Why did Twitter recently appear to censor Substack content? What was revealed in the open-source algorithms that Twitter recently published? And what does a truly free and open social media look like? I sit down with Bill Ottman, co-founder and CEO of the Minds social media platform, to discuss a radical new vision for internet privacy and decentralization. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/does-elon-musk-want-to-buy-substack-bill-ottman-on-twitter-substack-rift-how-censorship-fuels-violence_5188501.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Bill Ottman, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Bill Ottman: Thanks for having me. Mr. Jekielek: Bill, you’re the founder of a network, Minds, that is looking to completely decentralize the social media experience. Please tell me about this. Twitter recently open sourced at least part of its algorithm. What’s the significance of that? Mr. Ottman: Yes, that is a positive step in the right direction. They have published a piece of their recommendation algorithm. There’s a couple other components of Twitter that they’ve open sourced. Open sourcing is what we’ve been pushing for over a decade. For anyone who doesn’t know, it means that the software is actually published. It’s auditable, and can be inspected. Theoretically, you can make sure that there’s not shadow banning or there’s not bias or there’s not security issues. The rationale for companies keeping their software secret is always just based on this irrational fear that someone is going to steal your idea or steal your code. To be honest, the likelihood is that no one’s going to care less about your code. You should be, and we are flattered when people take our code. We want people to take our code because that’s spreading our technology. You can actually build a hugely successful business enterprise with open source. I could just name the companies for days. You have the Mongo database, and WordPress. WordPress powers 30 percent of the websites on the entire internet, and they’re fully open source. That is something that is only going to keep expanding. What was formerly Birdwatch, now Community Notes, is also an open source component of Twitter, which honestly, has been one of their more successful products. It’s really interesting to see their fact-checking. You’ll even see Biden getting fact-checked, even Elon gets fact-checked on his own posts, and all that infrastructure is out there. It’s a big step in the right direction. Mr. Jekielek: I like how it’s called Community Notes, and not fact-checking. Fact-checking has definitely got a very bad name now because typically, it’s not really fact-checking. Mr. Ottman: It wasn’t when it was being done on Facebook and Twitter and YouTube was with a handful of think tanks behind the scenes, arbitrarily applying labels whenever they felt like it. The way that Community Notes is set up, is actually similar to ours. We have a jury system on Minds for our whole appeals process for a community jury. It’s similar in that sense where it’s not limited to just a small handful of organizations. Actually, the community is participating. Mr. Jekielek: Elon Musk did release some significant portion of the algorithm, but it’s not actually the algorithm you said. Please explain this to me. Mr. Ottman: GitHub is where people create software, the GitHub repo, it’s called github.com/thealgorithm. That’s what they labeled it in this cute branding way, and everyone was so excited about it. People are analyzing it, commenting, even opening merge requests for changes. That’s kind of how GitHub works. Basically, you have a master branch, and then people can fork the code, make a little change, and then request it gets merged back in with the main branch. That’s a kind of versioning software. Unfortunately, we realized when Substack links got limited over here on the source code for the algorithm, nothing about Substack was updated when that happened. We now know that it’s not the production code. It’s an algorithm, but it’s not the algorithm that is running live from what we can tell, because none of the Substack changes were referenced. Elon says that the whole purpose of what he’s doing is for maximum public trust, and that you have to be transparent with the algorithm because otherwise society can’t trust this as the town square, which totally makes sense. But again, you need to publish the thing that you are actually running. Mr. Jekielek: I want to touch on this in a moment, and have you explain what that means in more detail. Also, there is code in there that makes it so that people who are blocked repeatedly by others, that actually downgrades the ability for their content to be seen. As I was looking through this, there’s a whole realm of possible weaponization that can be used here. I became aware of block lists. Maybe you can just tell me about this whole thing. Mr. Ottman: Sure, yes. The more you’re blocked, the more you’re reported, which can be manipulated by mobs. There’s a whole block list that people can subscribe to. Someone could create a whole bot army to just go and block somebody, and then based on one person creating a bot army that blocks one user, suddenly their reach is destroyed. Additionally, the ratio of followers to who you’re following matters. Say you have a hundred thousand followers, but you’re following a hundred thousand people, that’s bad according to the algorithm. They don’t want you to have a high number of people that you’re following because that’s bot behavior. We even had our team talking about it. They said, “Should we start unfollowing people so that we can get favored? It messes with your head. Mr. Jekielek: Right, exactly. There’s a behavior modification element. A little while ago, all the people started asking questions. There became this thing where everyone on Twitter was constantly asking questions, some of which seem very gratuitous or not particularly necessary. People discovered that asking questions leads to more engagement in their accounts and more followers. Please explain to me what you mean by, “if this is not the code,” and how the Substack piece fits into it. Mr. Ottman: There’s clearly some sort of blacklist somewhere in the Twitter infrastructure, which is a whole list of probably legitimate spam URLs that should be punished. But what happened last week is that with links to Substack, you could no longer engage with them. You couldn’t share. The whole API integration between Substack and Twitter was broken, so all the Twitter embeds on Substack articles were all broken. There was speculation about what was happening, and Elon alluded to this in one post where he said that Substack is trying to download all our data and create their own social network, and so we needed to block them. So Substack is a venture backed tech company. Andreessen Horowitz I’m pretty sure is a major investor. Marc Andreessen, a legendary technologist and investor also invested in the Twitter acquisition in a big way, I think over a hundred million dollars. Elon has also alluded to being interested in potentially buying Substack. It’s this great place for independent journalist blogs and he’s been doing all this stuff with the Twitter Files. I’m sure that he and Mark have been having conversations about it anyway, and doing their negotiations. Who knows how much Substack is worth. But the speculation is saying that Elon blocked Substack as a reality check for them to understand how much they are actually reliant on Twitter and their APIs in an attempt to potentially negotiate the valuation. This obviously had a major blowback effect. He essentially censored all of the Twitter Files journalists that he’s been working with; Taibbi and Shellenberger all run Substacks, even for their main websites. The Free Press, Bari Weiss’s group, also uses Substack for their backend infrastructure. It’s actually impressive that Elon has managed to infuriate both mainstream and independent journalists at this point. Again, I say this with the caveat that obviously Elon has brought Twitter to a much better place than it was pre-acquisition. Ultimately, I’m an Elon fan and I’m rooting for him, but some of these behaviors seem sort of impulsive. I would love to be able to talk with him and help him work through some of the issues. Mr. Jekielek: You have a pretty specific philosophy. Minds is a pretty small network. Epoch Times, everyone knows, is on Minds. But there’s a whole vision behind it. You’re building something that you believe is very important. I agree, and I think it can be very important. Why don’t you tell me about that? Mr. Ottman: We have over 6 million users now. The evolution of social media now is going to be much more difficult for us than it was in the early days, because we’re not willing to use a lot of the surveillance tactics and what is called growth hacking. Other people call it dark growth hacking mechanisms, like reaching into people’s contact books and using all of these manipulation measures to grow. We’re not willing to do that, which is what they leaned on for their whole growth wave. The whole analytics industry, customer acquisition data industry, it’s all a total mess. It’s just a data brokering world and people are buying information from each other, and it’s really something that we’ve rejected. Where we are trying to take things is to not have our creators be reliant on us. That’s where these decentralized and open source protocols come in. One notable feature that we’ve integrated with is called Nostr, which stands for Notes and Other Stuff Transmitted by Relays. It’s a cryptographic relay network where essentially—and this is all happening in the background, I know people’s eyes may glaze over hearing some of those words—what’s happening is that you have a crypto key pair in the background of your account and every time you post or follow somebody, your key is signing those events. What that means is that you and only you control your private key. This is the same with cryptocurrencies as it is with cryptography and encrypted messenger services. There’s a public key and a private key. That data is stored on this relay network, meaning that you can take your private key that you get on Minds and you can actually leave Minds and go to another app on Nostr. There are dozens of them that are social media interfaces. You can upload your key, your content is there, and your followers are there. So, your identity is yours. The issue right now is that on YouTube and Twitter, kind of web 2.0 juggernauts, if you get banned, your stuff is stuck there. Everything that you work a decade on is ripped from you. The paradigm is that the creator owns their identity, their content, and their social graph. Snowden is on Nostr now. Dorsey has taken a liking to it. He’s repenting for his Twitter days. He’s become sort of a Bitcoin and decentralization guy. This new ecosystem has millions of users. The way that we are interfacing with the Nostr protocol is the same way that Twitter could, the same way that Rumble could, or the same way that any centralized app can. Just because you’re running on servers doesn’t mean that you can’t participate in this new decentralized internet. The momentum is totally unstoppable, because at the end of the day, it creates a more resilient network that can’t get taken down. It is censorship resistant. It actually takes liability away from the platform, because the content is unleashed on the world. It’s like the torrent music sites. Torrents have been around for decades, and we all know what they did to the music industry. Mr. Jekielek: We’re talking about Substack. By Elon doing this limiting of Substack, some people call it the censorship of Substack, he inadvertently demonstrated the power of a centralized network to instantly turn off a whole business for someone potentially, if Twitter’s so important. Maybe that’s what he wanted to show, but he also reminded everybody else that power does exist, and maybe that’s not the best thing. Mr. Ottman: It certainly exposed both of those facts. He probably was caught up in whatever negotiation they have going on. You can’t just play with people’s livelihoods like that, in my opinion. That’s the same behavior that a decade ago when Facebook started really restricting their algorithm caused dozens of businesses to go bankrupt. Because one day they’re getting a thousand likes on every post, and the next day they’re getting 10, just because Facebook decided that they’re going to make some tweaks. Suddenly, all these people are out of jobs and have lost their business. Now granted, does Facebook have the legal right to do that? Probably. But that doesn’t mean that you do it just because you can do it. With this whole Substack fiasco, I have faith that he could probably admit he was wrong. Mr. Jekielek: For the Epoch Times, this throttling was not academic at all. We spent years developing our Facebook presence, only to have to very aggressively pivot to an independent subscription model. The throttling happened pretty much exactly how you described it, probably to an even greater order of magnitude. Mr. Ottman: Subscription businesses are absolutely the future. We have Minds Plus on Minds. We enable creators to set up their own memberships. We have that functionality. Being reliant on the surveillance advertising economy is just a bad decision for any site. Advertising is always going to be relevant, but typically it should be thought of as a secondary revenue stream as opposed to primary. Because when it becomes primary, you are just dependent on the whims of corporations that are not your own corporations. That’s not really ideal. Mr. Jekielek: How did you become so interested in creating a completely open source decentralized system for social media? Mr. Ottman: I just always thought that it was inevitable that an open source system would take over social media. We’ve seen historical precedent for that with other technologies, for instance, with Linux, which is the most famous open source operating system powering the majority of the infrastructure of the world. It used to be that all software was just free, and software licenses didn’t even really exist. It was just that the academics were all sharing software. Then, this whole proprietary software, intellectual property mode of operating came into play with Windows and everything started getting locked down. We’ve seen these instances, whether it’s Linux, or whether it’s Wikipedia. I’ll be the first to say that Wikipedia has many problems with regards to the editing and the administration and some of the censorship that occurs there. Even on our page, there are these trolls, and I know many others have had similar experiences. However, Wikipedia was revolutionary in what it did. It’s fully open source, all the software and the content is creative commons, meaning that it can be shared freely with attribution. Encarta and Encyclopedia Britannica, all of these institutions are gone, because no one uses them. Wikipedia, again, not necessarily the most reliable, but it changed the world. It is the go-to spot to get the basic facts now, and it beat out all of the proprietary corporations that were trying to dominate the encyclopedia world. You see what’s going on with Bitcoin in relation to the traditional finance world. Bitcoin is a fully open source and transparent system that is just organically happening. It’s happening because it’s open and transparent and it’s accessible for people. The idea that it would happen in social media makes sense and it is happening. It’s not just us who have taken on this philosophy. With technology systems, it is inevitable that most industries are going to move to open source. Mr. Jekielek: At this point, the reason we became interested in Minds in the first place was because we were seeing all these other systems getting locked down, like Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube. We were basically looking to go anywhere where there is a philosophy of openness and no censorship. Then, Elon came and created competition again. What is the case for someone to join your platform, when there aren’t a ton of people engaging with you? Mr. Ottman: We actually find that smaller to medium-size creators have an easier time getting engagement on Minds than on Twitter and Facebook. I know you’re using the Twitter mirror function because you have a big Twitter following. But I would argue that if you were going hard full bore native on Minds, you would probably see different results than maybe you’ve seen so far. First of all, we don’t have restrictive algorithms, so it’s much easier to get into the recommendation feed. We also have a whole reward system, where you can earn more reach based on the contributions that you make. You can earn these tokens, and then, tokens are worth views. You can use the tokens that you earn to boost your posts for more views. This is the inverse of how most other networks are operating, where they’re pushing you down. We’re trying to bring people up and share revenue with creators and give more reach. But to what you’re saying about the dynamic of competition with Twitter, I relate it to what happened when Obama got elected. When Obama got elected, I feel like everybody was super happy, hopeful, and it created this apathy where you have the figurehead that looks good and it feels like change, and it feels like progress, but then it’s a little bit emptier than you would’ve hoped for. With Elon, I would say there is change happening that is positive. However, with letting people back on, for instance, he seems to be playing favorites. Not everybody has been let back on Twitter. There are probably thousands, maybe even millions of accounts that got banned during Covid of non-high profile, random people who were just sharing a study and got banned. They’re not prioritized in terms of being reinstated. So, we’re going to keep holding his feet to the fire. He will be more willing to change, and he’s already proven this, than Facebook, Google, and Apple. The thing that I love about Elon is his willingness to have the conversation in the open. He’s also shattered barriers for how the elite converse with the public. He acts like a normal person. He posts memes, he plays around, and he’s a goofball. That in itself is a total game changer, because traditionally, it’s always been that the billionaires shield their personality. They don’t really act like themselves in public. But he’s changed that, and I absolutely appreciate that. There are major advances in discourse that have happened, and we just have to keep moving in the right direction. Mr. Jekielek: This is shattering what you’re describing, and it also extends through to the Twitter Files. Of course, there is a lot of criticism of the Twitter Files, including about the fact that it’s not nearly everything or it’s very piecemeal. Nonetheless, have there been some unbelievable realities exposed. For you, this question of censorship is obviously essential. On the one hand, there is a whole kind of ideology these days that censorship is actually a good thing and necessary, because the content might lead to radicalization and violence. But on the other hand, we’re also seeing the Twitter Files telling us that some really bad decisions are being made. When there’s no light of day, then people can just keep doing that with zero accountability. It’s hard to square all of this. Mr. Ottman: Yes. Both realities are true to a degree. It is true that disinformation can run wild on social media and cause negative things to occur. It has happened in isolated instances, but you have to compare that with the devastating impact of censorship itself. We wrote a whole paper with a team of PhDs and Daryl Davis on bringing together the peer-reviewed research on this debate and showing both sides. It’s overwhelmingly true that censorship facilitates greater isolation and greater radicalization. Let’s do a thought experiment. You are John Smith, posting a study about Covid during the pandemic. You’ve been on Twitter for 10 years, and then, you’re gone. How does that make you feel? Mr. Jekielek: Sad, angry, potentially militant. Mr. Ottman: Do you suddenly think that the study you posted is fake? Mr. Jekielek: No, of course not. You’re indignant. Mr. Ottman: You are indignant. Yes, you’re reinforced. There is one example that we get into, and I’m not blaming YouTube for this, but there was one example of a woman that they banned. She was a Middle Eastern kind of dance creator, and she showed up at YouTube headquarters and shot two people. Antonio Casilli is a European censorship researcher. He has correlated violent protests with censorship. He’s talked about the toothpaste tube effect where he studied this one Tumblr community that was a pro-anorexia community. Odd, but it exists. There are all kinds of strange places. Twitter tried to get rid of it because it was really nasty stuff, but people are just going to go somewhere else to talk about it. Just because you censor people doesn’t mean that they stop being interested in what they’re discussing. In fact, even looking at all the school shooters, it’s like isolation is depression. They’re essentially synonymous. The psychological impact of censorship is just devastating. We just saw it on a scale that has never been seen before. Mr. Jekielek: We are seeing it through the Twitter Files and other disclosures in lawsuits like Missouri v. Biden. There is one thing I found really fascinating in the censorship effect report you wrote which is very eye-opening. I want to recommend that people take a look at it and its conclusions. The word radicalization has become a pejorative, but in this report you outlined that radicalization isn’t positive or negative, it’s just something that happens. Please explain this to me. Mr. Ottman: It obviously can, and it is used colloquially as a pejorative, and probably for the most part it is. But with a lot of these policies, there’s no room for positive radicalization or positive extremism. Mr. Jekielek: I’m going to jump in. My friend Bob Woodson uses the term radical grace when he talks. Radical grace is when someone forgives. For example, there’s a story in our American Essence magazine recently about a woman who was a lawyer under the Ceaușescu regime in Romania, and was too successful. A hit man was sent to kill her, and she talked him down basically, and he ended up becoming a Christian. She forgave him for what he was doing—radical grace. Mr. Ottman: Yes, absolutely. We actually mentioned that type of field in the paper, radical forgiveness and radical love. There are instances of mothers whose son was murdered, and then they see the killer in court and decide at that moment to forgive them, or they go visit them in jail in the years following. The catharsis and healing that’s able to occur through that process is counterintuitive, but it’s arguably one of the most effective mechanisms to healing. That’s very much the approach that Daryl Davis has taken in his de-radicalization work. For anyone who doesn’t know, he’s a famous black musician and race relations expert who has befriended hundreds of the KKK and inspired them to leave. Being kind and human to people is more likely to change their minds than shaming them. From a human perspective, some of this stuff is very obvious. Be nice to people if you want to have any chance at influencing them. Don’t shame them for being hateful. Mr. Jekielek: Basically, radicalization is just feeling very, very strongly about something, correct? Mr. Ottman: Right. You need to have access to radical ideas in order to stretch yourself, and for humanity to stretch itself into the lawful fringe areas that the First Amendment protects. That is where you’re going to see all types of crazy stuff that is nonsense, but also a decent amount of the most breakthrough ideas. This paradigm of social media apps just banning all of that if it has anything to do with that topic, it’s just gone. The global impact this is having on our brains is devastating in terms of the chilling effect on how we communicate publicly. Everybody’s basically putting on a front where we have to protect ourselves. Because you’re not going to risk the following that you’ve developed over a decade that is directly correlated to your livelihood and your ability to influence the world. Mr. Jekielek: Martin Kulldorff, the former Harvard professor of epidemiology, has discussed this with me. We’ve been advised by people who are from former communist countries, in order not to lose our Twitter or Facebook presence, to apply self-censorship methods to push it to the limit, but not go over the edge. This is basically what dissidents in these societies would do. Of course, this is probably good advice in a sense. But on the other hand, it exposes this terrible reality that our system is like that now. Also, it’s not all radical ideas that are censored. Some of them are propped up too. Mr. Ottman: That’s a double standard. Mr. Jekielek: Right. Mr. Ottman: Yes, absolutely. One of the major backlashes against Twitter censorship pre-Elon acquisition was about their deadnaming policy for trans individuals, which is actually still in their terms, and they haven’t rescinded those terms. They did rescind the Covid misinformation terms, but not the deadnaming stuff, which Megan Murphy got banned for by saying a man is not a woman. She was famously getting banned for saying that. That’s a double standard, or they might say, “These protests are okay. These are loving protests. Those are hateful protests.” It’s the same double standard of what is allowed. It should just all be allowed and let people curate their own experience. You would think from a business perspective, having maximum access to a customer base on both the Right and the Left would be good for business. You would think that, and I do think it’s true. Somehow, this cartel of advertisers have peer-pressured the companies to create these content policies. I would imagine that they would know that half as many potential users is worse than twice as many. But it shows you how strong the ideology has taken hold. They are willing to sacrifice those customers. Mr. Jekielek: I’m reminded that you’re actually entering into a lawsuit against this censorship law in California which is begging to be challenged under the First Amendment. Please tell me about it. Mr. Ottman: AB 587 is a new law in California that went into effect in January, spearheaded by Gavin Newsom and the Attorney General. It essentially mandates social media companies to report on a biannual basis all different kinds of analytics about their moderation, and to have specific content policies about a specific group of topics; disinformation, misinformation, hate speech, radicalization and extremism. None of these terms are defined, and those are the only ones that they are mandating. For instance, they’re not mandating child abuse material policies. They might argue, “That is already against the law,” but it still gives you a sense of where their priorities lie. They’re only mandating specific policies around topics that are lawful under the First Amendment. First of all, of the words that I just mentioned, they don’t define them, so we don’t even know what they mean. But none of those are inherently unlawful. What is misinformation? If someone posts about some aloe cure for whatever it is, one person is going to call that misinformation, and another is not. Maybe it is, and maybe it isn’t. It’s not illegal to be wrong. It’s not illegal to be stupid. With extremism and radicalization, it’s an extreme what? It’s a radical what? They in themselves are just qualifiers, they’re adjectives. Mr. Jekielek: As you mentioned in the report, and also as Jacob Siegel mentions in his amazing new piece about the hoax of the century, it originally stems from information warfare techniques designed to deal with the war on terror. That’s what radicalization implies when that term is used. Mr. Ottman: I want to touch on the Restrict Act, which is sort of the Patriot Act 2.0, and is related to this. But just to close the thread on the lawsuit. With James Lawrence, who leads the effort—he was Alex Berenson’s attorney who famously got Alex reinstated on Twitter after they had banned him for Covid content—we are suing the state of California to get this overturned. Tim Pool is joining and Babylon Bee is also joining, and we’re hopeful. Mr. Jekielek: Please tell me about the Restrict Act. Mr. Ottman: Everyone’s been hearing about TikTok surveillance and that we need to ban TikTok in the U.S. TikTok is a very problematic application that is a surveillance nightmare. It is clearly sending information to China that poses a national security threat, probably legitimately. Mr. Jekielek: And a tool of influence, I have to add. It has a massive ability to influence, if you look at Dr. Robert Epstein’s work that I’m familiar with on other social media apps. Mr. Ottman: Right. That sentiment of people wanting to do something about TikTok is totally well founded, I would say. But with the Restrict Act, Jesse Watters famously confronted Lindsey Graham on this. Lindsey Graham, who was one of the primary advocates in Congress, didn’t even know what was in the act. He didn’t know that it was a censorship nightmare, a piece of legislation that essentially would fine people in the U.S. for using VPNs. It’s just such a great example of the hijacking of a good cause. More sensible legislation would be an “encrypt act,” where you’re actually protecting citizens, mandating end-to-end encryption throughout the government, and then educating people about the dangers of surveillance applications in the app stores. Regulation in this realm is so risky, so it has to be very sensitively crafted. You could label apps in the app stores that are surveillance-based or that are funneling data to different territories around the world, in the same way that Twitter is labeling media companies now. You could label apps in the app store for what’s going on with them. Are they open source? Are they privacy preserving? You could create little icons. We saw it with organic food. We can use mechanisms like that to educate people and push back on TikTok. But I was joking with a friend that the Restrict Act could be one of the rare pieces of legislation where the Left and the Right come together. Because you’re getting all the TikTok people who are clearly going to be against banning TikTok, and then you’re going to get all the privacy and freedom people who don’t want the Restrict Act. Ironically, you could end up having the Left and the Right both arguing to bring down the Restrict Act. Mr. Jekielek: It’s a hugely intractable problem with TikTok. I don’t know the answer. You have a totalitarian society taking advantage of a genuinely open society to massively push their agenda. We seem to be unable to deal with the information gathering and the influence operations of TikTok without going against our own values. How do we deal with this? Mr. Ottman: We need consistent standards, because with all the other apps in the app store, a large majority may have similar surveillance mechanisms in them, and those companies might be U.S. based like Facebook or Google. But we also don’t know what Facebook and Google are doing with their data behind the scenes. Facebook could be selling that data to anybody, and so could Google. When the TikTok CEO was testifying the other day, he actually said the same thing. He asked, “Can we just have consistency?” I’m not necessarily defending him at all, but it is true that we can’t think of TikTok in a vacuum. You can’t think that just because Facebook is based in the U.S. that we don’t need to address that elephant in the room just as much. In fact, it could be more nefarious, because we think that they’re in the U.S. and they would never betray our interests. But the likely reality is that they are betraying our interests. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about that briefly. We’ve seen the film, “The Social Dilemma,” and I know you’ve seen this film. It shows us how deeply these social media networks understand us and how they develop technology that’s addictive, and gets us using it more and more. Of course, TikTok is all this stuff on steroids. The difference is that it’s in the hands of a regime that seeks to subvert America and has zero guardrails of any sort. It’s a regime that has a multi-billion dollar forced organ harvesting industry that’s committing genocide. A tool like this in the hands of the Chinese military is different from Facebook in my view. I don’t think we can create an equivalency. Legitimately, it’s a special category. Although, I am deeply afraid of where Facebook might be selling its data. Mr. Ottman: This conversation, wondering about the national security risks of the apps that we store in our pockets, is an opportunity to have that conversation holistically. Yes, TikTok and other authoritarian-sponsored apps are in their own category, but we need to have the whole conversation because all of them are a threat. Mr. Jekielek: One hundred percent. This is where Minds can give us an alternative. Here’s an opportunity for you to tell us how Minds is different? How can you not put your finger on the scale as Elon did with Substack, and especially like TikTok would be doing. Mr. Ottman: Sure. We can, and the reason we’re integrating with Nostr and other decentralized protocols is because we know we want to protect ourselves from ourselves. We know what could happen to us down the line. Back in the day, Twitter’s slogan was, “Free speech wing of the free speech party.” They all thought that they were fighting for free speech in their early origins. By integrating with sovereign censorship resistant protocols, you’re basically protecting your user base and giving them an escape hatch. You’re saying you can take your stuff with you at any point in time. What that does is in terms of the power dynamic, it keeps us on a level playing field. When we know that our users could just take their key and go to another app, we’re going to respect their freedom, because we know that they could do that. The problem with YouTube and Twitter and Facebook is that they have everybody locked in. You can’t move your whole following to another app. It actually takes a decade to do. I’m hoping that we can get more large networks to adopt these protocols. From a user perspective, they shouldn’t even really feel anything different. It all feels the same. But in your settings, you would just have an option where you can download your key. That means that if Twitter ever messes with me, I can just go somewhere else. Mr. Jekielek: This can be huge amounts of data. Imagine you’re a very active user; you’ve got video and you’ve got all sorts of stuff. Your key is where does this thing even live, if you’ve got however many gigabytes or even terabytes of video? Mr. Ottman: For right now, there is a torrent integration with Nostr happening. Video and more heavy duty media is coming. Right now, it’s mostly supporting just text and links. That data lives on the relay network, so anybody can run a relay node on their machine. That’s where it lives. It lives in this decentralized network. Then, you have your key, which gives you the ability to access and write to that identity. Mr. Jekielek: This brings up a couple of thoughts. One is that you’re building something step-by-step without some kind of massive funding that’s driving everything behind you. At least that’s the sense I get. It actually depends on user participation. All the people that buy into Minds are the people that are effectively hosting all of this material. That’s very interesting and compelling. Of course, it’s a work in progress. Mr. Ottman: Yes. Our original funding round was equity crowdfunding, which was made possible through the Jobs Act passed in 2016, which essentially enabled non-accredited investors to invest in startups. Historically, in the whole tech industry, you’ve only been able to invest in startups if you’re an accredited investor, which means that you need to have a certain income or certain net worth, which really created this siloed world where a normal person couldn’t invest in tech companies. Now, they can. We’re actually reopening our funding to the public this coming week. That’s at Wefunder, wefunder.com/minds. It’s really important to us for the community to have its own stake. It’s not a fully public company, but the equity crowdfunding shift has made it much more accessible. We need to be owned by our users. There’s no world where I wouldn’t want that to be a real reality. That’s really important. Additionally, the code is owned by everybody. Everybody owns their keys, their data, and their content. It’s really this sovereign, self-ownership world that we want to move to. Mr. Jekielek: I’ll just qualify for everyone that I didn’t know that you were opening up your funding. You’re very welcome to mention it. I want to talk more about this broader ideological push to censor, to hide information, and to keep so many things classified or top secret. You recently drew my attention to this New York Times piece about what happened with the Nord Stream 2 pipeline explosion. The New York Times has a line where they say, “Maybe it’s in the best interest of everyone not to know,” or something in this vein. Wow, really? How could that be true? But this is the mentality that has now emerged in our society. Obviously, you’re dead set against this. What do you make of this? Mr. Ottman: That’s where a lot of my original philosophy comes from, this desire for greater access to information, both from the government and from corporations. There’s always an excuse to be more secretive, whether it’s talking about national security or the infrastructural security of the app. They say, “We can’t publish our code because that would be a security risk to our users.” That’s what most of these companies will say and you can go ahead and make the security through obscurity argument. But time and time again, when you talk to the best cybersecurity researchers in the world, they will all say that open source encryption protocols are the most hardened and battle tested, because you have that public accountability and you’re essentially having all the smartest people in the world audit your code and find the holes. Look at Bitcoin. Bitcoin is totally open source. It’s never been hacked. There is every incentive to hack it, but yet it seems to be one of the most secure encrypted protocols that we’ve ever seen. Wikipedia works, it’s open source, and it’s not like it’s getting hacked. Linux works, exploits get found once in a while, but they get fixed and the world doesn’t end. We’re trying to push that transparency-by-default mentality. It’s really hard when you spend a lot of time building a business. I remember when the day before we first open sourced our code. You are nervous and you think, “Oh gosh, we’ve put so much time and money into building this and we’re going to put it out there. But what people don’t realize is that there are licensing models and software licenses that you can use that do protect you, but also enable you to be transparent. The software license that we use is called the General Public License version three, which was created by the Free Software Foundation. It’s the same license that Twitter used on their algorithm, AGPL v3.0. What it essentially means is. “Here’s the code, you can do whatever you want with it. You can use it and you can commercialize it, but any changes that you make you have to share with the whole world as well.” You can’t just take this code and then create your own proprietary app. You have to pay it forward essentially, in terms of transparency. Some people call it a copyleft license, or the content equivalent would be a creative commons share alike. That means, “You can take this music that I made, you can remix it into your own music, but when you share the final product, you have to share that with everybody else.” I thought it was interesting that Twitter picked that license for their algorithm. There are other models where you can do a time-delayed release where we’re going to publish our code so it can be audited, but no commercial use can happen for a period of X years. Basically, you are being transparent, but you’re protecting yourself in the business sense. With open source, most people think, “Oh, you’re just giving it away.” But there’s a lot more nuance to it than that. Mr. Jekielek: There’s a proxy that many Chinese users use to access the Epoch Times and a lot of other sites. It’s essentially a plugin for a browser. If you’re on the China side of the great firewall of China, it lets your browser basically use the worldwide web freely. Now, the way Freegate works is it mimics, it pretends to be other protocols. When talking with the guy that runs this, he said, “Never in a million years would I make my protocols public.” Why? “Because the CCP would know exactly what we’re doing and I can’t.” So my point, and I think he has a very strong case. For this particular type of case, it probably doesn’t work. But you suggest you don’t want radical transparency in all cases. Are there examples where secrecy or classified information is acceptable in your mind? Please explain this to me. Mr. Ottman: For something like a browser extension, which is what you said is being used? Mr. Jekielek: It’s not a VPN, it’s a proxy. But effectively what it does is it allows users free access to the internet in a place where it’s massively censored. But the protocol itself, if the bad guys knew how it worked, it would negate its use. Mr. Ottman: Yes. I would need to dig into the specifics, but it would also be possible for traditional content publishers to integrate with Nostr or another kind of relay network or distributed system where the content lives in the decentralized web as well. There’s different strategies. Mr. Jekielek: This is what I’m saying, I’m not saying that there aren’t other ways to skin this cat and people have tried. This one seems to be the most effective. The point is that I may want to not provide the nuclear codes to the worldwide web. That would probably be an extreme example, correct? Mr. Ottman: No, it’s an important example. I do think that there are certainly exceptions for absolutely everything being transparent. That’s the paradox between transparency and privacy, because privacy is a cousin to secrecy in a sense. Obviously, we need privacy. There’s no freedom without privacy. If we don’t have the ability to converse privately, then we’re not free. In the same sense that we’re not free to use applications privately, we’re arguably not free. But I don’t know it’s possible with that proxy that there could be some open version of it that wouldn’t be stoppable. I would need to look into the specifics on it. Yes, we would push for as many systems as are generally accepted to be useful for society to be transparent as possible. However, cocktails for biowarfare and nuclear codes should be private. Mr. Jekielek: Right. I’m just trying to understand where the limits on transparency are. Mr. Ottman: The thing with this proxy that you’re using, the creator has his opinion. We don’t know that it would be immediately taken down if it was published. Maybe if it was published, it would be forked by other developers and they would create more resilient versions that can’t be taken down. Maybe it’s riskier for it to not be published, because if they find out who that individual is and take him out, then the whole thing is taken out, because he was the only one with access to the code in the first place. If they can politically attack that person, then that’s a single choke point. Part of the benefit of open source is that it’s unleashed, so it can’t get taken down, because it’s been widely distributed. It’s an interesting debate though. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s go back to this general question. Privacy and secrecy are two sides of the same coin you suggested. There’s room for secrecy, maybe even more than just the nuclear codes and the bioweapon cocktails. Where do you set that line? Mr. Ottman: Certainly for personal communications, we believe that it should be all end-to-end encrypted by default. We have no desire to have access to people’s private conversations. It’s more of a risk to both us and them to have us be able to access those conversations. We use an end-to-end encrypted protocol for our messaging. That’s one of the scary things about Twitter. They actually have said that encrypted messages are coming in the roadmap, but that’s something that doesn’t get spoken about enough. That’s a Twitter file that I would like to see; the history of DMs being accessed. Think about who you have on there. You have heads of state, you have the corporate leaders of the world. Let’s see the history of Twitter admins accessing those messages. The data is there, and it has been done. We’ve seen screenshots of the Twitter admin console where if a Twitter admin goes to your page, they can just look right at your DMs. Right now, they can do that, and that Twitter file wasn’t shared. We also need to know what’s the status of these programs with the different government task forces, and the web portals for them to submit take-down requests to Twitter. We don’t know what’s happening right now. It’s a high likelihood that it is still happening. What I can say is while running a social media app, we have received requests from the government before, not often, but on a few occasions. We absolutely require a warrant and a subpoena. We have built our infrastructure so that when those requests come in, we’re not even in a position to share it, because if we have access to the DMs, then we have to share the DMs. But if we engineer ourselves out of the driver’s seat, then we can’t. They come in and we say, “You can see what’s public on their page. That’s what we have.” Mr. Jekielek: The counter-argument, which you’ve heard a million times is, “The terrorists get to use these systems, so the government needs access.” Mr. Ottman: Yes. Breaking encryption by all of the smartest security researchers in the world makes everyone less safe. It makes the U.S. infrastructure less safe, when you build back doors into primary encryption protocols. The government uses Linux, and the government uses Signal. We know this from the Twitter Files. Signal is one of the most popular open source, encrypted messenger apps. The war rooms between Twitter and the government were happening on Signal. That’s where they were talking. I have friends in the military who use Signal. They are all told to use Signal. For the NSA and other intelligence agencies to try to break encryption is breaking their own security for conversations that they’re encouraging their own personnel to have. It’s not a good idea. Mr. Jekielek: Interesting. I hadn’t heard that before. The thing that keeps me up at night is this thing that I call the megaphone. The megaphone is the system of all these different government and civil society and media structures working together to create a perceived consensus around issues, for example, “The vaccine is safe and effective.” That’s the one that perhaps we’ve heard the most often in recent times. It’s a very, very powerful mechanism, and censorship is a piece of it, but not the whole thing. Jacob mentions this digital leviathan that’s potentially replacing the governance system in the U.S., if it’s not stopped somehow. What do you see happening here, and is there any way to stop it? Mr. Ottman: It’s really alarming that the information landscape is getting taken over by these agencies. We’re seeing this as Operation Mockingbird 2.0. Historically, Operation Mockingbird was where the media was being used as a mouthpiece for the government. Now, we’re seeing that in the social media age, and citizens are the targets. This term, domestic terrorist, is the new fetish of the intelligence agencies. They seem more concerned with domestic terrorism from Joe Citizen sharing their thoughts on social media about the government. “The freedom community is now threat number one to our national security.” Mr. Jekielek: It just means that there is dramatically less focus on all these really serious, legitimate threats that America faces. Mr. Ottman: Right. It would have been nice in the Twitter Files to see a hundred thousand requests for child sexual abuse material, but we don’t see that. Maybe it’s there. I hope it’s there. Mr. Jekielek: Yes. Mr. Ottman: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: What do you think is going to happen here, based on what you’re seeing? You think about this in a very broad way, it seems. Mr. Ottman: The genie is out of the bottle. They got caught with their pants down. Ultimately, open source decentralized systems are going to take over just as a matter of physics, because they are more resilient. They protect the users more. As they become infused with the monetization incentives that the centralized networks have, and we reach feature parity with Big Tech, there’s no reason not to use both. This is one of the positives about the Twitter deal, it used to be Big Tech and alternative tech. You had us and Rumble and Parler and these alternative social media apps, and then you had the legacy Silicon Valley world. There was this big split, and there was no in-between. But now of the top apps, Twitter is kind of in the middle, probably even more over on our side. From a power dynamic and competitive perspective, Zuckerberg and Pichai and all of these CEOs are looking at this and saying, “What are we going to do next?” “Look at what Twitter did. Twitter open sourced their algorithm. Can you believe it? What are we going to do? Would we ever do that?” It’s in the conversation now. I have been screaming from the rooftops for 12 years about just using the word open source. Now, it’s even being discussed at that level, and it actually seems to be taking hold to a certain degree. I make the analogy to organic food a lot, where historically food was just food. No one really knew the difference between GMO processed hormone food versus organic labeled local food. But then, this whole movement came out, and now in the grocery store, you have a whole labeled section and organic section, and then you have the conventional section. That’s what I want to see in the app stores. In the app stores, you go in and you have a labeling infrastructure where you can see what apps are doing to you. It is like food. Our phones are like extensions of us. They are having a biological impact and they’re with Neuralink and all of these advances. Soon they’re going to be in people’s eyeballs. We’re entering that transhuman reality, and so we need to be even more cognizant of nanotechnology, and nanobots in vaccines. Everything is becoming digitized and it’s going to be interfacing with us on a more intimate level, which makes it urgent to understand the nature of the software that we are injecting into ourselves. It is that much more critical. Mr. Jekielek: One of the things about this trans-humanist direction that at least part of our society seems to be interested in taking, inadvertently, there are fundamental questions of censorship control. Are you losing autonomy? Are you losing decision making? Is certain information kept from you? I don’t know. Profound questions. Mr. Ottman: It’s super profound. Imagine you become paralyzed or you have some neurodegenerative disease which one of these technologies can help you. It’s a very different conversation when you have it from a health angle and a severe medical condition angle versus a supplementary human performance level. It becomes a lot more personal. You can think about it from the perspective of a disease that could get you, “Would I give up some freedom to have this capability restored in my body? Would I risk having my body infected with some nanobot that could just shut me down at a moment’s notice, but I’m able to regain this function?” That’s scary, because that is real. If you take this nanotech, you are risking that, because there’s people controlling that software. The same thing when you hop into a Tesla. If someone hacks Tesla, a hundred thousand cars could go off the road at once. There could be a major disaster because Tesla’s code is not open. But again, they would make the argument similar to the proxy argument that you made. They’re making that security through obscurity argument, which is a good debate. Mr. Jekielek: Gosh, I could keep talking to you forever here. Why don’t we just jump to the Minds event that’s coming up on Saturday the 15th. We’ll be there. You’re going to be there. Let people know what they could find there if you happen to be in the Austin area. Mr. Ottman: Yes, Austin, Texas, April 15th. If you go to festival.minds.com, you can see the whole lineup. It’s like the New York City event you came to that we had at the Beacon last year. At Minds Fest, we’re trying to have debates and civil dialogue with people from across the political/cultural spectrum. There’s a huge appetite for it, even though major social networks want to shut down that debate. That really is what people want to see. One person who’s coming, who is historically liberal, Steven Bonnell, known as Destiny. He’s a great YouTube debater and comes at things from more of an establishment perspective, but he is willing to have the conversation. Historically, it was liberals who championed free speech at Berkeley. Now it’s the conservatives and the Christians who are fighting for free speech, like that all inverted. We just like to dig into that. We’re going to be talking about the Twitter Files. We’re going to be talking about social media censorship. We’re going to be doing lots of live debates with the audience. We’re going to be inviting the audience on stage and talking about government secrets and probably talking about Nord Stream that you mentioned. Then, we’re doing music afterwards. We’ve got some blues musicians. Daryl Davis, who I mentioned, is an amazing blues musician and piano player. He played piano with Chuck Berry, the famous legendary rock musician. In our original roots back when I was at UVM in Vermont, when Minds first kind of glimmered, we would hold these events called Gathering of the Minds. We would bring together all students, student government, and professors, and then have these round tables. We successfully got the University of Vermont to divest from weapons manufacturers. That was a result of one of the conferences that we had. Not to go too deep, but most universities have stock portfolios, they’re invested in all kinds of different companies. That was when I was staunchly in Students Against War and protesting the Iraq war. But we then blend it with culture, art, and music, because people are exhausted by the culture war. It is exhausting. I know that you probably feel that sometimes. I do. It’s fascinating. I love it. But you need to bounce it out and just show that people can have a good time together. That’s what music does and has done historically . Unfortunately, we don’t have that kind of spirit of culture and counterculture that music from the 60s really had. It doesn’t really exist anymore. I’m hoping that we can bring that back a little bit, but a bit more of a balanced way, because you don’t want the music to get overly politicized. Mr. Jekielek: I’ll just mention this as we finish, that it almost seems like facilitating the dialogue is the radical thing now. Mr. Ottman: Exactly right. Mr. Jekielek: I understand exactly what you mean when you say more in a balanced way. Bill Ottman, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Ottman: Thanks so much for having me. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Bill Ottman 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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On Monday, in a truly shocking move, Tucker Carlson was fired from Fox News—or as the official statement claims: Tucker Carlson and Fox News have “agreed to part ways.” This is indeed a shocking development because Tucker’s show was far and above the most popular program on Fox. And actually, it was one of the most popular news programs on cable TV. Furthermore, financially this is going to hurt Fox News quite a bit. Not only did Tucker’s show bring in $77 million in advertising per year, but also, right after his departure was announced, Fox’s share price tanked. Within a matter of hours, they lost close to a billion dollars worth of market cap. Eventually, it bounced back a little bit, but as of this episode, it’s still down by about half a billion dollars. Regardless, the big $900 million question that’s still hanging in the air is: why? Why exactly did Tucker Carlson get fired? And why was it done so abruptly? Watch the video: 🔴 Watch Dr. Malone Interview: https://ept.ms/3GAdOfB 🔴 Join EpochTV with a very special OFFER: https://ept.ms/1DollarNOW11

President Joe Biden has signed a war powers resolution and will deploy U.S. troops to the African nations of Djibouti, Ethiopia, and Sudan. The military deployment is taking place under the shadow of a widening war in Sudan, and Biden says the troops will help protect U.S. personnel in the region. At the same time, however, the U.S. State Department will not be evacuating American citizens from the area. Meanwhile, the war between Russia and Ukraine is escalating into deeper tensions between Russia and NATO. Pentagon intelligence leaks detailing U.S. troops on the ground have led Russia to declare it is in a “hot war” with the United States. Topic: Major New Warning Issued on 'Huge Biological Risk' 🔵 Watch the full episode HERE 👉 https://ept.ms/BidensWarPowersCR_YT 🔴 Stay informed. Stay Free. Join us: https://www.joshphilipp.com

From chemical warfare to cyber warfare to legal warfare, how does the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) use unconventional warfare techniques to systematically target, subvert, and deplete its enemies? What is the Chinese regime’s greatest strategic vulnerability? And how could the United States exploit it? And how is the CCP deploying a disguised maritime militia in the Pacific—with little to no resistance? I sit down with Col. Grant Newsham, a retired U.S. Marine officer and author of “When China Attacks: A Warning to America.” Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/col-grant-newsham-on-ccp-chemical-warfare-chinas-fishing-militia-and-their-greatest-strategic-weakness_5181108.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Grant Newsham, it’s such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Grant Newsham: I’m glad to be here. Thanks very much. Mr. Jekielek: With your book When China Attacks, the big question I have is attacking who? Who are we talking about here? Col. Newsham: Ultimately they want to attack the United States. We are the main enemy that prevents them really from getting regional domination, and ultimately, global domination. We’re the target. China is likely to use so-called non-kinetic attacks against us at this point, but they are likely to use a kinetic assault to launch a military invasion of Taiwan. By going after Taiwan, they have the chance to humiliate the United States and really put the Americans on their back foot and make it look as if China is unstoppable. Mr. Jekielek: You start When China Attacks with this hypothetical scenario of an attack by the Chinese Communist Party on Taiwan. As I was reading, I was charting all these different unconventional methods of warfare that the CCP utilizes to achieve its objective, and I found it to be a very, very troubling scenario. Realistically, will this happen in the near future? Col. Newsham: It could happen. There are probably a dozen scenarios that different analysts have, but this one, I could see happening. It wouldn’t surprise me at all. Mr. Jekielek: Please explain that. Col. Newsham: What the Chinese want to do is seize Taiwan. They’d like to get it without fighting, but if they have to, they will. They have built up a military that is capable of doing it, but they also need to ensure that the Americans are kept at bay. They’ve got to thread a needle here, because if they go too hard against the United States it may provoke America to respond with everything they have, and that’s not what China wants. They want to humiliate the Americans just enough to make them worry about what happens if they go all in and also to rely on China’s proxies. Essentially, it’s the front men in the United States telling whatever administration is in office to just hold still. Don’t respond. We can’t risk nuclear war over little Taiwan, and we want to get back to business as usual. What I can see is the Chinese launching an all-out very quick hard assault on Taiwan, but not going all out on the United States, not doing another Pearl Harbor attack or hitting the U.S. mainland, and maybe even leaving the U.S. bases in Japan alone. They do have ways to make life difficult for us, as you noted, like their fishing fleet, the maritime militia, things that look like civilian weapons or civilian entities, and also the proxies that I mentioned. In just about every country, they’ve got people who put in a good word for them. That’s how I see it. The Chinese could present the American administration with a fair complaint. They’ve taken Taiwan and they’ve told the Americans, “Stand clear or it’s nuclear war.” You can almost hear a certain type of administration talking itself into doing nothing, saying, “We would really like to, but it’s unfortunate. We can’t intervene on behalf of Taiwan.” That would be my scenario, and I would note the Chinese would like to get Taiwan without fighting. Who wouldn’t? It’s a lot easier. They have been launching political warfare against Taiwan for decades. The subversion of the country has just been immense with the pressure that is put on Taiwan. What could happen in the upcoming presidential election in Taiwan in January 2024, if the pro-China candidate wins, Beijing might think that it can work with him and draw him in, and have him draw Taiwan into the mainland’s embrace. Most Taiwanese wouldn’t want that, but if you have a certain type of leader and you play it right, China might increase their odds of winning without fighting. But if a candidate from the party that wants nothing to do with Chinese domination wins, at that point, the gloves come off and China gets very serious about a so-called kinetic attack on Taiwan. Kinetic is just the popular word these days for a shooting war. Mr. Jekielek: Why is Taiwan so important to China, and why is Taiwan so important to the U.S.? Col. Newsham: That’s the question. You hear a lot of people say, “Taiwan isn’t worth it. It’s worth more to China than it is to us. It can’t be defended. Just let it go.” You hear that a lot in the debate these days. It’s wrong, and there is also an element of maliciousness in it. The idea of letting 23 million free people come under Chinese Communist enslavement is not something that sits well with me. But why is it important? First, look at it from China’s perspective, and if you look at it that way, you can figure out why it’s so important from the U.S. perspective. Surprisingly, it doesn’t have so much to do with the high-end semiconductors that Taiwan manufactures. That gets a lot of attention, and yes, it would be an inconvenience, and probably a big one if Taiwan’s semiconductor production was cut. They produce something like 90 percent of all high-end semiconductors. But I don’t think that is the main reason. With or without chips, Taiwan is a very juicy target for Beijing and here’s why. Taiwan is strategic terrain, and strategic geography, if there ever was. It’s part of the so-called first island chain that stretches from Japan to Taiwan, down to the Philippines, down to Malaysia. If you look at a map, that will tell you a lot about Chinese thinking, particularly military thinking. That first island chain actually hems in the people’s liberation army. It makes it very hard for them to get into the Pacific to go east. But if China takes Taiwan, they have seized a lodgement right in the middle of the first island chain. Think of a castle wall being breached and suddenly the attackers just pour in and keep going. That’s what would happen. If the People’s Liberation Army launches from Taiwan and goes up north, they can surround and isolate Japan. If they go down south, they can isolate Australia, cut it off from the U.S., and cut it off from the rest of Asia. Militarily, it’s very nice to have that as a platform. It makes operations farther east into the Pacific much easier to accomplish. The Chinese objective is not to just stop at the first island chain. Rather, it’s to go all the way to the west coast of Latin America where they are setting up the infrastructure, the ports, the airfields, the political influence, and the economic influence that they will need to deploy Chinese forces sometime in the future, if not tomorrow. It’s part of the plan. From a military perspective, it’s very important. You ask yourself, “If I were the Americans, my first defense line has been breached.” Obviously, that is serious, but there’s more to it than just the military operational issue. I would call it the political/psychological aspect of Taiwan and its importance. Suppose Taiwan comes under Beijing’s rule. Look at the message that would be sent and what Beijing would have demonstrated. It’s that the U.S. military could not prevent the Americans from keeping 23 million Taiwanese free. U.S. economic and financial power couldn’t do it and U.S. nuclear weapons couldn’t do it either. In short order, you’re going to find Asia turning red as most countries there realize that an American promise is not what it used to be, and you’re going to see that worldwide as well. It would be a huge psychological political blow against the Americans and for Beijing. How would one argue if that happens? You say, “Taiwan wasn’t all that important, but if it’s somewhere else more important, then we’ll go all in.” I don’t think anyone’s really going to buy that, and we don’t have a particularly good track record in recent times of taking care of our friends. Rather, we tend to leave them high and dry, and there’s a point at which a lot of people notice. Those are some of the reasons why Taiwan is so important. Mr. Jekielek: You’re American. You talk about the Americans as if you’re looking a little bit from the outside, which in fact you are. Please tell me a little bit about your background and how you came to be studying Chinese military capability and intentions. Col. Newsham: Sure. I first started looking at Taiwan and China around 1981, so it’s been 40 years or so. I first started looking at business with China. I used to be a lawyer, so that was one area I focused on. I was with the Marines for 30 years and active in reserve time. During that time, much of it was in the Asia-Pacific. Also, I was a diplomat with the U.S. State Department for eight years, and a lot of that was in Pacific East Asia. I also worked in the business community, working for an investment bank in Japan for a decade-plus, and also working for Motorola in Japan and Korea. That’s a familiar name to some people, but it committed suicide in China. I’ve had decades of experience looking at China and looking at Asia from different perspectives, not just the military, but also from the diplomatic, the financial, and that of high-tech industry. Mr. Jekielek: A lot of the unconventional warfare that the Chinese Communist Party wages does involve all these different sectors. It doesn’t actually involve the conventional, traditional, war-fighting apparatus as much. Col. Newsham: Yes. It’s a very different concept of war and of bringing your enemy under your control. We tend to look at warfare like a 100-yard dash where the participants get up to the starting line, they shake loose and get down in the crouch, and then the starter says go. That’s when the race starts, the war starts, and the shooting starts. But to the Chinese, the shooting is the last thing, if it’s even necessary. Ideally, you’ve weakened your enemy and enemies to the point that they can’t respond effectively, or can’t respond at all. You do this with methods that don’t involve shooting people, although they are willing to do that, or they have other people do the shooting for them. These are things that to an American or Westerner look unobjectionable, and that just looks like business competition. The Chinese look at this as economic warfare. The idea is to drive your opponents or your competitors out of business, to get their technology, suck their know-how out of them, and rig the system in China so that you can build up Chinese companies. The idea is to dominate the main sectors and just about anything that’s on the Chinese list of things to dominate. You can look at how that has actually worked in the U.S. Once China was let into the World Trade Organization in the early 2000s, despite not meeting any of the requirements that every other country would need, things went wild and American businesses started flocking to China. China turned into this manufacturing juggernaut. America’s manufacturing capability, and more importantly the jobs and the livelihoods that came with it disappeared. One figure from an MIT analyst states that about three-and-a-half million manufacturing jobs were lost as a result of letting China into the World Trade Organization, and that’s just jobs lost. You would think that every one of those jobs supported several people at least. That has actually worked very well to China’s advantage. It’s weakened us and it’s strengthened China, because the Chinese economy has grown, with many countries growing dependent on it, America not the least. This helps China develop its military as well. It’s very much a net gain for the Chinese and a net loss for us. Once again, there’s a psychological aspect to it. I would encourage anybody to go to some big, or even not so big, American city, and if you dare, go to the neighborhoods where working class people used to live and have a look around. It’s as if a war took place. It’s horrific, and I describe part of that in my book. That is one example of what the Chinese consider warfare that is intended to weaken their enemy, while strengthening themselves. But we don’t look at it that way. There are other lines of attack that China sees as warfare— biological war, chemical war, cyberwarfare, and proxy warfare. That means getting your opponent’s prominent and influential people to do your bidding for you. It was very interesting the other day when we saw the CEO of TikTok testifying before Congress. It was interesting to see him, but it was more interesting to see behind him a phalanx of Americans who had signed up to do China’s bidding. Money has a way of doing that. There’s also one point I wanted to mention as to why Taiwan matters. Taiwan is a small island with 23 million people. It’s an existential threat to the Chinese Communist Party, and how could that be? It’s such a small place. It is proof that people of Chinese origin can handle democracy, consensual government, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and all the freedoms we think are important. Taiwan shows what is doable and what China could become. That is one of the reasons Beijing wants to strangle it, because it is a daily living reminder there is an alternative for China besides Chinese Communist rule. You hear it all the time. “Chinese people can only be handled or ruled by a boot on the neck with force.” Even Jackie Chan said something like that, and others have said it. It’s nonsense. Taiwan is proof that it doesn’t have to be like that. It’s really a priceless reminder of what China could be. Mr. Jekielek: It suggests that any country that’s a free country actually acts as a threat to the Chinese Communist Party. In fact, I was just discussing this very issue on a podcast recently that totalitarian regimes fear any freedom, because it shows people that there is another way. Col. Newsham: Definitely. That is something that the Chinese Communists really don’t like, if you listen to what they say. Xi Jinping gave an official speech around 2013 where he effectively said that Western values are antithetical. They are the enemy. They are the opponent. They are not at all compatible with the Chinese Communist, Chinese socialist ideas, and he is very clear on this. There was no live and let live, or let’s take some of the good parts. He was very clear on these Western values. I’ve never come across too many people anywhere that like to be enslaved or treated unfairly. That is an absolute threat to the Chinese Communist Party that ultimately rules by force, and does not rule with the consent of the governed. An easy way to prove that is to have a real election. That doesn’t seem to be in the cards. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about TikTok. A few years back you wrote an op-ed for us about TikTok and its relationship with a certain piece of legislation, the 2017 national intelligence law that the Chinese Communist Party enacted, and that it may have some bearing on what TikTok is ultimately required to do. Col. Newsham: That’s an easy one. High-priced American lawyers would insist otherwise, but TikTok has to do whatever the Chinese Communist Party tells it to do. That is required by the national intelligence law you just mentioned. Even before that law was passed, if the Ministry of State Security comes to your company and says, “We would like you to come in for tea,” there’s only one answer to that. That has always been the reality for any Chinese company. There’s really no such thing as a private company that’s free of government coercion, in the way we would see it. It’s ironic that we’re spending so much time debating the degree to which TikTok and similar companies have connections to the Chinese government. They all do and it is about that simple. Jack Ma, for example, you hear about him and it was thought, “He’s a brash private sector guy.” He has always been a creation of the Chinese Communist Party. That’s one of the aspects about that regime and that system—a company in China will only be successful for as long as the Chinese Communist Party says it will. That is the reality, but when you’re paying a lawyer $800 an hour to argue the point, they’re glad to do it. But some things are not that hard to figure out when it comes to the PRC [People’s Republic of China]. Mr. Jekielek: I was recently at a hearing where the Chinese doctrine of civil-military fusion was discussed. It’s actually one of the top seven national priorities if I’m not mistaken. Something is very relevant here to the realities around TikTok. Do you have any thoughts on that? Col. Newsham: Yes. That civil-military fusion is the description of how the economic activities and military activities are combined in China. One supports the other and vice versa. If something that is developed for military purposes and there is a commercial use for it, it’s going to get shared and vice versa, and that is strategy. It’s the way that Chinese look at things, and they have been very effective with that. With TikTok, you can think of what the harmful aspects are. If you can influence your target, particularly young people or even older people to think a certain way, that directly benefits your military. It thinks about how it can weaken the enemy in order to set them up for eventual assault and eventual domination. With the intelligence-collection capabilities of TikTok, there is a usefulness there. Once again, that benefits the military and the security part of the Chinese governmental structure. You see this all the time. Don’t ever think there’s a purely private company in China. If push comes to shove, they are obligated by law to cooperate with the authorities. Remember when Apple refused to unlock the phone of a mass-murdering terrorist and refused to help out the FBI. But at the same time, they actually did help out the Chinese government unlocking some things. Things you can do in America, you cannot do in China, and that needs to be kept in mind. Mr. Jekielek: It’s almost unthinkable that when there is a civil-military fusion opportunity, that it wouldn’t be used. Otherwise, heads would roll, maybe not literally, but proverbially. What do you think about that? Col. Newsham: That’s how it is. It’s something that is so foreign to us. We sometimes admire the brash business executive, like say, Howard Hughes going in front of the Congress and talking straight and talking tough. There is no Congress in China, but if there was, you would only do it once. We look at this as very natural, that the private sector business is separate from the military and security activities. The Chinese see it very differently. Everything comes together to enhance Chinese power. They see it that when Chinese power grows, ideally, it happens at the same time that American power reduces. I mentioned Motorola, for example. Think about that. In its day, it was one of America’s top companies that was really respected. It got in trouble partly by getting into the China market without being wise about what they were doing, and now it basically doesn’t exist. There’s a little bit left, but the bulk of what was Motorola is now owned by Lenovo, by a Chinese company. Just think of the effect of that. You had multiple generations of people who worked for Motorola in Schaumburg, Illinois and elsewhere. It’s all gone and it hasn’t been replaced with anything. China’s high-tech industry has expanded rapidly. Now, it’s a real threat to the U.S. companies. America has gotten weaker, and China has gotten stronger. That’s how the Chinese Communists do the calculation. Mr. Jekielek: While we’re on this topic, tell us about this concept of comprehensive national power, which the CCP uses to rate itself against every nation in the world. You’ll have to tell me the details, but it’s important to know how they think about this. Col. Newsham: I’ll try to explain it simply in a way you can understand. If you look at it in the sense of, “Whatever is good for me is bad for you,” that is the ideal. Something that weakens your opponent while strengthening you is ideally what you want. China actually counts all of these wins and successes that they have around the world. They set up and get ownership of some strategic locations or air fields. The Americans aren’t getting in there, and it all goes into that accumulation of national power. Everything that is good for China and benefits China, that’s exactly what they want. But it’s not as if they want it to have the so-called win-win where everybody is benefiting. They want the other side to go down. If you can weaken your enemy, confuse him, take away his key industries, weaken his currency, weaken the dollar, and you get people to start using Chinese currency overseas, that is a big addition to China. It’s on the plus side for China’s comprehensive national power, and it’s a decline for American national power. It helps if you just forget the idea of win-win. The Chinese use that expression a lot, but what they mean is we win twice, and you lose. Another example would be when the Chinese get the blueprints for the F35 fighter and the C17 long-range transport. That’s a good thing for China. It goes into the plus column. What does it look like on the American side? It’s on the negative side of the ledger. They are very much keeping score on this. It’s helpful to remember the ultimate objective of the Chinese Communist Party. You really have to listen to them. Ultimately, it is to get the Americans out of Asia, but also to keep pushing and eventually dominate the region and dominate the globe. They have gone about setting things up to do that. They have a way to go, but it’s been a very impressive move over the last 20 to 30 years. Mr. Jekielek: On the side of the Chinese military, and you’ve been looking at this, what is the state of the Chinese military? I’ve heard wildly different assessments of their capabilities. What have you found? Col. Newsham: Unfortunately, they are pretty good. People used to laugh 20 years ago when the idea of the People’s Liberation Army attacking Taiwan was mentioned. It was jokingly referred to as the “million man swim,” the idea being they didn’t even have the resources to get across the Taiwan Strait. It also implied that they weren’t smart enough to figure out how to do it. Nobody is laughing these days. I actually have a chart that was put together by the former head of intelligence for the U.S. Navy in the Pacific fleet that graphically depicts Chinese military growth over the last 20 years. The first chart is 2000, and there’s not much there now. China doesn’t have much hardware, and it can’t operate very far offshore. In 2020, it’s very different. It’s just the whole charge is full. China has a military, has a Navy Air Force, ground forces, and also, as everyone knows, rockets and missiles. It’s got a lot of them and it’s figuring out how to use them. It actually already knows how. It knows its weaknesses and it’s trying to address those. Now, China is able to really throw its weight around in the region, and the idea is to eventually throw it around globally. There was a condescension towards the Chinese over many years that they could never be our equals. Five or six years ago I suggested to some Marines that the Chinese would have the equivalent of our amphibious force and units that patrol the oceans. People laughed at me and said, “They could never do it. It’s too hard to do.” Well, it wasn’t. The Chinese could put together two or three of these things at least if they wanted to. They’ve had them out and about for more and better future operations. We have underestimated them. That was a mistake, but they do have problems. It’s not as if they figured everything out, and that is something that we do need to keep in mind. You don’t want to psych yourself out, but you do have to realize just what a formidable force they’ve become. In certain circumstances, they could probably beat us or at least kill a lot of us if they chose the timing. For example, with something close to the Chinese mainland, we would have a hard time, because they would have the advantages of operating from so-called interior lines. From the Chinese mainland, it would be a huge advantage for them. It would be hard for us to get in there. But if you get farther out, then it gets more difficult for the Chinese. It could be five years before they really have the power projection capability where you can send military units way far away and shoot somebody and use force. The Chinese are very capable of sending naval flotillas to the ends of the earth. They do it in Africa and Latin America. They go down to the Indian Ocean. They’ve been sending units to the Horn of Africa for a long time and they’re smart. They’ve learned what their shortcomings are. They’ve learned how to operate combining different forces and different types of units, and they’ve done a very good job. The Chinese leadership does complain sometimes about the so-called peace disease. They fret that they haven’t had combat experience and that is a real drawback. But the U.S. Navy hasn’t really fought a major enemy since 1945. With U.S. forces, the combat experience tends to get winnowed out pretty quickly as time goes on. If you understand the problem, if you say train to address it and you train hard, you can make up for that lack of experience. I don’t see that as much of a problem as some other people do. The fix we’ve gotten ourselves into with the Chinese does come from not having taken them seriously enough and maintaining our edge. We spent so many years in the so-called sandbox in Iraq and Afghanistan focusing on those kinds of wars, that the Chinese caught up in many areas and surpassed us in some as well. Mr. Jekielek: Since we’re talking about maritime capability, there is this unconventional fleet that the CCP has used in a military way, which is essentially their fishing fleet, but which also doubles as a maritime militia with its swarming tactics. Perhaps it is a way to explain the Chinese Communist Party’s mentality around war fighting, what kinds of tools can be used, along with what this group of fishing boats is doing. You couldn’t have a military response to that, because these are just fishing boats. It would be an outrage. It would be an international crisis, irrespective of what those boats were actually doing. Please tell us how this maritime militia works. Is it actually just an arm of the military? Col. Newsham: Part of the people’s armed police is probably a good way to look at it. But just think of it as military, and that will work. These are fishing boats that sometimes do fishing, but they’re also built for double hauls, and are up-engined. They have people with arms on them and they use them to ram, intimidate, and sink other vessels, particularly other fishing vessels. You have this charade that they are not a part of the military and they’re just fishing boats. They’ve used these very successfully in the South China Sea. You can establish a long-term presence in places and really drive your opponents out, and they won’t go back in. If you’re a fisherman, there’s no way you’re going to go in and challenge a big boat with a double haul and guys with weapons on it that is willing to ram you and sink you and shoot you if necessary. It’s a nice adjunct and it gives you the cover, as you pointed out, by saying, “This is just a fishing boat. What are you complaining about? It’s not a naval vessel. “The Chinese have a lot of these, in addition to their regular fishing fleet, which sails the seven seas vacuuming up fish. One example of how they throw their weight around causing their opponents to back off is Japan. A handful of times over the last decade the Chinese have flooded the zone around a tiny Japanese island with around 400 fishing boats with maritime militia mixed in. The Japanese don’t have anywhere near enough patrol boats, Coast Guard or naval, to take care of that. The Chinese have done this now and then, and the purpose is to tell the Japanese, “Look, when the time comes we assert administrative control,” which is the legal term for asserting dominance over your territory, and the Japanese are very worried about this. The Chinese have driven Japanese fishing boats out of their traditional waters. They don’t go into some of these because they’re afraid. It’s either maritime militia or the fishing boats, and then throw in a couple of Coast Guard boats, and it’s a formidable force. Chinese Coast Guard cutters are effectively warships. They’re big, and they’re armed. They’re really almost the size of U.S. naval combatants. The Chinese have also understood one of the weaknesses of their opponent is that we insist on law and playing by the rules. When somebody doesn’t do it, we’re flummoxed. We don’t quite know what to do. You hear this all the time on the U.S. side, “China’s gray zone activities, what do we do about it?” That’s about as far as it gets. We say, “What do we do about it?” Nobody has actually come up with the common sense approach that lets them know that we consider these naval ships, and we are going to respond accordingly. A while back, there was actually a U.S. naval commander who stated, and he was on the right track, that it takes a certain willingness on our side to push back, but also to fight back. The other guy knows that he can break the rules and elbow in on you and hurt you, and you’re not going to do anything, because it’s against the law. He’s going to take advantage of that. It’s almost an aspect of so-called lawfare, where the Chinese use international law to their advantage. Partly, it helps them if they don’t obey it, but we do. You can see the advantage that it gives to the Chinese compared to us and others. Mr. Jekielek: What I find most fascinating about the hypothetical assault on Taiwan chronicled in your book, is the gray zone activity and the reaction, which is pretty much what would happen, unless we have a dramatic policy change like you just described. Col. Newsham: You can use these regular fishing boats and maritime militia to surreptitiously lay mines off of Japanese ports where the U.S. Navy operates. Cargo ships, for example, can launch drones that can cause Americans a lot of trouble as they’re sailing out of San Diego. These are things that we don’t think of as war fighting, but it’s a platform and we should expect that we’re going to have to deal with it. Mr. Jekielek: Think about what that means—cargo ships coming out of China being weaponized. What portion of the world’s cargo chips come out of China? It’s probably a very significant portion. Col. Newsham: Yes, it is. One of the key worries is containerized missiles. You’ve seen a big container ship that has thousands of containers on it and you just need a couple of them that have anti-ship cruise missiles in it, and which one is it in? It’s a giant shell game. If you’re willing to do that, it can give you a huge advantage. Then, all you have to say once it happens is, “We don’t know.” We Americans insist on evidence to be able to prove the charges, and if the Chinese just shrug their shoulders, one can see the usefulness of this. It could make it very hard for the Americans to respond to a Taiwan scenario. You don’t have to sink an aircraft carrier, just disable or immobilize a couple of other naval ships. We don’t have enough ships, but you also get worried about what other problems you’re going to have. That is very much part of the Chinese military strategy, making use of these so-called gray zones and what look like civilian resources or platforms to go after us and their enemies. The Australians will find something similar if they head north from Australia. They’ll find that, because they will have lost a few ships on the way up from the Chinese fishing fleet, most likely. Mr. Jekielek: I want to stay in the Pacific for a moment longer. There are all these different unconventional warfare methods that the Chinese Communist Party is affecting on the U.S. mainland. I want to get to that. This is incredibly important, but I’ve recently become more aware of some of these bullying actions of the Chinese Communist Party, trying to get the leaders or leaders of some of these small island chains to basically play ball, seemingly on the course to assuming administrative control eventually. But there have been a few of these leaders that have, unbelievably against all odds, stood up to the behemoth. In one case, President Panuelo, of the Federated States of Micronesia, is on record saying that Chinese officials have threatened his life. These are people that are in the capacity of serving as Chinese officials, not this gray zone thing that you usually see. In this long letter, he describes a host of serious threats to his nation. It’s unheard of anywhere, nevermind in a tiny island chain state. What is the significance of this? Col. Newsham: Keep in mind that we won’t even say those things, because we’re afraid China might not let us do business there. Even American leaders are reluctant to speak out in too many cases. Mr. Jekielek: Please give us a quick summary of what President Panuelo has alleged or said. Col. Newsham: He writes in great detail about things like the Chinese paying off all sorts of officials and influential people in Micronesia. They’re providing money to secessionist groups in several of the states in Micronesia. It would be like providing money to Texas so they could go independent, but they’re doing that. In just the most amazing way, just recently at a meeting down in the South Pacific where the Micronesians were not going to participate, the Chinese designated a Micronesian guy and said, “You represent Micronesia.” He had no authority to do that, but they just did it and brazenly ignored the rights of a sovereign nation. They have also been sending survey ships to follow the communications cables. They’ve been doing this in a lot of places. The idea is when the time comes, they will cut them. You’ve seen this full-fledged political warfare, and an influence effort against Micronesia. This is just Micronesia. You have huge Chinese investment where these real estate developers come in and promise billions, and they insinuate themselves commercially. That leads to political influence, and then they pretty much get a lock on the local economy. They create a constituency of people that get a ton of money from the PRC. Most people don’t like this, but there’s nothing you can do. They’ve been very effective doing this in the Pacific. These are the islands where, during World War II, there was bloody combat to take them back from the Japanese. These islands in the Central Pacific are actually in the middle of America’s defenses. We have the first island chain with Taiwan, but the Chinese are setting up behind us. The third step in Chinese influence efforts is a military presence. They’ve taken their time on that. In the Solomon Islands recently they have signed a deal with the Prime Minister of the Solomon Islands that effectively lets the Chinese military into the Solomon Islands. That’s where Guadalcanal was, the World War II battle. The Chinese military will get in there before too long. But you have President Panuelo. He had the nerve and the courage to stand up and say this, and this was actually the third letter he’s written. He wrote one last July and one a little before that, warning his fellow citizens or fellow officials, but also the leaders of other countries of this Chinese subversion that is coming. He says it means there’s nothing good for the people of the country when this happens, but it’s important to note that he’s put himself at real risk. China does play hardball and you can take that in its fullest meaning, but he’s spoken up. I really recommend people read the letters because they’re so well written, a real cry from the heart and also asking for help from the Americans which doesn’t seem to have been forthcoming yet. Panuelo also offered to change Federated States of Micronesia’s recognition from China to Taiwan. It is very rare to have that happen, but there’s some timing issues here. You’ll notice it doesn’t seem as though the Americans have taken advantage of the opportunity. If you’re a guy who’s stood up against the Chinese, you’d think you’d get some sort of support from the United States. If it’s being given, it’s really well hidden. Mr. Jekielek: If you’re watching this episode online, we’re going to embed it into the webpage, because it also functions as a blueprint of Chinese Communist Party influence operations anywhere. Everything listed there are things that I’m aware of in other places. Col. Newsham: It really is. It’s a predictable sequence. It applies to the U.S., Canada, and anywhere. It starts with a commercial presence because it’s just business. Who can complain about that? But the business leads to political influence. It creates dependency within the societies. From the Chinese perspective, they’re happy to have the society have internal fighting; people who don’t want the Chinese coming in, and others who do. You get that society turning on itself and that’s very good from the Chinese perspective. Ultimately, the objective is to have a military presence. They’re patient, and that will come. It’s not hard to see what’s happening. You see something very similar happening in so many countries where the commercial and political dependence that they create has worked very well. There are usually financial benefits involved, but it tends to corrupt the country. As noted, it does cause people and society to get very unsettled, and people fighting with each other, which from the Chinese perspective is a good thing. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about one of these unconventional warfare methods which the CCP has been engaged in, which is Fentanyl. This is something you write about, and that’s very close to your heart as well. Please explain to me how this works. Col. Newsham: It is as clear a case of chemical warfare as you will find. What China provides is about 99 percent of the fentanyl precursors. The raw materials go to Mexico and then get turned into pills and moved into the United States. Fentanyl killed about 70,000 Americans last year, and that’s Americans of all types. In the entire 12-years of the Vietnam War, only 55,000 Americans were killed. In one year, America lost 70,000 people, many of these are military age, and this is just ones who died. Then, there are the walking wounded, along with the effect this has on families and society. The cost of dealing with and trying to treat these people are immense. Some figures are over a trillion dollars, depending on where you look. Think about it. You’ve effectively launched an attack on your main enemy. You’re taking what amounts to a couple divisions of troops off the battlefield every year and nobody does anything. You get away with it. This is really setting us up for the day when a shooting war actually starts, or just may not even be necessary. Fentanyl or the chemical warfare ties into economic warfare. America needs workers. If a lot of them are drug addled, it gets hard to find them. That’s just one example. It’s actually very hard to find people to work in a factory if you do a startup. Also, there’s a psychological warfare aspect of this. By getting so many influential Americans convinced that they have to be in the China market, convinced that they need to make money from China, and also convinced that we need China’s help with fill-in-the-blank—North Korea, climate change, transnational crime, as a result of that we have tied our hands and will not take on China on the Fentanyl scourge that is killing just tens of thousands of us every year. And it’s not stopping. In 2018, Donald Trump did speak with Xi Jinping about it. Mr. Trump declared it was a game changer, and of course nothing changed. Xi Jinping even told him, “Look, you’ve got a drug problem. I don’t.” They could stop it anytime they want, but they’re glad to have it go into the U.S. Mr. Jekielek: Multiple administrations have been “working” with China on this issue. You’re saying they can stop at any time they want, but not everyone would agree with you. Not everyone would believe it is that simple. How could that be possible? Col. Newsham: Here’s a test. I would suggest anybody who goes to China to go from your hotel and go on a walk. If you see a picture of Xi Jinping, take out your Sharpie and draw a mustache on it and see if the Ministry of State Security is waiting for you before you get back to your hotel or five minutes afterwards. The level of control that China has over that society is immense and Orwell couldn’t have dreamed of it. I used to do a lot of work in the organized crime field, Asian organized crime in particular. You always find that Chinese organized crime tracked back to the security services, to the Chinese military, and always to the Chinese Communist Party. This has just been a huge win for the Chinese to cause us this much harm, and then to get us to think China can’t do anything about it. I’ve heard the excuses that it’s local officials, and the central government doesn’t know what they’re doing. Once again, that suggests you don’t really know how China works. People say, “The police, their hands are tied. Otherwise, they would crack down.” Actually, the police do whatever they want. The other good one is, “The guys that make it, they just rejigger the formula. It’s not illegal.” As if in China the law actually matters. The law is what Xi Jinping says it is. China could crack down on this if it wanted to, but I would suggest it doesn’t, because it’s just been wildly successful in killing us. I don’t know why you would stop if your enemy is not wise enough to stand up for himself. Mr. Jekielek: Some people have described it as a reverse Opium War. Col. Newsham: A reverse? Mr. Jekielek: A reverse Opium War. Col. Newsham: I’ve heard that. Mr. Jekielek: Some people have described it as a reverse Opium War. Indeed. Col. Newsham: The Opium War was 180 years ago, roughly. There’s a point at which that excuse doesn’t get you very far. Go to those parts of American cities that are absolute war zones with a lot of it having to do with the drug Fentanyl. I wrote an article about this a couple years ago. A fellow who was a retired Navy pilot from Pittsburgh called me up and told me that his adult son had just died from Fentanyl poisoning. Of course, he was distraught to put it mildly. He said, “I tried to get congressmen interested and they really weren’t.” All I could do was listen to him. To the extent I am able, I can cast some light on the issue and the effect of this on our country. To ignore it the way our ruling class and elites have, there’s a callousness that just isn’t my thing. Mr. Jekielek: I really want to talk about solutions to this one specifically, as we finish up. What could we do? You did mention how the CCP might use climate change. There are many In the U.S. that believe that it’s an existential threat and say, “We have to work with the Chinese Communist Party on this. We need to make all sorts of concessions for this purpose.” How do you view that? Is that another tool of war fighting? Col. Newsham: It’s incredibly effective too. China is very sensitive to its human rights record where it’s just an absolute atrocity. Then, you have the climate czar, John Kerry, saying, “Human rights don’t matter. The only important thing is climate change. We’re not going to talk about this with the Chinese. We need their help.” I mentioned North Korea and transnational crime, even though with so much of the transnational crime, there’s a Chinese role in it. With North Korea, what they’re doing is actually very much in line with what the Chinese want. You have the Americans in particular thinking, “They want what we do and we don’t want to pressure them, and we don’t want to get them mad.” It’s hard to see how you’re going to win a war or win this fight with the PRC if you’re thinking like that. You got to hand it to them, on some days you almost don’t know what to say, but what do you do about it? Certainly, we need to do something different from what we’re doing and have been doing. You need to apply pressure where it’s really going to hurt, and you apply it almost asymmetrically from a different direction. One example of this that I cover in the book is that the Chinese government is absolutely dependent on the convertible currency, U.S. dollars. Without it, they really can’t fund their military or even their economic growth. If they want to fund the Belt and Road initiative, they have to pay in U.S. dollars or something like it. Everything they want to do, they have got to find the dollars somewhere. That can be by manufacturing things in China and selling them overseas. That can be Wall Street pumping in tens of billions a year into the Chinese economy, which is just a godsend to the Chinese Communist Party. With America’s business class, the foreign direct investment it puts into China, it’s sending in the convertible currency that they’re using to build their economy, build their military, and the so-called comprehensive national power. That doesn’t get nearly the attention that it deserves. They haven’t got half the foreign currency they need to pay all of the things they owe. You saw the American investor, Mark Mobius, just note the other day that he wasn’t allowed to take his money out of China. Welcome to discovering gravity. This has been the case forever in that system. There’s a shortage of convertible currency, so here’s what you do. You take the biggest, and not even the biggest Chinese financial institutions and you cut them off from the U.S. dollar network. Start with the People’s Bank of China, and revoke its license to operate in the U.S. for six months. That would get some attention. Additionally, many if not most of China’s elite have assets overseas. They don’t have enough confidence in their own system or its future. They put it in places like America, Britain, England, Singapore, and Australia. Ideally, they get a relative out there with a green card, and that has a residence permit. We should be seizing bank accounts, canceling the residence permits of their relatives, and also publicizing this to high heaven. Bloomberg did some excellent reporting around 2013 on Xi Jinping’s family wealth overseas. They knuckled under and spiked the stories. That’s how sensitive it was. But that is a way you can apply pressure that matters personally, so that they feel a personal effect at the high end of China’s ruling class. Also, go after them on the human rights front nonstop. Every day, it should be nonstop. But we don’t seem to do that. Those are things that the Chinese Communist Party is very vulnerable to. You can see none of those involve shooting, but these are forms of pressure that you can apply if you identify what the key weaknesses are. For the Fentanyl murder if we won’t do these things, we’re not serious, and that is heartbreaking. Mr. Jekielek: Grant, to your point, there’s a piece of legislation, the Stop Organ Harvesting Act of 2023 that just passed the House. It basically has some teeth in terms of sanctioning officials that are involved in this ghastly business in Communist China, one of the most severe human rights violations there. We don’t know where it’s going to go from here, but it does seem like U.S. legislators are thinking hopefully at least a bit in the direction that you’re describing. Col. Newsham: Yes, it’s a good thing. As you say, we’ll see where it goes and there are plenty of people on Capitol Hill who do take this seriously. The donor class of course seems to call the shots too often at the end of the day. But there are very good people on Capitol Hill on both sides who want to do something about it, and this shows one thing that’s doable. But you’ve really got to not just pass the law and then sanction a few unlucky officials. You have to go up to the highest levels and make them feel the heat. You do have to understand the system, realize how pressure and power is applied, then go to the top. It shows what is doable. We will see what comes. Mr. Jekielek: Grant Newsham, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show again. Col. Newsham: Thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Grant Newsham and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek. To get notifications about new Kash's Corner and American Thought Leaders episodes, please sign up for our newsletter! Here 👉 Get Alerts - PRE-ORDER "The Shadow State" DVD: https://www.epochtv.shop/product-page/the-shadow-state-dvd The Real Story of January 6 | Documentary BUY Jan 6 DVD: https://www.epochtv.shop/product-page/dvd-the-real-story-of-january-6, Promo Code “Jan” for 20% off. - Follow American Thought Leaders on social media: Twitter: https://twitter.com/AmThoughtLeader Truth Social: https://truthsocial.com/@AmThoughtLeader Gettr: https://gettr.com/user/amthoughtleader Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AmericanThoughtLeaders Gab: https://gab.com/AmThoughtLeader Telegram: https://t.me/AmThoughtLeader

From chemical warfare to cyber warfare to legal warfare, how does the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) use unconventional warfare techniques to systematically target, subvert, and deplete its enemies? What is the Chinese regime’s greatest strategic vulnerability? And how could the United States exploit it? And how is the CCP deploying a disguised maritime militia in the Pacific—with little to no resistance? I sit down with Col. Grant Newsham, a retired U.S. Marine officer and author of “When China Attacks: A Warning to America.” Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/col-grant-newsham-on-ccp-chemical-warfare-chinas-fishing-militia-and-their-greatest-strategic-weakness_5181108.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Grant Newsham, it’s such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Grant Newsham: I’m glad to be here. Thanks very much. Mr. Jekielek: With your book When China Attacks, the big question I have is attacking who? Who are we talking about here? Col. Newsham: Ultimately they want to attack the United States. We are the main enemy that prevents them really from getting regional domination, and ultimately, global domination. We’re the target. China is likely to use so-called non-kinetic attacks against us at this point, but they are likely to use a kinetic assault to launch a military invasion of Taiwan. By going after Taiwan, they have the chance to humiliate the United States and really put the Americans on their back foot and make it look as if China is unstoppable. Mr. Jekielek: You start When China Attacks with this hypothetical scenario of an attack by the Chinese Communist Party on Taiwan. As I was reading, I was charting all these different unconventional methods of warfare that the CCP utilizes to achieve its objective, and I found it to be a very, very troubling scenario. Realistically, will this happen in the near future? Col. Newsham: It could happen. There are probably a dozen scenarios that different analysts have, but this one, I could see happening. It wouldn’t surprise me at all. Mr. Jekielek: Please explain that. Col. Newsham: What the Chinese want to do is seize Taiwan. They’d like to get it without fighting, but if they have to, they will. They have built up a military that is capable of doing it, but they also need to ensure that the Americans are kept at bay. They’ve got to thread a needle here, because if they go too hard against the United States it may provoke America to respond with everything they have, and that’s not what China wants. They want to humiliate the Americans just enough to make them worry about what happens if they go all in and also to rely on China’s proxies. Essentially, it’s the front men in the United States telling whatever administration is in office to just hold still. Don’t respond. We can’t risk nuclear war over little Taiwan, and we want to get back to business as usual. What I can see is the Chinese launching an all-out very quick hard assault on Taiwan, but not going all out on the United States, not doing another Pearl Harbor attack or hitting the U.S. mainland, and maybe even leaving the U.S. bases in Japan alone. They do have ways to make life difficult for us, as you noted, like their fishing fleet, the maritime militia, things that look like civilian weapons or civilian entities, and also the proxies that I mentioned. In just about every country, they’ve got people who put in a good word for them. That’s how I see it. The Chinese could present the American administration with a fair complaint. They’ve taken Taiwan and they’ve told the Americans, “Stand clear or it’s nuclear war.” You can almost hear a certain type of administration talking itself into doing nothing, saying, “We would really like to, but it’s unfortunate. We can’t intervene on behalf of Taiwan.” That would be my scenario, and I would note the Chinese would like to get Taiwan without fighting. Who wouldn’t? It’s a lot easier. They have been launching political warfare against Taiwan for decades. The subversion of the country has just been immense with the pressure that is put on Taiwan. What could happen in the upcoming presidential election in Taiwan in January 2024, if the pro-China candidate wins, Beijing might think that it can work with him and draw him in, and have him draw Taiwan into the mainland’s embrace. Most Taiwanese wouldn’t want that, but if you have a certain type of leader and you play it right, China might increase their odds of winning without fighting. But if a candidate from the party that wants nothing to do with Chinese domination wins, at that point, the gloves come off and China gets very serious about a so-called kinetic attack on Taiwan. Kinetic is just the popular word these days for a shooting war. Mr. Jekielek: Why is Taiwan so important to China, and why is Taiwan so important to the U.S.? Col. Newsham: That’s the question. You hear a lot of people say, “Taiwan isn’t worth it. It’s worth more to China than it is to us. It can’t be defended. Just let it go.” You hear that a lot in the debate these days. It’s wrong, and there is also an element of maliciousness in it. The idea of letting 23 million free people come under Chinese Communist enslavement is not something that sits well with me. But why is it important? First, look at it from China’s perspective, and if you look at it that way, you can figure out why it’s so important from the U.S. perspective. Surprisingly, it doesn’t have so much to do with the high-end semiconductors that Taiwan manufactures. That gets a lot of attention, and yes, it would be an inconvenience, and probably a big one if Taiwan’s semiconductor production was cut. They produce something like 90 percent of all high-end semiconductors. But I don’t think that is the main reason. With or without chips, Taiwan is a very juicy target for Beijing and here’s why. Taiwan is strategic terrain, and strategic geography, if there ever was. It’s part of the so-called first island chain that stretches from Japan to Taiwan, down to the Philippines, down to Malaysia. If you look at a map, that will tell you a lot about Chinese thinking, particularly military thinking. That first island chain actually hems in the people’s liberation army. It makes it very hard for them to get into the Pacific to go east. But if China takes Taiwan, they have seized a lodgement right in the middle of the first island chain. Think of a castle wall being breached and suddenly the attackers just pour in and keep going. That’s what would happen. If the People’s Liberation Army launches from Taiwan and goes up north, they can surround and isolate Japan. If they go down south, they can isolate Australia, cut it off from the U.S., and cut it off from the rest of Asia. Militarily, it’s very nice to have that as a platform. It makes operations farther east into the Pacific much easier to accomplish. The Chinese objective is not to just stop at the first island chain. Rather, it’s to go all the way to the west coast of Latin America where they are setting up the infrastructure, the ports, the airfields, the political influence, and the economic influence that they will need to deploy Chinese forces sometime in the future, if not tomorrow. It’s part of the plan. From a military perspective, it’s very important. You ask yourself, “If I were the Americans, my first defense line has been breached.” Obviously, that is serious, but there’s more to it than just the military operational issue. I would call it the political/psychological aspect of Taiwan and its importance. Suppose Taiwan comes under Beijing’s rule. Look at the message that would be sent and what Beijing would have demonstrated. It’s that the U.S. military could not prevent the Americans from keeping 23 million Taiwanese free. U.S. economic and financial power couldn’t do it and U.S. nuclear weapons couldn’t do it either. In short order, you’re going to find Asia turning red as most countries there realize that an American promise is not what it used to be, and you’re going to see that worldwide as well. It would be a huge psychological political blow against the Americans and for Beijing. How would one argue if that happens? You say, “Taiwan wasn’t all that important, but if it’s somewhere else more important, then we’ll go all in.” I don’t think anyone’s really going to buy that, and we don’t have a particularly good track record in recent times of taking care of our friends. Rather, we tend to leave them high and dry, and there’s a point at which a lot of people notice. Those are some of the reasons why Taiwan is so important. Mr. Jekielek: You’re American. You talk about the Americans as if you’re looking a little bit from the outside, which in fact you are. Please tell me a little bit about your background and how you came to be studying Chinese military capability and intentions. Col. Newsham: Sure. I first started looking at Taiwan and China around 1981, so it’s been 40 years or so. I first started looking at business with China. I used to be a lawyer, so that was one area I focused on. I was with the Marines for 30 years and active in reserve time. During that time, much of it was in the Asia-Pacific. Also, I was a diplomat with the U.S. State Department for eight years, and a lot of that was in Pacific East Asia. I also worked in the business community, working for an investment bank in Japan for a decade-plus, and also working for Motorola in Japan and Korea. That’s a familiar name to some people, but it committed suicide in China. I’ve had decades of experience looking at China and looking at Asia from different perspectives, not just the military, but also from the diplomatic, the financial, and that of high-tech industry. Mr. Jekielek: A lot of the unconventional warfare that the Chinese Communist Party wages does involve all these different sectors. It doesn’t actually involve the conventional, traditional, war-fighting apparatus as much. Col. Newsham: Yes. It’s a very different concept of war and of bringing your enemy under your control. We tend to look at warfare like a 100-yard dash where the participants get up to the starting line, they shake loose and get down in the crouch, and then the starter says go. That’s when the race starts, the war starts, and the shooting starts. But to the Chinese, the shooting is the last thing, if it’s even necessary. Ideally, you’ve weakened your enemy and enemies to the point that they can’t respond effectively, or can’t respond at all. You do this with methods that don’t involve shooting people, although they are willing to do that, or they have other people do the shooting for them. These are things that to an American or Westerner look unobjectionable, and that just looks like business competition. The Chinese look at this as economic warfare. The idea is to drive your opponents or your competitors out of business, to get their technology, suck their know-how out of them, and rig the system in China so that you can build up Chinese companies. The idea is to dominate the main sectors and just about anything that’s on the Chinese list of things to dominate. You can look at how that has actually worked in the U.S. Once China was let into the World Trade Organization in the early 2000s, despite not meeting any of the requirements that every other country would need, things went wild and American businesses started flocking to China. China turned into this manufacturing juggernaut. America’s manufacturing capability, and more importantly the jobs and the livelihoods that came with it disappeared. One figure from an MIT analyst states that about three-and-a-half million manufacturing jobs were lost as a result of letting China into the World Trade Organization, and that’s just jobs lost. You would think that every one of those jobs supported several people at least. That has actually worked very well to China’s advantage. It’s weakened us and it’s strengthened China, because the Chinese economy has grown, with many countries growing dependent on it, America not the least. This helps China develop its military as well. It’s very much a net gain for the Chinese and a net loss for us. Once again, there’s a psychological aspect to it. I would encourage anybody to go to some big, or even not so big, American city, and if you dare, go to the neighborhoods where working class people used to live and have a look around. It’s as if a war took place. It’s horrific, and I describe part of that in my book. That is one example of what the Chinese consider warfare that is intended to weaken their enemy, while strengthening themselves. But we don’t look at it that way. There are other lines of attack that China sees as warfare— biological war, chemical war, cyberwarfare, and proxy warfare. That means getting your opponent’s prominent and influential people to do your bidding for you. It was very interesting the other day when we saw the CEO of TikTok testifying before Congress. It was interesting to see him, but it was more interesting to see behind him a phalanx of Americans who had signed up to do China’s bidding. Money has a way of doing that. There’s also one point I wanted to mention as to why Taiwan matters. Taiwan is a small island with 23 million people. It’s an existential threat to the Chinese Communist Party, and how could that be? It’s such a small place. It is proof that people of Chinese origin can handle democracy, consensual government, freedom of the press, freedom of speech, and all the freedoms we think are important. Taiwan shows what is doable and what China could become. That is one of the reasons Beijing wants to strangle it, because it is a daily living reminder there is an alternative for China besides Chinese Communist rule. You hear it all the time. “Chinese people can only be handled or ruled by a boot on the neck with force.” Even Jackie Chan said something like that, and others have said it. It’s nonsense. Taiwan is proof that it doesn’t have to be like that. It’s really a priceless reminder of what China could be. Mr. Jekielek: It suggests that any country that’s a free country actually acts as a threat to the Chinese Communist Party. In fact, I was just discussing this very issue on a podcast recently that totalitarian regimes fear any freedom, because it shows people that there is another way. Col. Newsham: Definitely. That is something that the Chinese Communists really don’t like, if you listen to what they say. Xi Jinping gave an official speech around 2013 where he effectively said that Western values are antithetical. They are the enemy. They are the opponent. They are not at all compatible with the Chinese Communist, Chinese socialist ideas, and he is very clear on this. There was no live and let live, or let’s take some of the good parts. He was very clear on these Western values. I’ve never come across too many people anywhere that like to be enslaved or treated unfairly. That is an absolute threat to the Chinese Communist Party that ultimately rules by force, and does not rule with the consent of the governed. An easy way to prove that is to have a real election. That doesn’t seem to be in the cards. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about TikTok. A few years back you wrote an op-ed for us about TikTok and its relationship with a certain piece of legislation, the 2017 national intelligence law that the Chinese Communist Party enacted, and that it may have some bearing on what TikTok is ultimately required to do. Col. Newsham: That’s an easy one. High-priced American lawyers would insist otherwise, but TikTok has to do whatever the Chinese Communist Party tells it to do. That is required by the national intelligence law you just mentioned. Even before that law was passed, if the Ministry of State Security comes to your company and says, “We would like you to come in for tea,” there’s only one answer to that. That has always been the reality for any Chinese company. There’s really no such thing as a private company that’s free of government coercion, in the way we would see it. It’s ironic that we’re spending so much time debating the degree to which TikTok and similar companies have connections to the Chinese government. They all do and it is about that simple. Jack Ma, for example, you hear about him and it was thought, “He’s a brash private sector guy.” He has always been a creation of the Chinese Communist Party. That’s one of the aspects about that regime and that system—a company in China will only be successful for as long as the Chinese Communist Party says it will. That is the reality, but when you’re paying a lawyer $800 an hour to argue the point, they’re glad to do it. But some things are not that hard to figure out when it comes to the PRC [People’s Republic of China]. Mr. Jekielek: I was recently at a hearing where the Chinese doctrine of civil-military fusion was discussed. It’s actually one of the top seven national priorities if I’m not mistaken. Something is very relevant here to the realities around TikTok. Do you have any thoughts on that? Col. Newsham: Yes. That civil-military fusion is the description of how the economic activities and military activities are combined in China. One supports the other and vice versa. If something that is developed for military purposes and there is a commercial use for it, it’s going to get shared and vice versa, and that is strategy. It’s the way that Chinese look at things, and they have been very effective with that. With TikTok, you can think of what the harmful aspects are. If you can influence your target, particularly young people or even older people to think a certain way, that directly benefits your military. It thinks about how it can weaken the enemy in order to set them up for eventual assault and eventual domination. With the intelligence-collection capabilities of TikTok, there is a usefulness there. Once again, that benefits the military and the security part of the Chinese governmental structure. You see this all the time. Don’t ever think there’s a purely private company in China. If push comes to shove, they are obligated by law to cooperate with the authorities. Remember when Apple refused to unlock the phone of a mass-murdering terrorist and refused to help out the FBI. But at the same time, they actually did help out the Chinese government unlocking some things. Things you can do in America, you cannot do in China, and that needs to be kept in mind. Mr. Jekielek: It’s almost unthinkable that when there is a civil-military fusion opportunity, that it wouldn’t be used. Otherwise, heads would roll, maybe not literally, but proverbially. What do you think about that? Col. Newsham: That’s how it is. It’s something that is so foreign to us. We sometimes admire the brash business executive, like say, Howard Hughes going in front of the Congress and talking straight and talking tough. There is no Congress in China, but if there was, you would only do it once. We look at this as very natural, that the private sector business is separate from the military and security activities. The Chinese see it very differently. Everything comes together to enhance Chinese power. They see it that when Chinese power grows, ideally, it happens at the same time that American power reduces. I mentioned Motorola, for example. Think about that. In its day, it was one of America’s top companies that was really respected. It got in trouble partly by getting into the China market without being wise about what they were doing, and now it basically doesn’t exist. There’s a little bit left, but the bulk of what was Motorola is now owned by Lenovo, by a Chinese company. Just think of the effect of that. You had multiple generations of people who worked for Motorola in Schaumburg, Illinois and elsewhere. It’s all gone and it hasn’t been replaced with anything. China’s high-tech industry has expanded rapidly. Now, it’s a real threat to the U.S. companies. America has gotten weaker, and China has gotten stronger. That’s how the Chinese Communists do the calculation. Mr. Jekielek: While we’re on this topic, tell us about this concept of comprehensive national power, which the CCP uses to rate itself against every nation in the world. You’ll have to tell me the details, but it’s important to know how they think about this. Col. Newsham: I’ll try to explain it simply in a way you can understand. If you look at it in the sense of, “Whatever is good for me is bad for you,” that is the ideal. Something that weakens your opponent while strengthening you is ideally what you want. China actually counts all of these wins and successes that they have around the world. They set up and get ownership of some strategic locations or air fields. The Americans aren’t getting in there, and it all goes into that accumulation of national power. Everything that is good for China and benefits China, that’s exactly what they want. But it’s not as if they want it to have the so-called win-win where everybody is benefiting. They want the other side to go down. If you can weaken your enemy, confuse him, take away his key industries, weaken his currency, weaken the dollar, and you get people to start using Chinese currency overseas, that is a big addition to China. It’s on the plus side for China’s comprehensive national power, and it’s a decline for American national power. It helps if you just forget the idea of win-win. The Chinese use that expression a lot, but what they mean is we win twice, and you lose. Another example would be when the Chinese get the blueprints for the F35 fighter and the C17 long-range transport. That’s a good thing for China. It goes into the plus column. What does it look like on the American side? It’s on the negative side of the ledger. They are very much keeping score on this. It’s helpful to remember the ultimate objective of the Chinese Communist Party. You really have to listen to them. Ultimately, it is to get the Americans out of Asia, but also to keep pushing and eventually dominate the region and dominate the globe. They have gone about setting things up to do that. They have a way to go, but it’s been a very impressive move over the last 20 to 30 years. Mr. Jekielek: On the side of the Chinese military, and you’ve been looking at this, what is the state of the Chinese military? I’ve heard wildly different assessments of their capabilities. What have you found? Col. Newsham: Unfortunately, they are pretty good. People used to laugh 20 years ago when the idea of the People’s Liberation Army attacking Taiwan was mentioned. It was jokingly referred to as the “million man swim,” the idea being they didn’t even have the resources to get across the Taiwan Strait. It also implied that they weren’t smart enough to figure out how to do it. Nobody is laughing these days. I actually have a chart that was put together by the former head of intelligence for the U.S. Navy in the Pacific fleet that graphically depicts Chinese military growth over the last 20 years. The first chart is 2000, and there’s not much there now. China doesn’t have much hardware, and it can’t operate very far offshore. In 2020, it’s very different. It’s just the whole charge is full. China has a military, has a Navy Air Force, ground forces, and also, as everyone knows, rockets and missiles. It’s got a lot of them and it’s figuring out how to use them. It actually already knows how. It knows its weaknesses and it’s trying to address those. Now, China is able to really throw its weight around in the region, and the idea is to eventually throw it around globally. There was a condescension towards the Chinese over many years that they could never be our equals. Five or six years ago I suggested to some Marines that the Chinese would have the equivalent of our amphibious force and units that patrol the oceans. People laughed at me and said, “They could never do it. It’s too hard to do.” Well, it wasn’t. The Chinese could put together two or three of these things at least if they wanted to. They’ve had them out and about for more and better future operations. We have underestimated them. That was a mistake, but they do have problems. It’s not as if they figured everything out, and that is something that we do need to keep in mind. You don’t want to psych yourself out, but you do have to realize just what a formidable force they’ve become. In certain circumstances, they could probably beat us or at least kill a lot of us if they chose the timing. For example, with something close to the Chinese mainland, we would have a hard time, because they would have the advantages of operating from so-called interior lines. From the Chinese mainland, it would be a huge advantage for them. It would be hard for us to get in there. But if you get farther out, then it gets more difficult for the Chinese. It could be five years before they really have the power projection capability where you can send military units way far away and shoot somebody and use force. The Chinese are very capable of sending naval flotillas to the ends of the earth. They do it in Africa and Latin America. They go down to the Indian Ocean. They’ve been sending units to the Horn of Africa for a long time and they’re smart. They’ve learned what their shortcomings are. They’ve learned how to operate combining different forces and different types of units, and they’ve done a very good job. The Chinese leadership does complain sometimes about the so-called peace disease. They fret that they haven’t had combat experience and that is a real drawback. But the U.S. Navy hasn’t really fought a major enemy since 1945. With U.S. forces, the combat experience tends to get winnowed out pretty quickly as time goes on. If you understand the problem, if you say train to address it and you train hard, you can make up for that lack of experience. I don’t see that as much of a problem as some other people do. The fix we’ve gotten ourselves into with the Chinese does come from not having taken them seriously enough and maintaining our edge. We spent so many years in the so-called sandbox in Iraq and Afghanistan focusing on those kinds of wars, that the Chinese caught up in many areas and surpassed us in some as well. Mr. Jekielek: Since we’re talking about maritime capability, there is this unconventional fleet that the CCP has used in a military way, which is essentially their fishing fleet, but which also doubles as a maritime militia with its swarming tactics. Perhaps it is a way to explain the Chinese Communist Party’s mentality around war fighting, what kinds of tools can be used, along with what this group of fishing boats is doing. You couldn’t have a military response to that, because these are just fishing boats. It would be an outrage. It would be an international crisis, irrespective of what those boats were actually doing. Please tell us how this maritime militia works. Is it actually just an arm of the military? Col. Newsham: Part of the people’s armed police is probably a good way to look at it. But just think of it as military, and that will work. These are fishing boats that sometimes do fishing, but they’re also built for double hauls, and are up-engined. They have people with arms on them and they use them to ram, intimidate, and sink other vessels, particularly other fishing vessels. You have this charade that they are not a part of the military and they’re just fishing boats. They’ve used these very successfully in the South China Sea. You can establish a long-term presence in places and really drive your opponents out, and they won’t go back in. If you’re a fisherman, there’s no way you’re going to go in and challenge a big boat with a double haul and guys with weapons on it that is willing to ram you and sink you and shoot you if necessary. It’s a nice adjunct and it gives you the cover, as you pointed out, by saying, “This is just a fishing boat. What are you complaining about? It’s not a naval vessel. “The Chinese have a lot of these, in addition to their regular fishing fleet, which sails the seven seas vacuuming up fish. One example of how they throw their weight around causing their opponents to back off is Japan. A handful of times over the last decade the Chinese have flooded the zone around a tiny Japanese island with around 400 fishing boats with maritime militia mixed in. The Japanese don’t have anywhere near enough patrol boats, Coast Guard or naval, to take care of that. The Chinese have done this now and then, and the purpose is to tell the Japanese, “Look, when the time comes we assert administrative control,” which is the legal term for asserting dominance over your territory, and the Japanese are very worried about this. The Chinese have driven Japanese fishing boats out of their traditional waters. They don’t go into some of these because they’re afraid. It’s either maritime militia or the fishing boats, and then throw in a couple of Coast Guard boats, and it’s a formidable force. Chinese Coast Guard cutters are effectively warships. They’re big, and they’re armed. They’re really almost the size of U.S. naval combatants. The Chinese have also understood one of the weaknesses of their opponent is that we insist on law and playing by the rules. When somebody doesn’t do it, we’re flummoxed. We don’t quite know what to do. You hear this all the time on the U.S. side, “China’s gray zone activities, what do we do about it?” That’s about as far as it gets. We say, “What do we do about it?” Nobody has actually come up with the common sense approach that lets them know that we consider these naval ships, and we are going to respond accordingly. A while back, there was actually a U.S. naval commander who stated, and he was on the right track, that it takes a certain willingness on our side to push back, but also to fight back. The other guy knows that he can break the rules and elbow in on you and hurt you, and you’re not going to do anything, because it’s against the law. He’s going to take advantage of that. It’s almost an aspect of so-called lawfare, where the Chinese use international law to their advantage. Partly, it helps them if they don’t obey it, but we do. You can see the advantage that it gives to the Chinese compared to us and others. Mr. Jekielek: What I find most fascinating about the hypothetical assault on Taiwan chronicled in your book, is the gray zone activity and the reaction, which is pretty much what would happen, unless we have a dramatic policy change like you just described. Col. Newsham: You can use these regular fishing boats and maritime militia to surreptitiously lay mines off of Japanese ports where the U.S. Navy operates. Cargo ships, for example, can launch drones that can cause Americans a lot of trouble as they’re sailing out of San Diego. These are things that we don’t think of as war fighting, but it’s a platform and we should expect that we’re going to have to deal with it. Mr. Jekielek: Think about what that means—cargo ships coming out of China being weaponized. What portion of the world’s cargo chips come out of China? It’s probably a very significant portion. Col. Newsham: Yes, it is. One of the key worries is containerized missiles. You’ve seen a big container ship that has thousands of containers on it and you just need a couple of them that have anti-ship cruise missiles in it, and which one is it in? It’s a giant shell game. If you’re willing to do that, it can give you a huge advantage. Then, all you have to say once it happens is, “We don’t know.” We Americans insist on evidence to be able to prove the charges, and if the Chinese just shrug their shoulders, one can see the usefulness of this. It could make it very hard for the Americans to respond to a Taiwan scenario. You don’t have to sink an aircraft carrier, just disable or immobilize a couple of other naval ships. We don’t have enough ships, but you also get worried about what other problems you’re going to have. That is very much part of the Chinese military strategy, making use of these so-called gray zones and what look like civilian resources or platforms to go after us and their enemies. The Australians will find something similar if they head north from Australia. They’ll find that, because they will have lost a few ships on the way up from the Chinese fishing fleet, most likely. Mr. Jekielek: I want to stay in the Pacific for a moment longer. There are all these different unconventional warfare methods that the Chinese Communist Party is affecting on the U.S. mainland. I want to get to that. This is incredibly important, but I’ve recently become more aware of some of these bullying actions of the Chinese Communist Party, trying to get the leaders or leaders of some of these small island chains to basically play ball, seemingly on the course to assuming administrative control eventually. But there have been a few of these leaders that have, unbelievably against all odds, stood up to the behemoth. In one case, President Panuelo, of the Federated States of Micronesia, is on record saying that Chinese officials have threatened his life. These are people that are in the capacity of serving as Chinese officials, not this gray zone thing that you usually see. In this long letter, he describes a host of serious threats to his nation. It’s unheard of anywhere, nevermind in a tiny island chain state. What is the significance of this? Col. Newsham: Keep in mind that we won’t even say those things, because we’re afraid China might not let us do business there. Even American leaders are reluctant to speak out in too many cases. Mr. Jekielek: Please give us a quick summary of what President Panuelo has alleged or said. Col. Newsham: He writes in great detail about things like the Chinese paying off all sorts of officials and influential people in Micronesia. They’re providing money to secessionist groups in several of the states in Micronesia. It would be like providing money to Texas so they could go independent, but they’re doing that. In just the most amazing way, just recently at a meeting down in the South Pacific where the Micronesians were not going to participate, the Chinese designated a Micronesian guy and said, “You represent Micronesia.” He had no authority to do that, but they just did it and brazenly ignored the rights of a sovereign nation. They have also been sending survey ships to follow the communications cables. They’ve been doing this in a lot of places. The idea is when the time comes, they will cut them. You’ve seen this full-fledged political warfare, and an influence effort against Micronesia. This is just Micronesia. You have huge Chinese investment where these real estate developers come in and promise billions, and they insinuate themselves commercially. That leads to political influence, and then they pretty much get a lock on the local economy. They create a constituency of people that get a ton of money from the PRC. Most people don’t like this, but there’s nothing you can do. They’ve been very effective doing this in the Pacific. These are the islands where, during World War II, there was bloody combat to take them back from the Japanese. These islands in the Central Pacific are actually in the middle of America’s defenses. We have the first island chain with Taiwan, but the Chinese are setting up behind us. The third step in Chinese influence efforts is a military presence. They’ve taken their time on that. In the Solomon Islands recently they have signed a deal with the Prime Minister of the Solomon Islands that effectively lets the Chinese military into the Solomon Islands. That’s where Guadalcanal was, the World War II battle. The Chinese military will get in there before too long. But you have President Panuelo. He had the nerve and the courage to stand up and say this, and this was actually the third letter he’s written. He wrote one last July and one a little before that, warning his fellow citizens or fellow officials, but also the leaders of other countries of this Chinese subversion that is coming. He says it means there’s nothing good for the people of the country when this happens, but it’s important to note that he’s put himself at real risk. China does play hardball and you can take that in its fullest meaning, but he’s spoken up. I really recommend people read the letters because they’re so well written, a real cry from the heart and also asking for help from the Americans which doesn’t seem to have been forthcoming yet. Panuelo also offered to change Federated States of Micronesia’s recognition from China to Taiwan. It is very rare to have that happen, but there’s some timing issues here. You’ll notice it doesn’t seem as though the Americans have taken advantage of the opportunity. If you’re a guy who’s stood up against the Chinese, you’d think you’d get some sort of support from the United States. If it’s being given, it’s really well hidden. Mr. Jekielek: If you’re watching this episode online, we’re going to embed it into the webpage, because it also functions as a blueprint of Chinese Communist Party influence operations anywhere. Everything listed there are things that I’m aware of in other places. Col. Newsham: It really is. It’s a predictable sequence. It applies to the U.S., Canada, and anywhere. It starts with a commercial presence because it’s just business. Who can complain about that? But the business leads to political influence. It creates dependency within the societies. From the Chinese perspective, they’re happy to have the society have internal fighting; people who don’t want the Chinese coming in, and others who do. You get that society turning on itself and that’s very good from the Chinese perspective. Ultimately, the objective is to have a military presence. They’re patient, and that will come. It’s not hard to see what’s happening. You see something very similar happening in so many countries where the commercial and political dependence that they create has worked very well. There are usually financial benefits involved, but it tends to corrupt the country. As noted, it does cause people and society to get very unsettled, and people fighting with each other, which from the Chinese perspective is a good thing. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about one of these unconventional warfare methods which the CCP has been engaged in, which is Fentanyl. This is something you write about, and that’s very close to your heart as well. Please explain to me how this works. Col. Newsham: It is as clear a case of chemical warfare as you will find. What China provides is about 99 percent of the fentanyl precursors. The raw materials go to Mexico and then get turned into pills and moved into the United States. Fentanyl killed about 70,000 Americans last year, and that’s Americans of all types. In the entire 12-years of the Vietnam War, only 55,000 Americans were killed. In one year, America lost 70,000 people, many of these are military age, and this is just ones who died. Then, there are the walking wounded, along with the effect this has on families and society. The cost of dealing with and trying to treat these people are immense. Some figures are over a trillion dollars, depending on where you look. Think about it. You’ve effectively launched an attack on your main enemy. You’re taking what amounts to a couple divisions of troops off the battlefield every year and nobody does anything. You get away with it. This is really setting us up for the day when a shooting war actually starts, or just may not even be necessary. Fentanyl or the chemical warfare ties into economic warfare. America needs workers. If a lot of them are drug addled, it gets hard to find them. That’s just one example. It’s actually very hard to find people to work in a factory if you do a startup. Also, there’s a psychological warfare aspect of this. By getting so many influential Americans convinced that they have to be in the China market, convinced that they need to make money from China, and also convinced that we need China’s help with fill-in-the-blank—North Korea, climate change, transnational crime, as a result of that we have tied our hands and will not take on China on the Fentanyl scourge that is killing just tens of thousands of us every year. And it’s not stopping. In 2018, Donald Trump did speak with Xi Jinping about it. Mr. Trump declared it was a game changer, and of course nothing changed. Xi Jinping even told him, “Look, you’ve got a drug problem. I don’t.” They could stop it anytime they want, but they’re glad to have it go into the U.S. Mr. Jekielek: Multiple administrations have been “working” with China on this issue. You’re saying they can stop at any time they want, but not everyone would agree with you. Not everyone would believe it is that simple. How could that be possible? Col. Newsham: Here’s a test. I would suggest anybody who goes to China to go from your hotel and go on a walk. If you see a picture of Xi Jinping, take out your Sharpie and draw a mustache on it and see if the Ministry of State Security is waiting for you before you get back to your hotel or five minutes afterwards. The level of control that China has over that society is immense and Orwell couldn’t have dreamed of it. I used to do a lot of work in the organized crime field, Asian organized crime in particular. You always find that Chinese organized crime tracked back to the security services, to the Chinese military, and always to the Chinese Communist Party. This has just been a huge win for the Chinese to cause us this much harm, and then to get us to think China can’t do anything about it. I’ve heard the excuses that it’s local officials, and the central government doesn’t know what they’re doing. Once again, that suggests you don’t really know how China works. People say, “The police, their hands are tied. Otherwise, they would crack down.” Actually, the police do whatever they want. The other good one is, “The guys that make it, they just rejigger the formula. It’s not illegal.” As if in China the law actually matters. The law is what Xi Jinping says it is. China could crack down on this if it wanted to, but I would suggest it doesn’t, because it’s just been wildly successful in killing us. I don’t know why you would stop if your enemy is not wise enough to stand up for himself. Mr. Jekielek: Some people have described it as a reverse Opium War. Col. Newsham: A reverse? Mr. Jekielek: A reverse Opium War. Col. Newsham: I’ve heard that. Mr. Jekielek: Some people have described it as a reverse Opium War. Indeed. Col. Newsham: The Opium War was 180 years ago, roughly. There’s a point at which that excuse doesn’t get you very far. Go to those parts of American cities that are absolute war zones with a lot of it having to do with the drug Fentanyl. I wrote an article about this a couple years ago. A fellow who was a retired Navy pilot from Pittsburgh called me up and told me that his adult son had just died from Fentanyl poisoning. Of course, he was distraught to put it mildly. He said, “I tried to get congressmen interested and they really weren’t.” All I could do was listen to him. To the extent I am able, I can cast some light on the issue and the effect of this on our country. To ignore it the way our ruling class and elites have, there’s a callousness that just isn’t my thing. Mr. Jekielek: I really want to talk about solutions to this one specifically, as we finish up. What could we do? You did mention how the CCP might use climate change. There are many In the U.S. that believe that it’s an existential threat and say, “We have to work with the Chinese Communist Party on this. We need to make all sorts of concessions for this purpose.” How do you view that? Is that another tool of war fighting? Col. Newsham: It’s incredibly effective too. China is very sensitive to its human rights record where it’s just an absolute atrocity. Then, you have the climate czar, John Kerry, saying, “Human rights don’t matter. The only important thing is climate change. We’re not going to talk about this with the Chinese. We need their help.” I mentioned North Korea and transnational crime, even though with so much of the transnational crime, there’s a Chinese role in it. With North Korea, what they’re doing is actually very much in line with what the Chinese want. You have the Americans in particular thinking, “They want what we do and we don’t want to pressure them, and we don’t want to get them mad.” It’s hard to see how you’re going to win a war or win this fight with the PRC if you’re thinking like that. You got to hand it to them, on some days you almost don’t know what to say, but what do you do about it? Certainly, we need to do something different from what we’re doing and have been doing. You need to apply pressure where it’s really going to hurt, and you apply it almost asymmetrically from a different direction. One example of this that I cover in the book is that the Chinese government is absolutely dependent on the convertible currency, U.S. dollars. Without it, they really can’t fund their military or even their economic growth. If they want to fund the Belt and Road initiative, they have to pay in U.S. dollars or something like it. Everything they want to do, they have got to find the dollars somewhere. That can be by manufacturing things in China and selling them overseas. That can be Wall Street pumping in tens of billions a year into the Chinese economy, which is just a godsend to the Chinese Communist Party. With America’s business class, the foreign direct investment it puts into China, it’s sending in the convertible currency that they’re using to build their economy, build their military, and the so-called comprehensive national power. That doesn’t get nearly the attention that it deserves. They haven’t got half the foreign currency they need to pay all of the things they owe. You saw the American investor, Mark Mobius, just note the other day that he wasn’t allowed to take his money out of China. Welcome to discovering gravity. This has been the case forever in that system. There’s a shortage of convertible currency, so here’s what you do. You take the biggest, and not even the biggest Chinese financial institutions and you cut them off from the U.S. dollar network. Start with the People’s Bank of China, and revoke its license to operate in the U.S. for six months. That would get some attention. Additionally, many if not most of China’s elite have assets overseas. They don’t have enough confidence in their own system or its future. They put it in places like America, Britain, England, Singapore, and Australia. Ideally, they get a relative out there with a green card, and that has a residence permit. We should be seizing bank accounts, canceling the residence permits of their relatives, and also publicizing this to high heaven. Bloomberg did some excellent reporting around 2013 on Xi Jinping’s family wealth overseas. They knuckled under and spiked the stories. That’s how sensitive it was. But that is a way you can apply pressure that matters personally, so that they feel a personal effect at the high end of China’s ruling class. Also, go after them on the human rights front nonstop. Every day, it should be nonstop. But we don’t seem to do that. Those are things that the Chinese Communist Party is very vulnerable to. You can see none of those involve shooting, but these are forms of pressure that you can apply if you identify what the key weaknesses are. For the Fentanyl murder if we won’t do these things, we’re not serious, and that is heartbreaking. Mr. Jekielek: Grant, to your point, there’s a piece of legislation, the Stop Organ Harvesting Act of 2023 that just passed the House. It basically has some teeth in terms of sanctioning officials that are involved in this ghastly business in Communist China, one of the most severe human rights violations there. We don’t know where it’s going to go from here, but it does seem like U.S. legislators are thinking hopefully at least a bit in the direction that you’re describing. Col. Newsham: Yes, it’s a good thing. As you say, we’ll see where it goes and there are plenty of people on Capitol Hill who do take this seriously. The donor class of course seems to call the shots too often at the end of the day. But there are very good people on Capitol Hill on both sides who want to do something about it, and this shows one thing that’s doable. But you’ve really got to not just pass the law and then sanction a few unlucky officials. You have to go up to the highest levels and make them feel the heat. You do have to understand the system, realize how pressure and power is applied, then go to the top. It shows what is doable. We will see what comes. Mr. Jekielek: Grant Newsham, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show again. Col. Newsham: Thank you very much. I appreciate the opportunity. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Grant Newsham and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek. To get notifications about new Kash's Corner and American Thought Leaders episodes, please sign up for our newsletter! Here 👉 Get Alerts - PRE-ORDER "The Shadow State" DVD: https://www.epochtv.shop/product-page/the-shadow-state-dvd The Real Story of January 6 | Documentary BUY Jan 6 DVD: https://www.epochtv.shop/product-page/dvd-the-real-story-of-january-6, Promo Code “Jan” for 20% off. - Follow American Thought Leaders on social media: Twitter: https://twitter.com/AmThoughtLeader Truth Social: https://truthsocial.com/@AmThoughtLeader Gettr: https://gettr.com/user/amthoughtleader Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AmericanThoughtLeaders Gab: https://gab.com/AmThoughtLeader Telegram: https://t.me/AmThoughtLeader

President Joe Biden is being accused of colluding with intelligence officials to spread disinformation about Hunter Biden’s laptop ahead of the 2020 elections. By doing so, Biden may have misled the media and helped to suppress sensitive information that could have changed the outcome of the election. The alleged scandal could also involve tax crimes tied to Hunter Biden, and both President Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland are facing accusations that could find them swept up in the case. 🔵 Watch the full episode 👉 https://ept.ms/DisinfoCollusionCR_YT LIVE 2: Why Are GOP Congressional Investigations Stalled? | Over the Target with Lee Smith After their November electoral win, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and other Republican House members promised to investigate White House corruption and the FBI’s crimes and abuses. Nearly half a year later, the results are dismal. GOP supporters are still being targeted by rogue law enforcement and former President Donald Trump has been indicted. Is there still time for GOP lawmakers to turn it around? Watch the Full episode: https://ept.ms/EmptyPromisesYT-OT

President Joe Biden is being accused of colluding with intelligence officials to spread disinformation about Hunter Biden’s laptop ahead of the 2020 elections. By doing so, Biden may have misled the media and helped to suppress sensitive information that could have changed the outcome of the election. The alleged scandal could also involve tax crimes tied to Hunter Biden, and both President Biden and Attorney General Merrick Garland are facing accusations that could find them swept up in the case. 🔵 Watch the full episode 👉 https://ept.ms/DisinfoCollusionCR_YT LIVE 2: Why Are GOP Congressional Investigations Stalled? | Over the Target with Lee Smith After their November electoral win, Rep. Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) and other Republican House members promised to investigate White House corruption and the FBI’s crimes and abuses. Nearly half a year later, the results are dismal. GOP supporters are still being targeted by rogue law enforcement and former President Donald Trump has been indicted. Is there still time for GOP lawmakers to turn it around? Watch the Full episode: https://ept.ms/EmptyPromisesYT-OT

Why is the FBI targeting churches? Who approved the memos singling out Catholic churches and associating terms like “red pill” and “based” with domestic violent extremism? How did classified intelligence on Ukraine end up spreading online for weeks without being detected? And what does Kash Patel—as the person in charge of the Defense Department’s transition from the Trump administration to the Biden administration—make of National Security Council spokesman John Kirby saying recently the Trump administration was not forthcoming when it came to plans for the Afghanistan withdrawal? Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/kashs-corner-obfuscation-and-lies-from-the-pentagon-intel-leak-to-the-whitewashing-of-the-afghanistan-exit-debacle_5194895.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Kash Patel: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to Kash’s Corner. This week we are going to dive into all things intel, classified leaks, and so much more. Jan, where should we kick it off? Jan Jekielek: That’s the thing, isn’t it? We’ve got these leaks, and it’s really unclear at this point, is it actual intelligence? Is it legit? People don’t know. People say it has been altered. We’re going to find out what you think. A big thing is this after-action report that the Pentagon has put out. Some of the things that the NSC [National Security Council] spokesperson John Kirby was saying don’t comport with some things we’ve actually said on the show. We definitely need to look at that. Finally, the FBI is targeting Catholics with terms like based and redpilled. We’ve got to talk about that. Let’s start with these so-called classified documents from the Pentagon related to the Russia-Ukraine war, with things like troop positions, weapons and deployments. We’re not getting a lot of information about whether this is legit, or what the significance is. Mr. Patel: The reporting that we’re seeing now, we’re talking about very sensitive collect. We’re talking about troop and operational planning in the Ukraine. We’re talking about intelligence as it relates to China and Russia and Ukraine. We’re talking about Mossad, literally the Israeli version of the CIA. This is some of our most sensitive intelligence. Why do I define it as such? Because classified intelligence comes in a number of forms, and as it gets smaller and smaller towards the top, meaning the more sensitive it gets, the less people have access to it. This disclosure of classified information, which I believe is unlawful, only could have come from a few certain people. You mentioned that it was a leak, and I want to come back to that. If it was a leak, that means it was an inside job by some U.S. government employee or contractor working with or just disclosing it to a media agency, whether it’s a newspaper or an online web-based platform. That’s illegal, it’s a felony, and it’s a terrible day for U.S. national security. Here’s something that is scarier. As bad and as unlawful as a leak of classified information is, what if it was an intrusion? What if Russia, China, some other actors found a way to tunnel into our classified system and pluck this information out? Let me throw you another scenario. What if it was an intrusion by an activist? What do I mean by that? Someone, either a U.S. government employee or private citizen, acquired this information and disclosed it to the entities they knew would promulgate that information on a wide scale platform. But I believe, based on the tradecraft and the type of information and the disclosure process here, it is not just a leak of classified information, but it’s more likely that it’s an activist-disclosure combined with the possibility of foreign intrusion or private intrusion by a bad actor. That’s Julian Assange. Many people out there called for Julian Assange to be pardoned, saying, “Yes, he committed egregious felonies in the United States of America by disclosing information.” Remember, it’s not that WikiLeaks was the entity. We don’t know all the details publicly. It’s not that WikiLeaks, as it was publicly reported, was the entity that got the intel, meaning they mined in there and got it. They combined with partners and received this information. This is the type of intrusion-activist programming that I’m talking about. He was the one that put it out there, and he has never disclosed how that happened, as far as I’m aware. All the people that said give him a hall pass, get-out-of-jail free card, literally, are you going to call for that same scenario here? Because that’s what essentially is happening. I don’t believe Julian Assange should receive a pardon or a get-out-of-jail free card. He broke the law, and there is a disastrous consequence to releasing classified information in the fashion that he did. This is no different. People will also compare it back to the Snowden thing, which is a similar tradecraft operation, but Snowden was an actual NSA [National Security Agency] contractor. But if you recall, his goal was to get that information out there. That was his intention. He did that, fled to Hong Kong, and then eventually found asylum in Russia. For a bad actor, is that what they want to do? Because then, you know their intent. Their intent is to forget the law and say, “I want this information out there, legal consequences aside, and I don’t care about the harm that it does to American national security.” That’s my biggest problem with these three scenarios. Now, we don’t have enough information to make that determination, but it doesn’t look like this was just some random disclosure to a media outlet by a disgruntled U.S. government employee. It just doesn’t seem that way to me. It’s not a traditional leak in that sense. For the U.S. government to figure this one out, it’s going to take some time. We’ll see a lot of parallels to Julian Assange, WikiLeaks, and even to Snowden. But actually, my bigger problem, if you can possibly have one in this scenario, is the United States government’s response to this or lack thereof. Mr. Jekielek: The response being, it was the NSC spokesperson, John Kirby, who said, “We don’t really know much about it. We’re looking into it.” Mr. Patel: Which is shocking. John Kirby, the national security spokesperson—who has zero credibility in my book, and we’ll elaborate on why once we get to the Afghan withdrawal and his lies about that—comes to the largest podium in the world and is asked, “Has the leak been contained?” “I don’t know,” was his response. That’s scary, Jan. John Kirby: We don’t know who’s responsible for this, and we don’t know if they have more that they intend to post. So we’re watching this and monitoring it as best we can, but the truth and the honest answer to your question is we don’t know. And is that a matter of concern to us? You’re darn right it is. Mr. Patel: You don’t know if it has been contained? What have you been doing? What has the response been? They’ve known about this for a while. They were not able to contain it. They haven’t figured out its root origin, and now they’re chasing a media narrative to exonerate themselves, instead of chasing the actual criminals that were involved in this type of disclosure and leak operation. That’s what is most frustrating to me, aside from the information leaked. Let’s get to the intelligence itself, and we really don’t have access to it. We just have access to whatever is publicly reported. Here’s something that people haven’t pieced together on Ukraine. We’ll get to the piece about it being altered in a second. Let me remind our audience that the United States has spent upwards of $110 billion in Ukraine. The campaign, from a media communications perspective, has been succeeding. The money, the armaments, the weaponry, the training that the United States government has provided the Ukrainian government has been succeeding in defeating Vladimir Putin’s invasion of the Ukraine. But not according to these documents. These are U.S. intelligence documents that say the strategic policy in the Ukraine is essentially failing. When you juxtapose that hard intelligence with what the White House has told us, somebody is lying. We have said on our show that committing money to an effort in the Ukraine is failing for a number of reasons. Lack of accountability on where the money goes is one of those. But now we have U.S.-based intelligence assessment and reporting saying what we’re doing is not working. The Biden administration hasn’t addressed that. John Kirby or nobody else has said, “That intelligence is wrong. We believe we’re still winning,” because they have a monstrous problem now. In my opinion, they have been caught lying to the world about what successes, if any, we’ve had in Ukraine. All the while they’ve had intelligence from the United States intelligence community saying the opposite. It’s not like nobody read that. As we talked about earlier, that reporting probably made its way into the daily presidential briefing over to the Secretary of Defense, the Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff, the Director of the Office of National Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the NSA. All of that reporting is read by those folks, and they advise the President. How could they have that reporting in one hand, and then on the other hand, lie to the world about what’s going on in Ukraine? This has the possibility of being one of Joe Biden’s largest disasters when it comes to American national security, because of how they’ve handled it so far. Mr. Jekielek: I want to go back to Assange and Snowden for a moment. Many people would argue, and there’s a case to be made for this, that Americans are better off knowing about the surveillance that is being done on them, which was being denied at the time by the security state. You’re taking these current intel disclosures at face value. You’re assuming as if they’re true. Some feel that Americans are also better off knowing, purely through this classified leak of the information. But yet, you’re vehemently arguing against it at the same time. Please explain this to me. Mr. Patel: Yes, that’s a pivotal distinction. Back when I was heading up the Russiagate investigation, I always said that the intelligence community and the classification process can never be utilized to cover up corruption or hide unlawful government actions. Mr. Jekielek: But it often is as we’ve learned. Mr. Patel: As we’ve learned, it often is. When I ran the Russiagate investigation, we also learned about the abuses at the FISA court about the unlawful funneling of money from a political party. We learned about the hijacking of the FBI—employees, agents, counselors, and lawyers in the FBI who were abusing the system. I didn’t say, “Hey, let’s leak this.” There’s a right way to do it, and we did it the right way. We followed the steps. I know that people in the public are going to disagree with this and say, “No, you should have done it quicker. You should have done it faster.” Look at what shifted. What shifted is completely, in my opinion, unlawful and unethical. There’s a way to get these abuses and these corrupt actors out from within the government. Snowden could have easily become a whistleblower. That’s how we get good, credible, verifiable information. Look at the recent history of FBI whistleblowers. We’re going to talk about some of that in a minute when we talk about the FBI’s unlawful targeting. If you are a U.S. government employee entrusted with this type of information and you sign onto those programs, you are saying, “I have to defend this nation.” Then, you can’t go out on the other hand and say, “I’ve discovered corruption. I want the easy way out. I’m going to give it to the media.” In my opinion, that’s just not the way to do it. But a lot of people will disagree with me. Collectively, we agree with the endpoint. When you have corruption, when you have U.S. government employees breaking the law, when you have unlawful targeting, when you have unlawful leaks and disclosures, it needs to be vigorously investigated and prosecuted. Everyone agrees with that. How we get there is where people disagree. There might not be an easy way out. Just because I was right, it’s really not about me and how I’m being right. It’s about having a credible position to prove what you are saying. With Russiagate, instead of just leaking it to the media, which at the time all that information was still classified, we are in a much stronger position later, years down the road, for having followed the process and the law to disclose that information to the American public in a lawful legal manner. Because now we are being attacked for saying those guys broke the law just to get you the intelligence. They are doing what Snowden and Julian Assange did. If government actors started doing that, then a large portion of the national security apparatus would literally implode because they would be serving their self-interest versus executing their oath of office. Mr. Jekielek: You’re basically saying, we can’t break the system to save the system. Mr. Patel: That’s a better way of saying it. Yes. Mr. Jekielek: That’s very interesting. Most likely the information that Snowden had with him was directly given to multiple foreign adversaries based on his travel plan, which obviously would be highly problematic. Mr. Patel: That leads to another great point. We haven’t talked about the propaganda campaign. Remember we said it’s been reported that some of these documents might be altered? The White House has even made statements like, “There might have been photographs that were altered.” That’s a red herring. Who cares if they were altered? That’s what China and Russia do every day. Their propaganda machines are the largest in the world. They take our intelligence any way they can get it and then distort it for their gain, whether it’s about Ukraine, Taiwan, the South China Sea, conversion of the petrodollar, the petroyuan—anything that benefits the CCP and Russia globally and hurts America. I don’t believe that the White House is going to sway the American public by saying the documents were altered. Of course they were. It’s a red herring from the White House to say, “It might have been bogus.” Here’s the bottom line. If it was bogus, Jan, everybody in the United States government would have come out and said so, because that’s their job with definitive authority. Of course you know whether those documents are yours or not. They’re out there on the internet. You literally pull the number on the document, and you put it in the Doculator and you say, “Where is this report?” Then, you get the guy that wrote the report and you say, “Is this your report?” “Yes, sir, it is.” It’s really easy. It’s not that hard to figure out. It is hard, if you want to bury corruption, and that’s what they’re doing here. They want to create a false narrative, and that only further hurts Americans’ belief in the national security system. That’s why there are so many people out there agreeing with what you posited earlier. Let’s just have everyone put it out there on their own. It gives that side credence, and it’s because of these government actors abusing the system. This is just one example. Mr. Jekielek: This is a fascinating discussion, and I want to follow it up in another episode. We’ve got a couple of other topics to get to. Why is the FBI looking at Catholic churches? Why have terms like based and redpilled made their way into FBI training manuals? What’s going on? Mr. Patel: We were just talking about intelligence, and it’s a great segue into this piece because it’s supposed to be based on intelligence. But tragically, we now have a two-tiered system of justice. We’ve talked about it extensively on this show. We’ve talked about the manipulation of intelligence by Chris Wray’s FBI in the past to falsely go after domestic violent extremists because they were Trump supporters, like when Chris Wray went to Congress and lied about it. Not only is it not based on intelligence, it’s based on a political orientation. It got so far as to enter the FBI training manual. That means FBI agents in the field are told, “This is essentially the bible for law enforcement. This is how you conduct your duty every day.” That means some intel analyst, an FBI agent and others got together and typed this up and said, “We, the FBI, are going to train our agents to go after Christians in houses of worship.” Why? What piece of intelligence did you produce to say that blanket statement? I don’t know how many churches there are in America, but it’s got to be a lot, Jan. You are going to now go in there and embed sources to collect on Christians? If there’s a particular Christian committing a crime that you have evidence on, sure, I get that. But you’ve just given blanket authority to surveil an entire group based on a religious belief. I have a huge problem with that, because it’s not supported by intelligence. Here’s the bigger problem. That written report that was created by an FBI agent, an intel analyst and all their teams out in the field, and I think it was the Richmond field office, actually made its way into a training manual. That means it has to be approved by the assistant special agent in charge, by the special agent in charge, the SAC, [Special Agent in Charge] and by Washington DC’s behemoth headquarters project. They have a direct chain of command. Here’s the one thing you can count on the FBI to do, and it’s how we undid their corruption in Russiagate. They have a chain of command that they never remove themselves from unless they want to supersede a case like the Hillary Clinton email investigation in Russiagate. But you can count on that chain of command like we did in Russiagate to get the underlying documentation. All these people signed off on it along the way. It’s not like some rogue agent went out there and said, “Let me just send this email out, and you boys in the field, you now have to go chase down houses of worship.” Chris Wray and the FBI put out a recent statement on this. They’ve since rejected it, of course, they’ve rejected it. The problem is that it got through the field offices and Washington headquarters because people approved it. What Congress should be asking is who approved it and how far up the chain did it go, and did Chris Wray approve it? Something like this has to hit the director’s desk. You’re going to embed sources paid for by U.S. government taxpayer dollars into Christian houses of worship, because of what? If Chris Wray doesn’t know, it’s an even bigger problem that his chain of command is failing to advise him on the most important new investigatory tactics his field level agents are supposed to execute. It’s largely problematic, and there’s going to be a massive uproar in congressional hearings and subpoenas. Jim Jordan already subpoenaed Chris Wray for the underlying documentation that I just requested, and it’s going to be an interesting day when he testifies, hopefully in the near future. Mr. Jekielek: Kash, there appears to be an inordinate focus in the FBI on issues of dubious importance, based on their response to this information being unearthed. We’ve discussed this on the show earlier. Where your focus is, also talks about where your focus isn’t, and that’s very concerning. Mr. Patel: That’s a critical analysis of what we’re talking about. You only have so many agents and manpower to put against a target. If the FBI field manual has been changed to target people of worship, do you know what they’re not targeting? That would be Illegal classified leaks of information, improper disclosures, foreign intrusions through a cyber-campaign to tunnel into our classified system, and how that information is being spread out around the world to attack the United States of America and its national security interests. Because you decided at the FBI that it was more important to falsely surveil Christians or people of faith based on no actual information whatsoever, and set an entire agency on course A, when they should be on the course for finding the truth prosecuting actual criminals. It’s a key piece that most everyone forgets. It’s not like we have an infinite amount of resources. This seems to be a priority shift by the FBI. Mr. Jekielek: Kash, what about these terms? I’ve heard you use the word based before. I’ve certainly used the term redpill multiple times. How do these things end up in the lexicon of extremism? Mr. Patel: In the FBI? As a former federal prosecutor, I understand that sometimes certain verbiage lends itself to augment a particular investigation, especially when I was doing terrorism work. But that doesn’t mean you come out and train an entire cadre of FBI agents and say, “If you hear this, it’s criminal. You need to open an investigation.” Don’t just take my word for it. The FBI has now admitted, along with this field training manual that’s since been rescinded, that other terminology, not just what your faith-based belief system is, but actual verbiage just generically describing something is a way to target people criminally according to FBI rules. The FBI added to their field training manual the terms based and redpilled along with a few others. Those terms are somewhat common in the, for lack of a better definition, Trump world, MAGA movement community. Those terms don’t actually mean what the FBI says they do. Mr. Jekielek: I’m just going to jump in. Not just the Trump world, MAGA movement community. I have heard these terms from all sorts of people who are not particularly even sympathetic towards MAGA. Mr. Patel: I agree. That’s a great point. But the FBI is saying that the reason we’re using this verbiage is because it follows whoever is subscribed to Donald Trump’s ideology. The further problem is that the FBI has defined the word based, and I just want to use this as an example. This isn’t my definition. This is what the FBI wrote. In the FBI training manual, based means, “Someone who has been converted to racist ideology.” That’s what it means to be based, according to the FBI. Mr. Jekielek: I hope that is also rescinded. Mr. Patel: Actually, I don’t know the status of it. Mr. Jekielek: I would love to know who wrote that definition. Mr. Patel: Again, field level operatives, agents, and lawyers at the FBI look at it, the supervisory chain of command authorizes it, and then it’s implemented in the FBI training manual. That’s how it gets there. This shows that the FBI has continued under Chris Wray’s leadership to target people based on faith, now based on common everyday verbiage that they want to falsely ascribe to a certain section of the American public, because they want a justification to target them. Ultimately, at the end of the day, that’s why these training manual adjustments were approved. They’re looking for justification, a hook to get in there and then commit more corruption like they did when they unlawfully surveilled me when I was a House intelligence committee senior staffer. They had training manuals and people in the chain of command all the way up to the director of the FBI and DOJ who had to sign off on the FBI training manual. Remember, the FBI director reports to the Department of Justice. All of these people must be held to account. What they are going to come around and say is, “Oh, we didn’t know about it.” That’s even worse, Jan. Your subordinates are essentially committing criminal activities to falsely target Americans, and you have no idea that is going on? Congress has a lot of work to do on this matter, and I hope they take it up. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s shift gears quickly because we’ve still got a bit to cover. On a number of shows, we’ve covered the issue of the DOD [Department of Defense] transition from the Trump administration to the Biden administration. You were obviously very deeply involved in that. I remember you telling me that there was a whole plan for withdrawal that you passed on to the Biden administration during that transition. I was actually at the White House listening to NSC spokesperson, John Kirby, say a number of times during a talk, “We didn’t get anything of this nature from them,” and this is me paraphrasing. These two views don’t square with each other at all. Mr. Patel: As we’ve always said, they definitely don’t. The tragic victim of all this is America and global security, all for the benefit of the White House’s dishonest talking points. As chief of staff at DOD, by regulation, I was in charge of the DOD transition from the Trump administration to the Biden administration. That doesn’t mean I did the work. I was the leader on paper, and thankfully we had career officials throughout the department engaging and executing that transition process. We executed the largest transition in DOD history. Just think about that. During the height of COVID, we gave the Biden administration more access to DOD employees than ever before. We gave them more access to programs, documents, intelligence, and classified matters than ever before.We let them come in and sit in our building with whoever they wanted. That’s the no-fail mission of the Department of Defense. I’ll remind our audience that transition can’t happen unless the Trump White House orders it to happen, which it did. Mr. Jekielek: Just very briefly, how did you quantify that this was the biggest or the most accessed? Mr. Patel: I wrote an op-ed, and we can put up a link to it. With the employees that were given access in the incoming Biden administration, the documents and intelligence cables that were handed over and provided to them, everything from submarine warfare to what we’re building next to Afghanistan, China, Russia, intel, all of that was produced to them in a systematic fashion through the transition process. Mr. Jekielek: The big question, of course, is Afghanistan. With this after-action report, or at least the way John Kirby portrayed it, a lot of this information just simply wasn’t passed down. It was a mystery. Mr. Patel: I’ll leave it for our audience to decide who’s telling the truth and who’s lying. John Kirby is the one who, as we talked about earlier, said he doesn’t know whether the leak that we talked about is contained. Then, when he was specifically asked about Afghanistan at the White House, John Kirby said, “I just did not see the chaos.” The spokesman for the President of the United States did not see the chaos in the Afghan withdrawal. He didn’t see the scores of Afghan citizens plunging thousands of feet to their death from our C17 transport planes? He didn’t see the seven children that were drone struck by the Biden administration? He didn’t see the 13 American soldiers that were blown up because the Biden administration relinquished control of Bagram Airfield and its detention center and let out the very suicide bomber that would murder our American soldiers? He didn’t see the chaos in any of that? Then, he has the gall to come to the podium and say, “The Afghan withdrawal is essentially the Trump administration’s fault. because they didn’t engage.” Mr. Jekielek: Just to be clear, I do believe he did talk about the 13 service members that were killed and that this was a tragedy. Mr. Patel: He said that, but he said that he didn’t see the chaos, is my point. If the loss of American soldiers’ lives isn’t chaotic in wartime or in an exfiltration operation, then that man should not be speaking to any interest regarding American national security. For him to go out and say we weren’t given anything is not true. Let me give you two concrete examples. The Secretary of Defense, Chris Miller, called Incoming Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin. He sent a one-word text message response. Chris offered him uninhibited access to him, the Office of the Secretary of Defense, to come in any time and meet with him to hand off documents and do what have you. They refused. I called my counterpart, the incoming chief of staff, and I said the same thing. “We are here for you. Our staff, our team will be readily available to you; whatever you want, whenever you want it.” Instead, they took it upon themselves to leak to the media that we weren’t transitioning to them and their teams. We didn’t pay any of that any mind. We said the no-fail mission is what matters. If those two individuals and their immediate senior staff don’t want to come in, it doesn’t mean we aren’t going to have the Joint Chiefs of Staff visit with the incoming Biden administration. It doesn’t mean that Office of Secretary of Defense employees aren’t going to meet with the incoming senior leadership team. It doesn’t mean that the sections in the Department of Defense responsible for Afghanistan warfare and special forces aren’t going to meet with their counterparts and the incoming Biden administration. We made sure all of that happened. Is there one page that says, “This is what you do in Afghanistan?” Of course not. That’s absurd. There is a myriad of work when it comes to intelligence, when it comes to weaponry, and when it comes to logistics. The reason the Department of Defense has the largest operation for logistics in the world is because it’s the largest company in the world. Moving men and equipment out of a theater of war is a massive lift. You are talking about moving the largest planes on earth in and out of a theater of war to exfil Americans, Afghan citizens and others along with equipment and machinery. Just think about the logistics of doing one plane load. We did hundreds. All of this was being transitioned over to the Biden administration. The key example I want to give on this John Kirby statement is that the whole world knows we told them, “You have to keep Bagram, and you have to transition based on intelligence.” And we told them one more thing. “There can be no timeline. You can’t have an artificial, “I’m out on this date.” It has to be intelligence-based like we were doing. I told them, “When you come in, you can call this the Biden Withdrawal Plan. I don’t care. It’s a no-fail mission for the United States Department of Defense. We can’t mess this up.” Instead, their senior leadership team was too busy terminating my employees on maternity and paternity leave instead of paying attention to this information. If they didn’t read it, that’s on them. They’re lying when they say we didn’t provide voluminous information on how to continue the intelligence-based withdrawal that Donald Trump had ordered us to conduct out of Afghanistan. The fact that the Bagram Detention Center was relinquished, and that the suicide bomber came out of the Bagram Center Detention Center and blew up our soldiers is the most tragic and unfortunate example. But it’s one that has to be showcased here, because it highlights the credibility issues this White House is having when they make such statements like that. I don’t care what they say about me, and I know Chris Miller doesn’t care about what they say about him or other of our senior leadership teams, because the mission was too important to fail, and they failed. Now, they are taking the media playbook narrative they fall back on when we expose either their corruption or their misgivings or missteps in national security, which is to say, “Blame Trump,” or just lie their way through it. Just to connect the end of the show here with the top of the show, they are lying their way through the disclosure of intelligence information that was classified from the DOD and other programs. We are going to have to stay on them, and Congress is going to have to act if we’re going to get answers. Mr. Jekielek: One thing that was quite interesting in what John Kirby was saying was that there’s been a lot of discussion about all this equipment that was left in Afghanistan. What John Kirby said was basically that this equipment had all been transitioned to the Afghans already, so this was already Afghan equipment. It was not U.S. equipment anymore. He reiterated that. Mr. Patel: There is paperwork and documentation on it that the Biden administration made the intentional decision to leave it there. That was not our decision, nor was it our recommendation. Certain small pieces of equipment that no longer served a purpose were at the end of their shelf life could have been destroyed or blown up in the country. Certain small pieces of equipment were given to the Afghans, but we certainly did not leave, whatever you believe the number is, $50, $60, $70 billion worth of equipment there and just transition it over to the Afghans, because they don’t know how to operate and maintain so much of that machinery. That’s our machinery, and our intelligence capabilities. If you believe John Kirby’s statement that you just cited, why don’t you call the Russians and the Chinese and ask them about all of the machinery they’ve taken out of Afghanistan that was American military equipment, and then exploited it for their personal use? They weren’t stealing it from the Afghans. They were taking it because we left it there, and they found an advantage that they could have over American DOD activities. It’s a terrible sequence of events for this White House from a national security perspective. The one thing that you always want any White House to succeed in is national security. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. I’ve been cheering for Joe Biden as our commander-in-chief to succeed on the national security mission. It’s a no-fail mission. But when you have his representatives and senior leadership team lying about classified disclosures and leaks, having a corrupt two-tiered system of justice and unlawful targeting based on faith-based motives or verbiage, and when you have them lying about Afghanistan, the most consequential theater of war we’ve had in modern American history, their credibility is shot, and we can’t believe anything they say anymore. That doesn’t help America. Mr. Jekielek: The Department of Defense and the National Security Council did not immediately respond to our requests for comment. Kash, it’s time for our shout-out. Mr. Patel: It is indeed, Jan. This week’s shout-out goes to Patrick H., who is a regular participant and viewer of Kash’s Corner, in our live chat and on the commentary board. We appreciate everyone that leaves comments. I know the live chat has been getting quite lively, and I’m sure it will be no different for this episode. Thank you for participating in the comments section. Thank you for participating in the live chat, and thanks for watching our show. We’ll see you next week on Kash’s Corner. To get notifications about new Kash's Corner and American Thought Leaders episodes, please sign up for our newsletter! 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 “Kash” for 20% off.

On Thursday, during a congressional inquiry in Washington, Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the current director of the CDC, made a rather stunning admission. When asked about it, Walensky had to admit that the existing mRNA-based COVID-19 vaccines—at least the ones that are currently available on the market—do not prevent the transmission of any of the current virus subvariants. Dr. Peter McCullough Interview on EpochTV: https://ept.ms/43Wqt6C

“My brother-in-law went home and googled ‘Zoloft’ and ‘suicide,’ and we were shocked. There were hearings in 1991, when it was just Prozac on the market, with the exact same issue.” After being happily married for almost 10 years, Kim Witczak’s husband shockingly committed suicide, shortly after he was prescribed an anti-depressant off-label for insomnia. “I intuitively, at the deepest part of me, knew there was no way that Woody … would take his own life,” says Witczak. For almost 20 years now, Witczak has been an advocate for pharmaceutical drug safety and reform, most recently taking on the fight for transparency and accountability surrounding COVID-19 vaccines. “There are more injuries and deaths that have been reported with this vaccine alone than any of the other ones. Right there, that should be a signal,” says Witczak. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/are-covid-vaccines-just-the-tip-of-the-iceberg-kim-witczak-on-the-spider-web-of-corruption-in-the-drug-safety-system_4786393.html Jan Jekielek: Kim Witczak, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Kim Witczak: Thanks for having me. I’m excited to be here. Mr. Jekielek: So Kim, you’ve been a drug safety advocate now for almost 20 years, and I absolutely want to figure out how you got to be doing this very, very interesting work. Before we go there, I want to read a headline from the Epoch Times from yesterday and get your commentary. “Hundreds of thousands of Americans sought medical care after COVID-19 vaccination, CDC data says.” And I’ll read a quote from Aaron Siri, the lawyer on the case, representing the Informed Consent Action Network. “It took numerous legal demands, appeals, and two lawsuits and over a year, but the CDC finally capitulated and agreed to a court order requiring them to do what they should have done from day one, release the v-safe data to the public. So tell me about what v-safe data is. This is exactly in your wheelhouse? Ms. Witczak: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: And what this is all about. Ms. Witczak: Well, first of all, I’m so happy that we were able to finally get this data because this data actually should have been out and made public many, many months ago. So v-safe was actually, it was going to capture any kind of safety side effects that a person had at the time they actually got vaccinated. So there were little cards that they gave the individuals that were getting the shot. If they were experiencing any side effects they could actually write in and it would go to the CDC. So to me, when you have rushed to market vaccines, this was a really exciting thing for me to see that there was maybe an opportunity to capture safety in real time as it was happening. But as we know, it didn’t exactly get disclosed to the public until months and over a year later. Mr. Jekielek: So it’s like the very purpose of this system was kind of subverted from within what happened? Ms. Witczak: Yes, that would be a good question for the FDA and the CDC. I would like to know why. What were they going to do with the data? Imagine if Aaron Siri had not sued to get this data, would we ever get this? Would the public ever know what was being reported in real time when the vaccine program originally rolled out back in early… What was it? Late 2020, early 2021. Mr. Jekielek: And there were 800,000 reports, or almost 800,000 reports from what I understand. That seems like a lot. Ms. Witczak: It is a lot because that is people who took their time to actually put in their information because in some ways they wanted it to be used for other people going forward, right? So 800,000 is a lot, but I can see the other side saying, “But not compared to the millions and millions of people who have taken it.” But we always have to remember any of these safety systems, whether it’s v-safe or VAERS or the FDA MedWatch that a small percent of people actually take the time to report. So you always wonder, is this just the iceberg and there’s a lot more underneath who did not take the time to actually report? Mr. Jekielek: You actually have a difficult story of how you actually got into this. This was not your wheelhouse by any manner, shape, or form in the past. Ms. Witczak: Yes, I like to call myself the accidental advocate because I would never have chosen this as my advocacy work. So I was married to my husband Woody for almost 10 years. We were just starting to think about having kids. And August 6th, 2003, I got a call from my dad who told me, “Woody’s dead.” I’m like, “What? Woody’s dead?” And they’re like, “He’s hanging.” I’m like, “Hanging?” The whole thing made no sense. Woody wasn’t depressed. Woody had no history of depression or any other mental illness. He had just started his dream job with a startup company and was having trouble sleeping. So five weeks earlier, he went to his doctor. The doctor told him he wasn’t sleeping. He sent him home with a prescription of Zoloft, which is an antidepressant, and told him it would take the edge off and help him sleep. And Woody did what most people did—trust. Woody was an athlete, he was kind of Humpty Dumpty. He got hurt, they fixed him. Broke his leg, they fixed him. So he trusted his doctor. And truthfully, there’s no reason why at that time we wouldn’t have trusted. So that night when I got that call, I was out of town. I remember the coroner asked me a question. He asked if Woody was taking any medication, and I said, “Yes.” And I go, “I didn’t even really know what it was,” but she goes, “Oh, there’s a bottle of Zoloft sitting on the kitchen counter.” And I said, “Yes, that’s it.” She goes, “We’re going to take it with us. It might have something to do with his death.” So that was his only medication he was on. Then ironically, the front page of our newspaper had an article that said the UK finds link between antidepressants and suicide in teens that exact same day. So Woody did not leave a message or there was no note. I was trying to figure out how to get home. I was out of town when this happened. My brother-in-law went home and googled Zoloft and suicide. And we were shocked. There were hearings in 1991 when it was just Prozac on the market with the exact same issue. There were advisory committee meetings talking about the link between suicide and violence. We had no idea. Truthfully, we never questioned the drug. Why would we? It was given to him by his doctor. It was sold and advertised safe and effective, and it was FDA approved. And at that moment, I intuitively at the deepest part of me knew there was no way that Woody, this guy who loved life, would take his own life. So that became kind of trying to research and figure out what happened. And so that really was the start of it. And then from there, I like to call it the battle for Woody. It took shape in many forms. We did a lot of media, told Woody’s story. We had a lawsuit against Pfizer, a wrongful death failure to warn. I came out to DC and met with a lot of members of Congress and the FDA. And eventually there were FDA hearings to get black box suicide warnings put on, as well as congressional hearings that wanted to know what the drug companies knew about the link between suicide and antidepressants. Mr. Jekielek: Okay. You said one thing that might not be obvious to everyone, that’s black box warnings. What is that? Ms. Witczak: Black box warnings are the most serious of an FDA warning. That means that there could be deaths associated with it; but it is the most stringent warning. If you ever look at the inserts that come in your prescriptions, it is literally in a black box on the top of your prescription. And it alerts you and should alert your provider that there is a serious risk with this medication so that you can be informed and know. At the time of Woody’s death, there was no warning. That didn’t exist. And a black box warning also affects how you advertise the product. And if you also look at print ads or if you look at any of the social media ads, again, it’s in a black box. Mr. Jekielek: And that is going to basically tell the user presumably that they should seriously think about taking this. Is it worth it? Is that the idea? Ms. Witczak: Well, for me it should be something that you actually disclose and tell a person, like that this has a serious adverse event or a potential for it, so that you can actually have a conversation with your doctor, with the pharmacist, with your loved one. I look back and go, “Woody went in because he couldn’t sleep. Should that have been really what he should have been given?” No. And if he would’ve actually would’ve been told like it’s an antidepressant, if you start feeling a certain way, we could have maybe done something. So I remember one situation with Woody when he came home. I was out of town for my job and I was excited to see him. He comes walking through our back door. He had a blue dress shirt on white t-shirt, completely sweat through, dropped to the floor with his hands around his head like a vice. He’s like, “Kim, you got to help me. I don’t know what’s happening to me. It looks like my head’s outside my body looking in.” He’s just rocking back and forth bawling. We had no idea what was going on. We called the doctor and the doctor said, You have to give it four to six weeks to kick in. He was having an adverse reaction, which had turned out to be one of the side effects that the company kept from the public and the doctors. But that is the importance of warnings. It’s the importance of having conversations. But it starts from the top. The company knows, the FDA knows, CDC in this case, then it goes to the doctor. But if we’re the last to find out, we’re the ones that live with this decision from keeping it from us. Mr. Jekielek: So it sounds like you played an important role in at least getting these sorts of warnings being more publicized and available. Give me a picture of how you view the health industry prior to COVID. How do you see it functioning? Ms. Witczak: Well, it’s funny, when I look at what we initially got done with the antidepressants, I thought, “Oh good, I did my job. I’m going back to my old life” because I thought it was just an isolated incident with just the antidepressants. But what I quickly realized, it’s actually a larger systemic problem with our whole drug safety system. And then I started finding the ties. It’s almost, I like to call it a spider web where you start seeing how the industry is really a business. And I think that is a promise that I start from… I also look at our patients as customers. My patient safety groups aren’t always happy when I say that. They’re like, “No, but we’re patients.” I’m like, “We are, but the industry needs patients to do the business.” So it is a big business that is full of conflicts of interest. It’s set up to sell products. And even the approval process at the FDA, there’s so much focus on getting things to market and not so much after and looking at the harms of medication. Mr. Jekielek: And so what did you see when essentially COVID is coming onto the scene? There’s reporting on it. It looks like it’s going to be very bad. This is what the media is saying. What are you seeing when all this starts happening? Ms. Witczak: So of course I was nervous too. We don’t know what this is. It was always focusing on, “Death. Death. Fear. Death. Fear.” I’m in marketing and advertising as my profession. So fear sells, hope sells, and so I saw a lot of that and it creates panic, right? Then there’s a new vaccine that was going to be rushed through Operation Warp Speed, and it was going to be on the market by the end of the year. Vaccines were never my advocacy focus. But the fact that something was rushed to market and was going to be available and with a short amount of clinical trials, all drugs have risks, but not this one. It was told that it was completely safe and effective and started seeing celebrities and social media influencers all telling us that we had to get it. And I started to see that the media that I worked with all the time quickly became part of the PR firm, the extended PR department of the drug industry to help sell and get these into every arm. Mr. Jekielek: So the drug industry and the government, because it was a strong government push as well. Ms. Witczak: Yes, it’s very much. Right. Mr. Jekielek: Right. So let’s talk about that for a moment. So there’s all these people that you’ve been working with over the last 20 years to talk about these issues, for example, of psychiatric drugs and safety related to psychiatric drugs. So what happened to these journalists that have been helping you expose this? Ms. Witczak: I’ve worked for years with a lot of mainstream journalists from around the world, from ABC, CBS, CNN, BBC. They were my friends, as well as the Fortunes and the newspapers. When I go back to the initial trials that they used to get authorization, the fact that it was only a couple months worth of data and then we lost the placebo control group, the companies and the government said it was for ethical reasons, “We’re in a pandemic, so we got to let the people in the placebo group get it.” But my feeling is that is what a clinical trial is. So if you sign up for a clinical trial, as if I signed up for one, that is part of my job. I may get it, I may not get it. That’s part of the risk of being in a trial. But when you took away the placebo group, we now have lost a huge part of the ability to look at efficacy and safety. So I would’ve loved to have seen that being reported on, right? Instead, we had… I remember right after December of 2020, we had the Times reporting 100 percent effective, 99 percent effective. And so that tells a very different picture than the idea that, “Well, but we don’t know about the safety.” That is where people get their news. And truthfully, a lot of doctors also, they’re people too, and that’s where they’re hearing their news. And so if you’re only getting the one side that’s coming from the pharma and the government, you’re not getting the full story. Mr. Jekielek: Well, I want to briefly talk about this v-safe data. Right from the beginning the CDC is collecting this v-safe data. But these journalists that you’re speaking with, that you’ve been speaking with all these years, one would think that if this data isn’t coming out, you might want to investigate that and find out. Even given the number of people that were vaccinated, 800,000, it’s still a pretty large number of adverse effects reported, right? So I’m trying to understand. Given this scenario with these v-safe data now coming out, which can and should be done in your mind with this? Ms. Witczak: Well, we should have been pushing the media, like what is the safety? Now we’re putting this in so many arms, we’re mandating, what does it look like? But you know what, they would just keep going to the same talking heads at CDC, the FDA, and we’d be like, “Nope, we have no safety signals,” right? If you were a true journalist, you should have been pushing that question a little bit more and asking, “Where is safety?” Or when there’s other reports and other studies and other experts that are coming out that maybe have a different view of what’s happening or they’re seeing data coming out of Israel or data coming out of the UK, why aren’t you curious to go find out what they’re finding, what they’re seeing? I’m really thankful for Epoch Times because they are doing investigative journalism, going in and asking the tough questions. And it’s the alternative media that’s doing it, right? But the average person doesn’t know. So if you say, “Hey, did you know that the FDA’s not going to release Pfizer’s data for 75 years?” They look at you like you’re a crazy conspiracy theorist. I’m like, “No, it was because of lawsuits again by Aaron Siri that was able to get that data made public,” right? And so they started releasing the safety data. Same thing with the v-safe out of the CDC. But along the way they kept telling us it was safe. Nope, we just see no signals. And so I think when you don’t have that piece of the puzzle, when you’re having just everyday conversations with your friends or people in the community, that isn’t there so it’s creating a divide. And I think that division- Mr. Jekielek: Just to be clear, you mean some people are skeptical of the drug or just simply don’t like taking drugs or whatever, but the rest of the population has this perception, “This is something perfectly safe and in fact valuable for the community. So what’s your problem?” Right? Ms. Witczak: Yes. And I think that was part of what’s happened too in the last couple years. We’re becoming divisive people. We should be having conversations. But when everybody’s telling you that, “Do your duty. You’re going to save grandma. This is about somebody else. This is not about you” and yet that there’s all this other story that’s not being told, you start having people that don’t disagree… People have lost friendships. Families have divided up over this. And just the fact of what is science now too, right? Even science can’t be debated. Mr. Jekielek: So some people, like the folks at the Academy for Scientific Freedom for example, would say that, “Well, science is always just one thing. And it’s this kind of search for the empirical truth, empirical reality through various tests and hypotheses and so forth.” And then there’s also scientism, which is edict and the science is settled and this sort of thing. I’m paraphrasing here what they would say. So it’s not really that science that’s divided, it’s more like there’s some kind of establishment view that may or may not be science-based. And then there’s actual science. Ms. Witczak: That was another observation I had, is the idea of questioning, right? There was no debate. It was like, “This is the science.” And how can it be settled when it was just such new and we’re still in the process and we’re still learning and you’re asking for the public’s input by using the v-safe or we’ve got the VAERS. How is it settled? And especially when there’s all of these reports and studies coming in from other parts of the world, you would think they’d be curious about, “Well, what are you learning? We should have a debate.” And I saw that with antidepressants where the same thing, because remember it was the front page where it said the UK found link between antidepressants and suicide. There was somebody over there that had all this information. And when the FDA hearings were happening, he should have been one of the invited presentations, I would think, right? Instead, he was given three minutes like I was given three minutes to tell our story. And then now fast forward sitting on one of the FDA advisory committees, there was a drug that we were reviewing. It got pulled off out of the UK, but they wanted to get it put on the market in the U.S. So I remember asking the question, “Are we going to hear from why the UK pulled the drug? Because we’re trying to approve it.” To me, that whole idea is that tension and that is what science should be, like we should want to learn and ask and tease it out to see especially when you have something novel like this, a novel platform, a novel delivery mechanism. We should want to see and learn and ask questions and have other scientists, not just the one that’s coming out of Fauci and the NIH and his camp of science. Mr. Jekielek: So what’s been coming out with this disclosure of the v-safe system of the Pfizer disclosures and frankly a lot of grassroots work that’s been doing is that there are a lot of vaccine harms associated with these genetic vaccines. Ms. Witczak: Well, we got to go back and remember that these companies were given complete legal immunity. So with this fast track product, even if it didn’t work or it caused some harms, they’re completely immune from being liable for any harms or future harms down the road. So that right there should be a flag for people. I’ve met a lot of vaxxed injured now who are trying to be heard, get their stories told, but what they’re doing is things are being quickly censored. So these people aren’t even being acknowledged. And they were doing what the government asked. They were doing their part. And now that they’re injured, they’re like an uncomfortable truth, an inconvenient truth. “Let’s not acknowledge them.” And they have no recourse for harms. They can’t sue. I was able to take on Pfizer, right? There is no avenue and there is a special… The Vaccine Compensation Program, the countermeasure program, there are all these people that have applied for it. There’s been no distribution of any funds. And so again, the government’s going to be paying for any harms. First, there has to be acknowledgement of harms. But there’s been an intentional silencing. We need acknowledgement for the vaccine injured. Mr. Jekielek: There’s clearly sizable number of them just in this cataloged in this v-safe data and the CDC’s own database. So isn’t that an acknowledgement? Ms. Witczak: Sure, the data might be there, but we need the CDC, the FDA to come out and acknowledge it—that it exists. The people who approve your products at the FDA are the same people that review safety. So it’s the same people. And for a long time we’ve been advocating, they should be completely separate departments. The people who approve the drugs are not the same people who should be looking at safety. Mr. Jekielek: Or not beholden to them, right? Ms. Witczak: Yes, there should be not having anybody crossing over. And so this group over here can be curious when they start seeing all these reports that have come into VEARS at the FDA, which is our system for tracking vaccine safety, right? And of course we’ve heard for a long time, there’s so many limitations, but this is the best we’ve got. This is what we’ve got. There are more injuries and deaths that have been reported with this vaccine alone than any of the other ones. Right there that should be a signal. And it also should be a, “Should we put a pause on it?” Or at least tell the public, “Hey, we’re looking at the data that’s coming in. Here are some of the things we’re seeing.” Mr. Jekielek: So how is it that you sit on an FDA board? What does that even mean? Ms. Witczak: It is funny. I’m the consumer rep, so I represent the public on the FDA’s Psychopharmacologic Drugs Advisory Committee. It is the advisory board just like the ones that were reviewing the vaccine. This one is for all the psychiatric drugs. And it is a place where the FDA, if they have questions or if there’s something that they want to tease out, they convene a board of, a lot of them are researchers or academia that are looking at science. And then I’m the consumer rep. It’s a great opportunity. It’s been a really big eye opening experience to see drugs coming to market. How they’re using fast tracking mechanisms, which is kind of what the emergency use authorization was, right? But there’s been a whole slew of new drugs that are coming using accelerated approval, which you think is an innovation breakthrough. But what it really means is less rigorous clinical trials and less focus on safety. And I take my job really serious on this committee, because I look back at the 1991 advisory committee that I now am a member of. Every one of those people took funds from pharma when they said, “Nope, we don’t see any length between antidepressants and violence and suicide.” [Sound bite/Speaker X]: I’ll ask the committee to vote on the following statement. “There is credible evidence to support a conclusion that antidepressant drugs cause the emergence and/or intensification of suicidality and or other violent behaviors.” Those in favor of that statement vote yes. Those opposed to that statement no. And Dr. Dunner has left a proxy which makes a unanimous of 10-0. Ms. Witczak: So if they had done their job, I probably wouldn’t be here, right? And so I do take the safety perspective, I take the real world perspective because I’m seeing so many of the drugs coming in with small clinical trials, right? So I do care about what happens when it gets on the market. Our system is really set up to bring products on the market we love more in America. We want to sell everything. And so we want more drugs on the market, but we need to be really careful because there’s real life consequences to these decisions. So I still laugh that I’m actually on this board with being as vocal as I am about safety, but I think it’s a really important place to be. Mr. Jekielek: Do you ever find yourself in a situation where you have all these industry or revolving door people on one of these advisory boards and they just want to be able to say, “Hey, we have Kim Witczak on the board. Witczak. So we’re all good here. Everything’s legit and above board because Kim is around.” What do you think? Ms. Witczak: Well, sometimes I do wonder if I’m the token safety person. But again, if it’s being used or not, I know the role that I play and sometimes it may just be something that’s on the record that comes down the road that there was somebody who actually did question these medications. Being on this role, to me it’s more than just the trials, it’s also having a background in marketing and advertising and how I just see the world. So when I get a new project, we have to go do a full 360 investigation with the good, bad, the ugly to take on a new product. And so my mind just naturally thinks that way. So I think I love being on the committee, although it’s very frustrating at times because I may be the only no vote. And I often tell people, if you’ve never observed an FDA advisory board meeting of any kind of drug, you should actually go back and listen. So the first part of the day, the sponsors give their presentation of their data. The FDA will do their analysis of the data and the committee gets to question. There’s an open public hearing where members of the public can come and give their perspective. And then there are the questions at hand that the FDA wants to know, like, “Do you think the efficacy is there, the safety?” And then we get to vote. And I always say, go back and listen to the explanation, not the vote. And this is what I’m also trying to get the mainstream media. Don’t just report that 17-2 approved it. Go back and listen to the explanations. Because often you’ll find the person who voted yes, they’ll say, “I voted yes for this product. I don’t think safety is as good as it should be, but I think we need it on the market.” And then they’ll come to me. “Well, I voted no, I don’t think safety’s there.” And so that explanation’s really important and I would highly recommend people just go, it’s a very interesting educational process. And it’s also where you learn how much pharma actually influences things that you don’t think are obvious. The patient groups that show up at these FDA meetings and where they get their funding. Mr. Jekielek: Okay, so let’s explore that, right? You’re talking about what are ostensibly non-profits or something in that vein are supposed to be independent groups that are looking at patient outcomes? Ms. Witczak: Yes. So they might be representing a group of patients, right? They might be like the Parkinson’s Association or the American Heart Society or National Alliance for Mentally Ill, they’re all nonprofits representing the disease or the disease group. And you could go to any of these hearings and they have become almost mouthpieces for pharmaceutical industry where they’re like, “We need this for our patients.” There’s the work that gets done for the people, but then you go and look at the funding. Two different parts of the business, right? Go look at the funding and it’s almost all pharmaceutical funding. And I think it’s really important with anything that we do, whether it’s patients groups who are the fact checkers, where’s funding coming from it? So that was a big aha. We like to call them astroturf groups because they seem like they’re real. And they are, they do good legitimate work, but you have to take that with a grain of salt. So that is one of those other areas that I have learned where pharma’s influence is pretty deep. Mr. Jekielek: Basically you’re talking about a situation where they’re strongly motivated arguably to give the outcome that the pharma would like because pharma provides some large portion of their funds. That’s the idea. Ms. Witczak: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: That’s what you would call a conflict of interest, right? Ms. Witczak: It seems like a conflict of interest to me. So they’ll sometimes have people who are in the clinical trials that would show up, but the funding, all their travel, everything’s paid for. And of course they’re going to say that this drug could have saved my loved one’s life if it was available now. You could see how things can get easily manipulated. I don’t know if you had a chance to listen to any of the FDA or CDC advisory committee meetings that they’ve had during the last two years to do with the vaccines. It’s very interesting to listen. Now, I wish that they were in person and I wish that the cameras were on, but the cameras were not on so you can’t actually see the emotional [expressions]. But there were people that were researchers that came, but they were under the guise of mom. “Or I worked for the company, but I have no conflict. I’m coming here as a mom.” It was very interesting when you start looking at the number of people who were actually talking during the open public hearing. And it seemed like there was some selection, particular selection that was happening. And we’ll never know because everything was Zoom, digital. And unlike back in the day of previous, of many of the advisory committees, you had to actually show up. When you do everything remotely, there’s something that you’re missing, you’re not getting the emotion of the people that are actually the injured that would’ve showed up to tell their story. But instead, during these last two years with the advisory committees, the cameras have been off. Mr. Jekielek: So you’re saying basically you think that there’s people who would’ve shown up to a hearing maybe uninvited or something like that, whereas on these Zoom meetings they just simply never get a say because they get edited out by someone who does that? Ms. Witczak: Yes, it’s somebody at the FDA that selects, say maybe it will only let 25 people, right? So I go back and I think about those hearings to do with antidepressants. I mean, even if you were not selected to speak, but they had a hundred and some people that would speak, families were lined up and the entire auditorium at the FDA was packed. Mr. Jekielek: Okay, what I’m hearing from you is that there’s some sense of accountability maybe of the people that are there, like, “Okay. There’s a lot of people that are interested. This is serious.” Whereas in the virtual world… Ms. Witczak: Yes, I think you know what? That’s a good way of saying accountability and transparency too. Then the media couldn’t ignore it. Imagine if all of these people came on to the FDA because they were going to discuss whatever vaccine and they are like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa. Before you do that, look at us. Here, I’m a healthy person. Now I’m in a wheelchair.” It would’ve been an entirely different outcome. I believe it all my heart. When I think back to antidepressants, there were so many, there were security guards with armed guards with guns. All the mainstream media was full with cameras. And it was all because people… Whether they got to tell their story or not, it was every row, every seat was full and it was also overflow. And so they had to have overflow rooms. And I think that same thing would happen with the vaxxed injured if we would’ve had in-person meetings. And I think we should be demanding in-person meetings as well. Mr. Jekielek: What is the level based on your experience of pharmaceutical industry capture of these institutions? Ms. Witczak: Well, again, I go back to follow the money. Most people, I learned a concept that I had no idea, it’s called the User Fee program, where basically it was back in I think ’97 that was established by Congress, that with every application the drug company pays a fee. So now I think it’s over 50 percent, 50 or more of the FDA budget actually comes from the pharmaceutical industry. This one’s Prescription Drug User Fee Act, PDUFA. And there’s MDUFA. We like all of our acronyms. And that’s a must pass legislation every five years. In fact, it’s just being authorized again. And mostly pharma decides what they want in, “Besides, we’re going to be paying you FDA, here are our demands.” And the consumer perspective doesn’t really get a say in that. So that’s one way. Mr. Jekielek: The consumer interest doesn’t have a say? How is that possible? Isn’t that the main interest? Ms. Witczak: So the initial negotiations happen behind closed doors, and it should never happen behind closed doors. My feeling is, we, the people that represent the public interests should be a part of these meetings. Again, everything is always about privacy. It’s always about the business and the privacy. I’ve heard that privacy thing forever. But at least there needs to be an opportunity where we can have a seat at the table and not the kids’ table at the Thanksgiving dinner. I want to be at the dinner table with the adults. But the times that we’ve maybe got to say what we want, we’re at the kids’ table. And so it really then goes back to Congress. But this congress, there hasn’t been a whole lot of interest in putting the safety measures in like there has been in past PDUFA negotiations. So that’s one where there’s the captured kind of the ties between pharma and the FDA and industry. But then there are all the others like the rotating doors where they go from the FDA to the company, the company back to the FDA. I just read Google has a new business. Califf, our current FDA commissioner came from there, now who’s inside the FDA and a couple of his people are now over at the company. On the one hand, sure you get in, you understand how the system works, but I feel like there should be some rules against that as well because there’s been some damage that has been done because of that rotating door for consumers when getting into litigation. So that’s something that I think that we need to take a look at as well. Mr. Jekielek: What would be an example of that damage, just to be clear? Ms. Witczak: So one of them is a preemption brief, which is basically the government, the FDA was intervening in a bunch of private lawsuits against some of the companies. But the person who actually created it came from outside, got money from one of the drug companies when they came into the FDA. And then they started intervening on behalf of the FDA in private lawsuits. And it was to do with a lot with the antidepressants and suicides. Mr. Jekielek: On the side of the companies? Ms. Witczak: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: Right. Ms. Witczak: The FDA was intervening on behalf of the company, let’s say when there was the Pfizer litigation. And they actually said, the brief was basically, “Even if they wanted to warn, we wouldn’t let them because we’re the ones that watch the warnings and we didn’t see a sign.” So that was basically the essence of the brief, and a lot of judges around the country threw them out. And that’s intentionally what it was meant to do. It was the harm that it did. And the consumer lost out again because these suits were often thrown out. I can give you another example of the rotating door problem. Prior to his appointment, Dan Troy, who became the FDA chief counsel which did not need to have congressional approval, it was presidential appointment, this guy took $300,000 from Pfizer and went into the FDA and started to intervene in these private lawsuits, suicide lawsuits against Pfizer and the other drug companies with the creation of this preemption brief. We were able to help expose this with one of the members of Congress, Representative Maurice Hinchey. And eventually Dan Troy left his position at the FDA as chief counsel and went back into industry, a law firm, private law firm, and then ultimately ended up as global chief council at GlaxoSmithKline, which is another huge drug company. So right there, we lose out, the public loses out. All of this has been documented because it was in the “New York Times.” It was covered quite extensively back then. But see, that’s the difference. I look back at things that happened in the past and it had a lot of interest by the media and it was covered by the media. All of a sudden with the vaccines, it was like this behavior doesn’t exist anymore because this is all for the greater good. It’s this really bizarre thing that’s happened with the media, the ones that actually used to do really great reporting. How much has changed just in the hypocrisy and the messaging that has come from top down and no one seems to be wanting to go back and go, “Well, do you remember when you said this Fauci? Remember when you said this? Do you remember when you said this?” And it’s like they’ve completely given him and the whole changing narrative a free pass. Maybe the good thing that’s going to come out of this is it’s going to shake up everything, shake up the traditional healthcare system, the FDA, government, the media system. And maybe we needed this to show the craziness of what has happened in the last couple years. Mr. Jekielek: Is there any good resource out there to basically understand how all these different relationships between pharma and government and patient advocates and so forth work? Ms. Witczak: Well, it’s funny you should ask. I’m actually working on something right now. I call it the spider web—the spider web of pharma’s influence on the whole medical ecosystem. It really started building it one by one as I’m learning about it through my years of doing this work. And I go back to where do our doctors get educated, right? The medical schools. Who owns medical education? So when you start seeing pharma’s influence on medical education, when I’ve asked doctors, “Have you ever learned anything about how the FDA works?” They were like, “No.” If you educate the doctors and you’re putting your monies into the programs and a lot of the academic institutions that do the research who the researchers also need the pharma money, well then that also influences what gets taught, how it gets taught, how it gets positioned, right? So there’s the education part, then there’s medical journals. So one of the things that came out of my lawsuit was this whole document that was the publication plan for social anxiety disorder. And it was basically listing all the places it was going to run, when it was going to run, who the authors were. And then there were a few that said, “Dr. TBD, Dr. TBD, Dr. TBD.” And I was like, “Who’s Dr. TBD? It’s pretty famous.” But it’s because they haven’t put a doctor in there. Mr. Jekielek: They already had the material ready to go. Ms. Witczak: The material was already committed to run on this date, here’s what it was going to be about, but they didn’t have the doctor who was going to be writing the journal. Mr. Jekielek: Ostensibly. Right. Yeah. Ms. Witczak: Yes. That’s when I started learning about the concept of ghost writing and medical journals and really understanding key opinion leaders. It’s a term that’s used [for those] that have written papers. It is that doctors who actually are out being spokespersons about their research, but they’re actually getting funding from- Mr. Jekielek: People who shift opinions of others basically. Ms. Witczak: Yes, exactly. So that key opinion leader, which was a new concept for me. Then you look at the PR department, like PR, how it’s working. They hire to write to do shifting of public perception about a problem, right? So they might be putting op-eds, even though it wasn’t really from the company. It might have been from an average person, but it’s intentionally well coordinated. Then you learn about fact checkers and who’s, again, funding fact checkers, who’s behind the fact checkers. Then you look at who’s running clinical trials, where are the clinical trial sites and who’s influencing it. That’s a whole nother area. And you start seeing it everywhere. It is- Mr. Jekielek: And when you say it, you mean big pharma? Ms. Witczak: Yes. Big pharma’s money. Mr. Jekielek: Right. Ms. Witczak: Then you have Congress, and then you have the FDA and you have advertising. Again, that’s a little bit more obvious, right? We’re one of the only two countries in the world that allows direct to consumer advertising. But also there’s all the marketing that goes to the doctors and through journals. And so it’s not just to consumers, it’s the back end. So their hand prints, fingerprints are everywhere. And it’s not to say that you don’t trust them, you just have to take everything with a grain of salt. It’s just about being aware. You know the kind of questions that you might want to ask. Mr. Jekielek: Sp we’ve had you on as an expert on trying to get access to some of the FDA data. For example, we have a headline, “FDA is withholding autopsy results on people who died after getting COVID-19 vaccines. It’s refusing to provide key COVID-19 vaccine safety analyses.” That’s another headline, something that where we got your feedback on this. A little bit earlier, we have White House health officials making very clearly false claims about COVID-19 vaccines, again related to safety. At the moment this just seems to keep happening again and again, this withholding of information, especially anything that would be related to safety and create questions about that. Ms. Witczak: I will keep saying the same thing. I sound like a broken record. But when there’s safety signals, it belongs to the public. And if somebody sends in, takes the time, whether it’s the individual, their family member or the healthcare provider, takes their time to send in reports into the VAERS system or the MedWatch, which is prescription drugs, they want to be investigated, they want to be contacted, they want it to be looked at and serve as a signal. But the idea that we’re intentionally keeping it and hiding it, I just don’t get it when people’s lives need this information and it could be the difference between life and death for somebody. Like the autopsy, we always hear, “Well, privacy. Privacy of data.” No, all you have to do, literally I’m… You redact everything else. So you redact their name, any personal information, but the information about what happened to them is not identifiable. It doesn’t say Kim Witczak, my age, where I came from. None of that, that’s all redacted. But take my experience and go investigate it. But I will never understand when you are a public health agency why you would ever withhold data around safety from the public. Are we going to trust them? Are we going to trust our public health officials? Are we going to trust our regulatory agencies? Will people trust who’s in charge? Mr. Jekielek: Well, and with this new bill in California, which Governor Newsom just signed, right now there’s essentially doctors, individual doctors are being told what they can or cannot talk about in a blanket way as far as I can tell. Do you have any thoughts on that bill? Ms. Witczak: Well, first of all, who’s playing the decision maker on “This is misinformation. This is disinformation,” it goes back to who holds the science, the cards of science. And so I thought practice of medicines between me and my doctor. My doctor has a feeling that we’ve discussed, but now he or she could actually lose their license. And who’s deciding it? The medical boards that are a political position anyways? I’ve been doing a lot of work with other safety advocates that have done work around medical boards and when patients who have reported their doctors and the medical boards look the other way. And so the idea that now we’re going to give all this power to the medical boards as well, that’s political position, who wants to practice in that kind of environment? If you really go in wanting to do this work and you have a different opinion than what is coming out of Washington because it’s between me and my patient, who wants to practice in that environment. Mr. Jekielek: I kind of, in my head, called it the prevent doctors from Doctoring Act. I’m not a medical professional, but there’s a Hippocratic Oath that you vow. You make a vow. And if there’s somebody that’s telling you a blanket how to deal with a patient that obviously they can have no idea about the reality of that particular patient, it seems like that would violate that oath. I’ll have to talk to maybe Aaron Kheriaty, the medical ethicist about this in more detail, but it strikes me as unbelievably problematic. Ms. Witczak: Yes, I think, first, do no harm, right? It also impacts the informed consent. If they have to say that they’re completely safe, that is problematic. It sure seems that it would be a very difficult environment to practice in. And I could see really good doctors that don’t want to practice in that and leave and go somewhere else. Mr. Jekielek: Well, Kim, I love seeing you referenced as an expert in our articles and some of our investigative work. Any final thoughts as we finish up? Ms. Witczak: Well, first of all, I will continue to do this work. It’s very thankless work sometimes, but it means a lot that you are having somebody like me. So I do this work because I don’t want any other family to have to learn the hard way. Stop. Pause. Ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. Do research. Listen to programs like this, educate yourself, because it could be the difference between life and death. Mr. Jekielek: Well, Kim Witczak, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Ms. Witczak: Thank you so much. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Kim Witczak 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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On this episode of American Thought Leaders, we sit down with Florida state Rep. Joe Harding, who spearheaded Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Bill. “As young as kindergarten, there were resource guides out there telling teachers, telling educators how to talk to children about their pronouns,” Harding says. “These guides were not being voted on in public meetings. These guys were being put forth with an agenda by activist groups.” He shares the impetus for the bill, how the bill is now being enforced, and what it was like being at the center of a national firestorm. Since the passing of the Florida bill, many other states have followed in Florida’s footsteps and adopted similar legislation. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/from-gender-theory-guides-to-transition-questionnaires-florida-state-rep-joe-harding-on-the-fight-for-parental-rights-in-education_4795734.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Mr. Jekielek: Representative Joe Harding, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Rep. Joe Harding: Great to be here. Thank you for having me. Mr. Jekielek: So let’s just start by getting you to tell me a bit about yourself. Usually state representatives, you’re in the state legislature, but you also do something else. So what are you up to? Rep. Harding: Yes, it’s the difficult thing of being in the Florida legislature, but also I think what makes it so effective is that we are part-time legislators. So first and foremost, I’m a dad of four children. I’ve got a nine, a seven, a five and a three-year-old, so they keep us very busy. And then I’m also an entrepreneur. I have a business that I run. And so we’re very busy. Mr. Jekielek: So we’re going to talk today a bit about your work with Governor Ron DeSantis, but I’m going to jump right in and we’re going to talk about the Parental Rights in Education bill, because that was actually a bill that you sponsored. So tell me a little bit about the genesis of this. Rep. Harding: Well, what we saw during my first year in the legislature, I got elected in 2020, and at that time the Parental Bill of Rights was moving in the legislature in ’21 in our first session. This idea that parents are the ultimate deciders for their children, the ultimate decision makers for their children. Really just blew my mind that that was so controversial. And so we got through the legislative session in ’21, working a little bit on that bill. I sat on two committees that bill went through, so I got to hear a lot. And then as I went back home to the district and started to talk to people and realize what was happening all over our state on this issue of sexualizing our children and some of the things going on with gender theory and different things that were being taught, and then how the school districts were getting around the Parental Bill of Rights that was just passed, what they were doing to manipulate that. That really shocked me, because I saw it from the perspective, like I do everything that I try to do in the legislature, as a dad. And I’m looking, I’ve got a third grader, a fourth grader. I’ve got children this age. It was such a wake up call. The first thing that really got me really motivated and knew we had to do something in the legislature was a story from Leon County where you had a 12 or 13-year-old girl who had had multiple meetings behind closed doors with people from the school district in Leon County, helping her change her name and change her pronoun. I just could not believe that that was happening in Florida’s schools. We can’t have an idea that a school district could have a closed door meeting with my child, not include me as the parent, and then when I asked the school district, in these examples of parents that we’ve had in Florida, when I asked the school district, “What are you meeting about? What’s happening? What decisions are being made?” and being told as a parent, “Sorry, but this has to do with something that you cannot be involved on,” and watching parents literally be shut out. And what it showed me was that it was so important that we do something now before it’s too late. Mr. Jekielek: You said you were concerned about some of the gender theory education. So what is it that you are concerned about? Rep. Harding: Well, what we’ve seen in Florida, and unlike many other states, just like we’ve seen in other states around the country, where third party groups, activist groups, are coming and they’re creating resource guides for school districts to use to teach certain subjects, all of them relating to gender and teaching sexuality. And one of the things that really surprised me that was as young as kindergarten, there were resource guides out there telling teachers, telling educators how to talk to children about their pronouns and how to have discussions about, “Well, can I use the pronoun that I use at school when I talk to your parents, or do I have to use a different name?” All these really confusing things to try to pull out of little children. So really, it was those resource guides. The first one I saw was in Palm Beach County and then found out that just right close by to my district in Alachua County there was one. And throughout the state of Florida they started to come forward, Broward County, Miami-Dade, and so on. As our bill started to get in the news, we had more and more people reaching out and saying, “Our county has one just like this.” And that was probably the scariest part, because these guides were not being voted on in public meetings. These guides were being put forth with an agenda by activist groups and they’re directly teaching and instructing teachers how to instruct children and almost bypassing the typical role that you would have with approval process that would go through the state Board of Education. They figured out a way to bypass it with an activist agenda. Mr. Jekielek: You had this up close and personal seat to watch the development of this Parental Rights in Education bill from start to finish. So why don’t you trace that for me. Rep. Harding: Originally this bill was going to be targeting these guides that we talked about a little bit. That there was these transition guides and this idea that we’re teaching teachers how to teach sexuality to little children, and we’ve got to address this. But then it came to my attention that Leon County and in Martin County, there were these transition questionnaires that were being put forward and it was given to students. If you’ve got questions about your pronoun, here. And one of the things it said was, “Do you want your parents to be involved in helping you basically transition from in our school as a he to a she or however you want to do it?” And so the original bill was about targeting this idea that I don’t want anybody in the school district having closed door meetings with my children. I don’t want them signing a document that the minor child is making decisions for themselves in school without the parents involved, and that’s where it originally started with. And then as I became aware of other issues where we had gender theory being taught in kindergarten and second grade classes in different school districts, we knew we had to address that. So we added that into the bill. So the bill got filed right at the deadline as we worked through the details of everything that needed to be in it. And then the bill gets its first hearing in the education committee, and at that point is when the media narrative just took off. And I think it was really early on. I saw it. Actually, it didn’t go on my desk. It went on all my neighbors’ desks around me in the Capital. So if you’re not familiar with the Florida Capital, the way our offices are, the freshmen are in the tower, and I’m up on the 11th floor, and all my colleagues that are my freshman colleagues are getting these pamphlets dropped off at their desk that basically says, “Help us stop the Don’t Say Gay bill. This bill is targeting trans children.” All these are just rhetoric. And it was the first introduction to the many lies that the left was putting out. And it was by one of these organizations that’s frankly using these issues like this to make money on it. But one of the things that I made a comment to one of my colleagues that sits on the … It was actually Rep. LaMarca out of Broward County. I made a comment to him that he was on the committee and I said, “They never came and talked to me. This Florida Equality Group never requested a meeting with me. And I’m hearing that they’ve met with 12 Republicans that are on this 18-member committee.” And it was my first glimpse into how dirty and how low these groups will go to spin up a narrative. And what they did was they purposely didn’t talk to me because they wanted me to be in the dark of what their tactics were. So I’d get in front of that committee and that committee just kind of went off the rails. It was all about hypotheticals and rhetoric and this is targeting gay children and all these different things that we’ve heard throughout. And no matter how many times you would give them an answer back to the bill, “This bill’s really simple, here’s what it says,” they would just keep spinning it up. So in many ways we were losing the messaging war on this bill, not because our message was not good, but because we didn’t have the power of the media. The left at this point, I think it was the day after, maybe the day of the first committee, had Anderson Cooper, had Chasten Buttigieg on to talk about this bill. I mean, national figures immediately talking about this bill from the left’s perspective and almost nothing from our side. And it was pretty early on, the governor got asked about the bill at a press conference and he made a comment something to the effect that, “We’ll go back and look into this bill.” And it was just a few days later he got asked about it again. From this point he had reviewed it. So he took that opportunity to really expose the media for using terms like Don’t Say Gay, because it was click bait and it sold well in social media and that’s why they use terms like that. But really he, on a national level, was able to expose so much of what their rhetoric was. And then it made the left really double down. It was really at that point that it became a fever pitch. We had over 300 students from Dade Broward County come into the Capitol, and their tactics … I told this to one of my colleagues, I said that, “If parents have not woken up already to what’s happening in our schools, the footage of these children in our Capital is a wake up call.” And watching children cuss eff this and telling us that we’re bigoted and we’re all these things, really nasty and aggressive, and right behind them are educators from those school districts, Democrat lawmakers, dancing, supporting, going along with it as if this is okay for little 15, 16 … I’m sorry if I’m too old to call 15, 16 years old children, but they’re children. They are minors. And there they are in our Capital with adult lawmakers dancing and going along with it. That was a wake up call, I believe, to really what took on a fever pitch all across the country from conservatives, and not just conservatives, from centrists. I believe the majority of Americans realize that what is happening in our schools, targeting our children, trying to indoctrinate our children, enough is enough. It was really an unbelievable time to really, I believe, start to reverse the course that we’ve seen happen for way too long in our school system. Mr. Jekielek: Lay out what’s in the bill. Rep. Harding: The bill does really three fundamental things. It says that parents should be the decision makers. Any decision that’s made in the school district that has a physical or emotional or mental impact on the student’s well being must involve the parent. It’s pretty straightforward. That could have to do with issues that have nothing to do with their sexuality. Could have to do with the way their grades are reported. Could have to do with which coursework they’re taking. But if that has a long-term impact on the student, engage the parent. Pretty straightforward. Then we said that in kindergarten through third grade, because there was a gap in our state standards where we did not address this, gender ideology and sexual orientation shouldn’t be taught in kindergarten through third grade. So that was the second. But the third piece was probably what really is the motivator behind the left being so fired up, because we said there has to be an enforcement piece. Because just like we saw with lockdowns, just like we saw through the time of COVID in our school districts that chose to not follow the governor’s executive orders, chose to not follow the rules the legislature put out, we said there has to be an enforcement piece. We said that if a school district is withholding information from you about your child, like in the case of Leon County where you had a 12 or 13 … I think she was 12 when it started … 12-year-old child having closed door meetings with the school district and school officials and blocking out the parent. And then the parent goes, “What was in that meeting? Could I see? What did she sign? I’d like to have that.” And the school district goes, “Oh, no, no, that’s confidential.” Well, so our bill directly goes at that and says, “No, you can’t withhold. You can’t have a private meeting with my child and close the door and then tell me that I have no right to that information.” Mr. Jekielek: What is the accountability? What can happen? Rep. Harding: So in our first piece of legislation, our main focus was a course of action. So the parents should have an ability to be able to sue the school. The school will go to a judge and get a judge to issue that the parents can … It’s the rightful information for them to know what’s happening. The only caveat being that if there’s threat or possibility of abuse or abandonment or neglect, which is currently already accounted for in our Florida state statute. But we doubled down on that in our bill and just said that if a parent is an abusive parent, obviously there may be some closed door meetings to try to protect that child. Ultimately where we landed, which I think is really such a great point, was that we have what’s called a course of action and a cause of action. The course of action is for the parents that can afford to go hire an attorney to go after the school. But not every parent can afford an attorney. So we came up with a cause of action and we have a 70-day and a 30-day period. So they can go to the school district and request information relating to a private closed door meeting that the school may have had with their child, and the school has seven days to provide that. If they choose to not provide that, then it gets escalated and the Department of Education, our state Board of Education gets involved. They have 30 days to do something with it. So what we wanted to do is we didn’t want parents that didn’t have the ability or didn’t know where to go to hire an attorney to be able to have another way to hold the school districts accountable. Probably the thing that we heard the most that often makes me almost laugh out loud is that what they would say is, “Well, aren’t you forcing taxpayer dollars to be spent on attorneys defending school districts?” But what they don’t acknowledge is simply that if school districts don’t want to be sued for having closed door meetings with children, stop doing it. Mr. Jekielek: Something just struck me. Someone that’s a huge advocate of let’s say gender ideology, they might view it as abusive that a parent doesn’t allow their child to be encouraged to change their pronouns or change their gender or whatnot. Have you considered this in the bill? Rep. Harding: Right, we did. That’s a great point. So we actually ultimately put in some conforming language in our final education bill in the legislature that putting in some review mechanisms, because that was our concern was abuse could be a term that my parents are Republican and you could have a activist person in the school say, “Well, Republican parents, it’s abusive that they make your child go to church,” for instance. It’s abusive that they make you whatever it may be. It could obviously be used in any way you want if you look at it from an activist point of view. So what we did do is we put it to where the school district has to have regular meetings and has to continually keep the principal and the superintendent, the decision makers in the school, involved. If they’re choosing to intentionally withhold information from a parent because of a concern of abuse, they have to continue regularly to keep revisiting that. And our goal, and I think this is an area we’re going to have to address further in the legislator as we see this implemented. I think that that term abuse is unfortunately misused. We look at abuse as abusing your child physically, mentally, not in terms of political issues. And unfortunately, the left will take political issues and call them abuse, and that’s simply not true. So we did put in some things in protection of that in our overall education package, but I think we’re going to have to revisit that further in the future. Mr. Jekielek: And so at what point does Disney get involved here? Rep. Harding: Yes, so Disney, I think the first time, we’re in our last week of sessions. So if you’re not familiar with the Florida legislature, how it works, we have 60-day session and it moves really quickly. And then those last week or two is when most of the either really controversial bills or really big bills that have a lot of different moving pieces move. The first time Disney publicly active in this bill was after our bill had actually already passed. It had passed in both chambers, and they were getting involved with the intent, I believe, to lobby the governor and try to make the governor back down, which clearly they didn’t know who the governor of Florida was, because backing down is not in his DNA, thankfully. But they started pushing actually after. And I’ve been asked about this before. Disney never was involved, at least with me and my bill. They never lobbied for or against the bill. They were not involved. They came in late mostly because they were getting pressure from activist groups that have gotten embedded within Disney. And there’s footage of closed door meetings, if you will, with Disney that’s gotten leaked out, really showing the underbelly of what they truly believe, which is shocking, I believe, to most Americans, some of the things that their producers. Mr. Jekielek: What would be an example? Rep. Harding: Well, this idea that they want 50 percent of characters in children’s movies to portray an LGBTQ person. I think 50 percent of children are not LGBTQ. And I think this idea that they’re trying to make this mainstream clearly has an agenda that they are trying to insert that’s just really out of line, I believe, with what the majority of Americans believe in and see. But what they did was Disney tried to get involved late, I believe, to pressure the governor to get the governor to back down. Clearly that didn’t happen. But I think what Disney misjudged was that the amount of energy that was behind this bill already, and they were very late to it. And I think what they learned the hard way is that you can never satisfy this progressive idea that there’s always some new thing that we’ve got to go with. And what I mean by that is the groups that they were trying to appease by coming out with a public statement and saying that we’re going to work … I think their first statement was something to the effect of, “We don’t agree with the bill and we’re going to try to work to see what we could do to help make it better.” Something big, whatever it was. But that wasn’t enough. What the left wanted to hear is, “No, we want to hear that you’re going to go out on record and you’re going to help us beat them.” And then Disney came out with a statement that says that, “We’re going to work to make sure that this bill, House Bill 1557, my bill, gets repealed. Well, in order to get repealed, you’d have to put the minority in the majority, which meant that was a direct threat at our Republican majority in the Florida legislature was, “We’re going to work to unseat you and try to replace you with progressive, out of line, far left replacements.” And that is what their statement, I truly think that is what really energized the right and the conservative movement and the governor. No, you’re not going to get involved and then replace our majority. We’ve made all these great decisions for Florida. Conservatism has worked in so many ways in Florida. So what you’re saying is you’re going to throw all that away, all the success that Disney frankly has had over the years, we’re going to throw all that away because we have an activist group that wants us to further a political agenda. They got used, unfortunately. I truly believe that. But unfortunately, Disney is no longer the company that Walt Disney founded. It’s gone. It’s now a California based company with California values, and it doesn’t align with Florida. And Disney’s gotten special privilege in Florida for way too long. It needed it to be looked at before. Absolutely should have been looked at much sooner. But I think at the end of the day, what the governor was able to do was expose that here we are giving special privileges to a company that’s directly targeting the values and the things that we are pushing forward in Florida. If we ignore that, then why are we up there? I’ve asked that question before. If we’re going to run for office to go along to get along, it’s not worth it to me. It’s not worth the time away. It’s not worth missing the T-ball games and school and family and church and business and all these things that you miss doing this. It’s not worth it if you’re not going to fight for what you believe in. What is the fixation with our children? That was really the question that I kept asking. I still ask myself what is this fixation really about? Mr. Jekielek: Well, so what have you come to so far in pursuing that question? Rep. Harding: I think that really what it is is a breakdown in what we see as the fundamental role of families—having parents involved. I think what we’ve tried, what has happened unfortunately in our society is this continued reliance on government and on experts. And so what we have activist groups that have gotten into our school district saying is, “Parents, you’re not qualified to have a discussion with your child about their pronouns or whatever new thing that we’ve created, because you’re just not in with it. You’re not current. You’re not cool. You wouldn’t know how to talk to your kids.” So I truly believe that it’s a breakdown in understanding of what the role of the family is, and you cannot replace parents with government. And I think that’s what we’ve seen an effort to do that and replace them with a bureaucracy and a bunch of experts. And at the end of the day, the parent knows the child best. No expert that sits in a corner office in the school district office knows the child as well as the parent at home. Mr. Jekielek: Have you spoken with anyone who believes this? Have you had a conversation or an informed debate? I’d love to understand this. Rep. Harding: When I’ve talked to my colleagues that serve in the legislature, many of them that were Democrat members very vocally opposed this bill. As I think back through some of those memories and some of those discussions, almost all of them, with the exception of a couple, off the record agree with most of what we’re doing. On the record, they put on a front that this is all filled with hate and this is about targeting certain children and all these different things. But off the record, more times than not, regardless if they’re a same sex family, regardless if they’re raising their children and they’re married to a man or a woman or they’re a man married to a man, even in those situations, so many of them agree that as parents, regardless if it’s two dads or two moms, I just want to be involved in what’s happening with my children. They’re my kids and I want to be involved and I want to know and I want to be the one leading that instruction. I think of one particular case right before the second committee hearing on the Parental Rights in Education bill. I had a colleague of mine, a democrat colleague, call me on the phone and say, “Hey, I just want you to know, I’ve obviously got to vote against your bill today. But as a parent, I agree with almost everything in the bill. I have a couple questions, but I pretty much agree with everything in the bill.” So it just shows you that it’s not real. And that wasn’t the only time. I had that multiple times where democrat colleagues would come to me and say, “I actually agree with this. I can’t believe this is even controversial, but obviously I got to be against it.” So even some of the biggest opponents off the record for the most part agree. There are a few that will look at it from a perspective that they have to believe what they are saying because they just need that to go on. I think back to this summer, I did a little bit of traveling and I was at a conference for other legislators throughout the country, and I ran into a legislator from Minnesota. And this legislator figured out who I was and what bill I had sponsored and just came at me in a really aggressive way, that I was bigoted and that all these different things that she said. And what was interesting to me was when I actually challenged her a little bit, said, “Have you read the bill? Do you know the bill that you’re calling the Don’t Say Gay bill, do you know what it actually is about?” And her response to that was, “I would never read that thing.” It’s like, “Well, how do you as a lawmaker who’s out there influencing what people think believe that the best answer is, ‘Why I would never read it because it’s filled with hate,’ and that’s your response? Then how can you actually be someone that’s part of the decision making for your state? That’s really alarming.” Mr. Jekielek: There’s at least one democratic legislator that was on your side with this bill, Representative Bush. Rep. Harding: Right. Mr. Jekielek: And kind of paid a price for this, too. Rep. Harding: Yes, what we saw was there was one Democrat House member who was willing to go on record and vote in support of my bill outside of the handful of other ones that would tell me privately, “I wish I could support it.” But he actually did support my bill and ultimately was beat in a primary by a very progressive, far left liberal. I think that that is what we’re seeing across Florida is there is no longer a Democrat Party that’s not … The Democrat Party across the country, really, but especially in the state of Florida has become so far left and liberal. It’s a bubble. And so you’ve got to be an activist. You’ve got to be as far left. There is no room for independent thinkers and they don’t believe in that. And so he paid the price ultimately for stepping out against his own party. Mr. Jekielek: Of course, as we know, the Parental Rights in Education bill was signed into law. What has been the impact of that so far, both in Florida and beyond? Rep. Harding: Well, it’s first we’re watching it closely to see how it’s implemented, because that’s really the biggest thing that we see in Florida is we can pass really bold and great legislation, but we have to make sure that it’s being implemented correctly. And if it’s not, there may be an opportunity for us to go back and readdress something that maybe needs to be tweaked, but also to hold those school districts accountable that are not complying. What we’re seeing is we’re seeing school districts that are absolutely trying to navigate around it. We’ve seen some of that. But I will point to some of the positives. We saw Miami-Dade County that had a sex education program that was considered very progressive and just really shocking. They had 12, 14-year-old children and they had profiles of these children in the textbooks in the sex ed program. And it’s just unbelievable talking about 14-year-old children as being all these different types of genders and just really confusing to be teaching to children. And so because of this bill and because of the outrage of many of the parents in the school district, that sex ed program was actually repealed, is now being revisited. And that’s one of the largest school districts in Florida in Miami-Dade. So I see a lot of hope that we are making some real progress. And I would also point to the school board races that happen all over our state. We’ve never had a governor get involved in the number of school board races like he did. But he did that because he saw that many of the issues that we faced in the lockdown that we’re facing with this gender theory issue is coming from liberal and out of touch school boards that are not in touch with their voters. And I think because they’re nonpartisan races, they can get away with a lot, and the voters don’t realize who they have sitting on these boards. And I think that we brought a lot of awareness to the importance of those school board races because of this bill. I think over 90 percent, 85 or 90 percent of the governor’s endorsed candidates won their races in school board races all over the state. So we are seeing a tremendous impact of it. And I think that there’s plenty of work to be done. I think that it’s showing areas that we need to work, but it’s showing areas as well. And it’s done something that I think the left could have never imagined with their false representation of what the bill did and with their false representation of the name of the bill. They exposed and they gave us a national stage to expose what was actually happening in our schools. And I think parents are watching. They’re more involved now than they’ve ever been, and I think that’s a really good thing. Mr. Jekielek: And are you getting any inquiries from outside of Florida about this legislation? I’ve heard of some things developing. Rep. Harding: Yes, we see similar legislation moving in a lot of states. In Pennsylvania. I think Ohio had something similar, and I know Virginia’s doing some things. I think that Florida leads. I think we saw this with COVID. We’re seeing this now with education. I think we’ve empowered parents in an unbelievable way in Florida. And I think that it’s extremely neat to see other states follow the lead of Florida. Mr. Jekielek: So when you got sworn in in November of 2020, you were stepping right into the middle of serious debate about COVID policy and Governor DeSantis taking a very different direction as well as, of course, all the agencies. And so what was that like? Rep. Harding: Well, it was really shocking, and if you’re going to choose a time to serve in politics, I obviously picked one hectic time to run. We had COVID. We had lockdowns and all these different things that our country was facing. So we spoke out against a lot of that. But it was really when it got personal, when you had people in your district calling you and saying, “I’m going to get fired from my job for the city of Gainesville that I’ve worked for, been loyal, saved lives. I’ve never done anything but give the best service to our taxpayers, but I’m going to be fired because of one decision I’m making, that I’m choosing to not get vaccinated.” And I had an opportunity to talk about that a little bit and his story on the House floor during our special session. And I think that was really, I doubled down any efforts I was doing and I was really just in awe watching the governor day after day beat the drum that Florida cannot follow the other states. Mr. Jekielek: What was it like as a legislator at that time? Or is it difficult? You describe this very polarized atmosphere in the legislature. Can you just give me- Rep. Harding: Well, I think the biggest thing, I always just got shocked. I don’t know why more people don’t talk about this publicly. I always would get blown away when the Democrat reps would come into committee and they would be wearing two or three masks and they wouldn’t sit near you and they’re looking at you like you have a third eye because you’re not wearing a mask. But I’m like, “I saw you last night at a bar in Tallahassee and you didn’t have a mask anywhere near you, but all of a sudden here we’re on camera, so you’re going to wear a mask.” I was always just blown away by the theater. And I think probably the thing that really caught me off guard was one of my Democrat colleagues actually created their own pin and they were wearing their vaccine card on their jacket showing everybody, “I got vaccinated and here’s my badge.” What are we doing? I mean, what is this? It just shocked me. It was a crazy time. And there were so many times I’m like am I the only one seeing how ridiculous this is? And it still is a pretty bizarre time watching the theater that the left put on. Mr. Jekielek: Why do you think this was happening? Rep. Harding: Well, because if you go back to what do we fundamentally believe? What do I believe as a conservative and what does the Democratic Party believe as the progressive left? What do they believe? And what I believe is that individuals should make decisions for themselves. That government is of the people, for the people, and we should have a government as small as possible. Government’s here for public safety. Government’s here for a couple fundamental roles, but they’re not here to be decision makers for everything in your life. They’re not here to be your only protector. They’re not here for all those things. The Democrats truly believe that government is everything. And what they do is they use people who have different needs, whether it’s playing on low income or minorities and telling them, “Well, the evil Republicans are coming after your job or they’re coming after your food stamps,” or whatever it is. Because the Democrats truly believe that the more we expand government, the bigger our services are for people, the better. But as conservatives, we think well, let’s get government out of the way so your own entrepreneurship, your own moxie, making the best of the American dream is what is ultimately your path to success. And the Democrats believe your best path to success is a government program. So when you saw Democrats fall into this idea that government has to save us, government has to issue vaccine mandates, mask ordinances, all these things, it’s because they truly believe that at the end of the day, government has to be the one to protect people. What I think is shocking was that they would sell that publicly, and even in their own mind, they wanted to have the freedom to not wear a mask. And you would see that from liberal leaders from New York and California and wherever else they would come from. They’d come vacation in Florida during lockdown. It was this idea, “Well, we want to control and we want our citizens to believe government is the answer to every problem, but yet I don’t want to live under that control. So I’m going to go to Florida where I can be free.” And it’s kind of the interesting thing that we can catch, I think, a lot of liberals in, which is this idea that, “We want it for everybody else, but not for me personally. I don’t want to be told what I can and can’t do.” So I think it’s really that fundamental, the lockdowns were such a big part of the Democratic Party because they truly believe that government is the ultimate answer to every issue. Mr. Jekielek: So what’s next for you? Rep. Harding: Well, what we’re going to continue to do as long as we’re fortunate to be in the Florida legislature is to continue, I keep using the word, but we’re going to continue to empower parents in Florida. I truly believe that all of the issues, and I say all of the issues that we face in our school districts, whether it’s attendance issues, whether it’s grade issues, all the issues that we are challenged with in our school system is because of government trying to replace parents. It’s because of a fundamental breakdown in our family unit as a country, as a whole. We’ve got to continue to advance school choice policy to empower parents on choosing where they want to send their children to school. At the same time, as long as we have public schools in this state, we’ve got to continue to hold them accountable, because it’s a large part of our budget every year goes through funding our schools, and we’ve got to as legislators control what is happening in those schools and make sure that it’s a good environment for our parents and for our children. Mr. Jekielek: Well, Representative Joe Harding, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Rep. Harding: Thanks for having me on. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Representative Joe Harding 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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TikTok is one of the Chinese regime’s most powerful weapons of mass manipulation and misinformation, argues Nicolas Chaillan, former chief software officer of the U.S. Air Force and Space Force. TikTok was the most downloaded app globally and in the United States in 2021. The Chinese regime is using TikTok to manipulate Americans—particularly the younger generations, Chaillan says. And it’s gathering enormous amounts of data, from voice prints to face prints, to power the next generation of AI weapons. At the same time, the best and the brightest are leaving the Department of Defense, Chaillan says. “When you hear the DOD talk about focusing on climate change and focusing on domestic terrorism as the number one threat, that’s just plain nonsense … If China is not the number one threat, I don’t know where these people have been living, but they’re not on the same planet.” Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/nicolas-chaillan-the-ccp-is-using-tiktok-to-manipulate-americans-and-gather-data-for-ai-weapons_4802605.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Nicolas Chaillan, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Nicolas Chaillan: Thanks for having me. Mr. Jekielek: It’s great to have you back. It’s one year now since you left the Air Force as the Chief Software Officer of the Air Force. You’ve been thinking a lot about something I’ve been thinking a lot about, which is TikTok and its influence on American society, its incredible influence on American society. I was just reading that there’s more viewing time of TikTok now than there is of YouTube by Americans, which is just kind of unbelievable to me. This is what you say about TikTok. You say it is potentially the most powerful weapon of mass manipulation and misinformation ever created by the CCP. Okay, so that’s a big statement. Mr. Chaillan: Yes, absolutely. When you look at what the CCP has been doing for many years now, information and the control of information is probably the cornerstone of being able to push their agenda to the American people. What you’re going to find is now 40 per cent of kids under 24 are using TikTok as the way to search for information. So, you can imagine that it enables the CCP now to control what you’re going to get to see, what you’re going to be able to find out about, and potentially censor information as well. Mr. Jekielek: It’s very interesting what you’re talking about, because typically when we think of TikTok, we basically think of data issues. There’s a ton of evidence showing that American data is available to Chinese censors and Chinese agencies, but what you’re talking about is something very different. It’s the ability of the Chinese regime to potentially influence Americans. Mr. Chaillan: Yes, absolutely. Look, the data aspect is very important too. The issue you’re going to see with TikTok is that it is multifaceted. Effectively, you’re going to find the data issue with potential access to personal information, including face prints and voice prints, which can ultimately give access to future payment systems. If you go to China, you can authenticate and pay with your face. One day this technology will come here. Effectively, China has all the data points of your face and voice to be able to use that for any kind of fake payment system. So, that’s going to be a real issue as well. But when you start compounding the data aspect—knowing the people, what they think, what they are watching—with the ability to promote content and filter content, that’s when you’re going to see things like what we’ve seen with the labs in China with the COVID-19 virus, where effectively, China was powerful enough to convince American companies to ban the discussion around whether or not the virus came from China’s lab. You can imagine that if they now control the main platform of information used by kids under 24, they don’t have to ask anybody. They can just decide to ban it themselves. Mr. Jekielek: There have been studies, and there’s actually a Chinese study that came out, and this is kind of fascinating to me that they would publish this. Perhaps, they were wanting to create a rationale for the population, because for the Chinese version of TikTok, Douyin, they basically created a new set of rules, which is really interesting. Mr. Chaillan: China knows how bad these kind of platforms are for the younger generations. They’ve done a lot of study and they know it’s actually classified as an addiction. For kids under 14, they can only watch Douyin for 40 minutes. It’s banned at night, because they know, particularly at night, how bad this is for the brain, particularly the brain of kids that are still growing and learning. They really want to have that mitigation aspect of not being able to be on the phone 24/7, which is effectively what you see with kids here. It’s interesting that China decided not to use the same platform with the same rules across China and the rest of the world. There are only two versions, there’s the Chinese version, Douyin, and TikTok for the rest of the world. People argue it’s because of the language. That’s nonsense, obviously, because TikTok is in 125-plus languages. It’s never been about languages. It’s been about the ability for the CCP to set different rules when it comes to the ability to prevent that kind of risk to the Chinese people. Mr. Jekielek: But there’s a couple of things here. They also have a particular interest in controlling what information gets to the Chinese people. In fact, they excel at this. Mr. Chaillan: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: There are multiple purposes happening here. Mr. Chaillan: Yes. But they probably have the same intent for what people get to see outside of China as well. Of course, they want to have a tighter control when it comes to the Chinese market. But at the end of the day, what’s interesting is even if you look at the algorithm itself, it’s going to be promoting educational content. It’s going to be promoting historical content, instead of the dance moves that we see here in the U.S. and in Europe. It’s not an accident. What they decide to promote is specifically designed to pull us down instead of pushing us up. Mr. Jekielek: What criteria are you seeing are being used by the regime in terms of what content they choose? Mr. Chaillan: It’s very clear that they’re looking at what’s going to be able to educate kids to learn and be more efficient, be able to learn new skills, and also obviously, when it comes to history, control the narrative around China being the new world leader and more importantly, America being the enemy. Mr. Jekielek: And censoring whatever is negative. For example, right now, there’s huge protests that have been happening as a result of the zero-COVID policy. There’s still tens of millions of people locked down and some of those people are going crazy. You don’t see a lot of that on Douyin. Mr. Chaillan: No, you’re not going to find that, for sure. That’s always been the case with the great firewall and the ability of China to control that access to information. I find it interesting that China has been able to effectively ban all American companies from doing really meaningful business when it comes to technology in China. But yet we’re completely okay with China coming into the United States with their solutions. No one is thinking twice about the technological risk of capturing all this data and the ability to track what people do. They are able to not only see all the applications installed on your phone, but also everything that’s going on in term of communication on your phone, who you’re talking to, what you like, what you don’t like, and what you’re searching. The amount of data that they’re capturing, beside the face prints and voice prints—which by the way, is already pretty scary to me—really tells you that the aggregate of information is beyond what any kind of comparable application would gather. Mr. Jekielek: In terms of the gathering of this information, there’s all sorts of possible uses. You were discussing a fake payment system. Do you mean now they have your biometrics that you would use to access your phone? So, in the future it might not have anything to do with TikTok. If someone wants to impersonate you, they’ve got the goods to impersonate you. Is that what you’re saying? Mr. Chaillan: Yes. It is multifaceted, right? You can think of the ability to infiltrate American companies. Let’s say you want to steal some technology from an American company. You’re going to be able to know exactly what the people behind the company like, what they’re listening to, and what books they read. So, now you can pretend to be their friend, by having the same passions. You can show up as an intelligence group, you can re-engage with those people and have a deep relationship, thanks to the information you gather. It’s really enabling them, as an intelligence community, to have access to pretty much everything of about 40 per cent-plus of America. It’s really very significant. I don’t think there is any kind of technology ever that’s been able to gather that kind of volume of information about people. They can pinpoint down to individuals in a company for cyberattacks. They can now target people. Like you said on the face and the voice prints, you can literally start using this for deep fakes. You can generate fake videos of people with their voice and their face saying things that they’ve never said. That could be used for many different use cases. They download all your contacts from your phone, all the applications installed on your phone. They potentially have access to biometrics as well, so it could be all the way to fingerprints. This is really giving, effectively, access to your entire life. When you take a step back and you think back of how you use your phone on a day-to-day basis for banking and healthcare and email access and everything you do on your phone today, you’re effectively giving the entirety of your life information to the CCP. Mr. Jekielek: Some people in the U.S. might say, “This is just the same type of information we’re actually giving to Facebook and Twitter and these Big Tech giants.” Although what you’re describing sounds more invasive. But then people would say, “Actually, it really is more invasive than you’re aware of.” Mr. Chaillan: It is definitely a little bit more invasive. When you read the terms and conditions of Facebook and Twitter and other social media companies, you’re not going to find as deep of an access. It is definitely concerning. A lot of people wonder why should a selected few private companies have so much, and individuals leading these companies should have access to such important information. And definitely, Congress should start taking action when it comes to data governance and privacy and cyber breaches. There’s very little requirement when it comes to a company getting breached in term of reporting, and making sure that the breach is handled the way it should be handled legally speaking, and also when it comes to the impact on individuals. It’s interesting, because Europe created a law, GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation,) enforcing proper behavior of companies. It’s a little bit extreme, and I think there’s a balance there. It’s working pretty well at the end of the day. Yet, the United States is still not really paying much attention to the value of data. In 2016, China created the Shanghai Data Exchange, which is effectively enabling China to access both American and European companies’ data, because they’re smart enough to enable access to a platform pretty much like a trading platform for stock, for data where U.S. companies, and of course, Chinese companies, and European companies are able to sell access to their data and trade it. Anytime they do that, China and the CCP are getting a free copy of that data, and getting more access to data. Why do we care? We care because with the volume of data we’re talking about, this is what’s going to be powering the next generation of artificial intelligence and machine learning weapons. Not just for basic use cases of spying on people and tracking faces and things like that, but now it’s also being used for the next generation of weapons, of actual physical weapons. Mr. Jekielek: So, what is the relationship? Maybe you can expand on this. What is the relationship with the amount of data, and how is that connected with the use of actual weapons? It’s not obvious. Mr. Chaillan: The more volume of data you have and the pace is so important when it comes to teaching and training AI models. The AI models, just like you see with Tesla, are gathering so much data coming from the cars to be able to optimize the self-driving features of the car. They’re capturing information about everything surrounding of the car, what’s happening in real life, people crossing dogs, pets, anything, right? At first, you may even think some of the data they are gathering doesn’t really matter when it comes to the car itself, like the ability to detect, proactively, maintenance issues. All these items are really enabling the AI to become better and faster, and then it’s a composite effect. The more data you have, the faster you can train. The faster you train and the faster you deploy that AI capability in real life with real use, the more it’s going to learn. The more data you have, there’s just better capability you can end up building. That becomes part of pretty much every aspect of life. When we put AI on a jet in the Air Force, very basic AI capabilities, we were able to see that the AI was able to defeat the human pilot every single time. Mr. Jekielek: Why? Mr. Chaillan: AI is able to do things that the human brain is not able to comprehend. Obviously, in the use case of the pilot, it doesn’t care about its own safety. He is going to take risks and do things that the pilots are taught not to do, both for their safety and the safety of the aircraft. But effectively, the AI is able to toe the line at a much more granular way that a human would not even be able to comprehend, because the human brain does not have the capacity of analyzing all this data, and understand what’s going on in real time. It’s just too much and too soon and too fast for the human brain to handle. Mr. Jekielek: Let me get this straight. This mass data gathering, which effectively TikTok facilitates for the CCP, is directly useful for the CCP in terms of developing war fighting technology? Mr. Chaillan: It’s useful in every aspect of artificial intelligence, machine learning, and AI weapons. It’s going to really empower them in term of spying and stealing intellectual property, which is by the way, is something that is vastly underreported. The FBI director finally came out after over-classifying this issue for years, disclosing that what we see coming from the CCP, when it comes to the CCP targeting American companies and stealing both IP through actual individuals embedded inside of companies in the U.S., but also through cyber means. It has never been as high as it is. There are hundreds of new cases a day opened by the FBI because of breaches. That gathering of intellectual property, combined with that data, is really creating a massive national security risk. It’s probably the largest national security risk we’ve ever seen in the last 20 years. Mr. Jekielek: Why do you think that America is somehow asleep at the wheel here? Mr. Chaillan: The first aspect is you’re going to find is that Congressmen are still struggling to turn on their phones, let alone understand the power of data. When you take a step back, and you look at the lack of understanding of cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, and software in general, and you look at hypersonic, you look at all these quantum computer risks and the fact that very soon, probably within 10 years, there’s going to be the ability for quantum computers to crack all encryption being used right now by the United States, both on the national security side and the commercial companies and payment systems, there really is a lack of understanding of technology, probably because Congress has no term limits, and you end up seeing people that just should not even be in the jobs. The first step is going to be about awareness. We also over-classify these issues way too much. You’ve seen the DOD, and the FBI, along with the DOJ over-classify these, and effectively, Americans are not even tracking the issues. I always felt that if you were just to disclose a little bit more about the volume of attacks and the means of attacks—we don’t need to disclose the who and the why—but if we can just disclose what’s happening and really raise awareness, that would have the biggest impact. Because what you’re going to see is American companies stepping up and willing to come and help the U.S. government to do better. What you see right now is most companies refusing to do business with the DOD. Of course, in China, they don’t have a choice, so they’re going to get access to best of breed commercial capabilities. So effectively, if you look at the commercial side, the commercial American companies are leading compared to the Chinese companies. But the U.S. government, particularly the DOD, is behind, because we don’t have access to best of breed American companies, where the CCP has access to best of breed Chinese companies. Even if they’re number two, the military side is clearly number one, because the DOD does not have access to the American technologies. You end up seeing at least a 10 to 15 years gap of adoption of innovative technologies. Mr. Jekielek: You’re basically saying that the U.S. Department of Defense does not have access to the best AI technology that Google and some of these leaders in the technology have, whereas in China they do. Is that what you’re saying? Mr. Chaillan: Yes, that’s exactly right. Effectively, what you see is most innovative AI companies in the United States are refusing to do business with the DOD. I tried to convince many of them, spending many, many hours of my week in discussion, including the large companies like the Googles of the world, to the smallest startups creating tons of innovation. And really what you find is they’re going to be willing to do a business with DOD when it comes to the business side of DOD— emails and management of people and optimizing, this kind of basic business concepts. But when it comes to the war fighting side, which is really what matters, the DOD is not an organization to manage people, it’s a war fighting organization. If you don’t have access to best of breed, you don’t have the ability to create the next generation AI weapons. No one wants to use them. The issue is that you see people living in this kumbaya universe, particularly in the Silicon Valley, where they feel like they don’t have to embrace the fact that we need to have these weapons just as a deterrence. No one wants to use it, just like nuclear weapons, but we must have it. We cannot be the only one without it. What you’ve been hearing in the last three, four years in the Pentagon, particularly from people that were sent from the Googles of the world, is the fact that we should focus on ethics. The bulk of the funding of these AI teams in DOD, instead of focusing on AI weapon capabilities, without going to crazy things like having weapons completely managed by AI shooting targets.We’re not talking even about advanced technologies like that. We’re talking about very basic AI weapons that could just proactively target better with human deciding whether or not to shoot, so there’s really no risk in term of AI taking control of the world or anything crazy like that. At the end of the day, what you’re going to find is these companies focus on pushing people to talk about ethics, on why we should not do any work with AI weapons. Meanwhile, China couldn’t care less and is embracing the advantage. It’s very clear that any kind of AI-enabled weapon will without a doubt win over a human-powered design. Mr. Jekielek: What about these companies, the American companies in China? For example, I’m aware that Google has an AI lab in China, as does Microsoft. Mr. Chaillan: It’s always interesting to me that you see Americans complaining pretty heavily when it comes to interacting with the Department of Defense in the U.S., but yet they do not care about the engagements happening in China. Overall, there’s a really poor understanding of what China is doing. There’s lots of discussions when it comes to the fact that China is at war with us. Some people dismiss it, not understanding what’s going on. Really, it’s all about educating the public on what China has been doing for the last 30 years. This is not something new, it’s just that we empowered China to be effectively controlling much of the critical manufacturing. Also, you can look at medicine, we can’t even have penicillin created here in the United States anymore. You see the same with microchips. That’s why Taiwan is so important. You’ve seen for once Congress waking up and doing some meaningful action with a new law, investing in U.S. made chips, $52 billion on chips. That’s a good baby step. But when you look at how much China is spending on chips, that’s still way, way too little. Not to mention when the government spends money, a good 80 per cent is wasted anyway. It’s not going to the right place. I don’t know how much of that is going to come to meaningful innovations. At the end of the day, when you take a step back and you look at the importance of Taiwan, if for some reason something happens in Taiwan, I can tell you most of the critical infrastructure and also critical industries will be completely one hundred percent disrupted. There is no backup plan. Mr. Jekielek: From what I understand, TSMC, which is a major premier chip manufacturer in Taiwan, is actually building a factory in the U.S. as we speak. Mr. Chaillan: That’s a good step. But at the end of the day, if you look at the broader landscape of chip making in Taiwan, if something was to disrupt the supply chain in Taiwan, none of this will matter. It’s a rounding error compared to the volume we’re talking about. If you look at automotive, and you look at pretty much every market on the planet, we underestimate how much would depend on chips. People just think of chips like computers and maybe they don’t realize that it’s effectively a piece of the internet of things, the devices you use, from your thermostat, to your car, to planes, to pretty much everything that we consume. Technology is such a central piece of life, people would not know what to do without it. Mr. Jekielek: All of these devices, internet of things devices especially, are gathering data and that data is fed into the companies that govern those devices or create those devices. That data is collected and then managed and sold in places like the Shanghai Data Exchange that you mentioned earlier. Again, how is it that these companies that are working in this Shanghai Data Exchange, imagine that the CCP isn’t involved in using their data for its own purposes in the process? Are there any safeguards? Mr. Chaillan: There are no safeguards, but I think they don’t really care. It’s all about profits. They want to go after this massive Chinese market. They also want to be part of this broader ecosystem. Quite honestly, it’s very difficult for some of these companies to produce the capabilities and products without using Chinese manufacturing. And we have created that, right? We empowered China to become the manufacturing giant today, believing we could not do it elsewhere, or believing we couldn’t do it here in the United States, which is probably completely wrong. But effectively, that’s what is happening now, and so you see companies just focus on profits. Mr. Jekielek: Another thing about TikTok, because of this incredible amount of data that it sucks in, it allows for this incredibly targeted advertising, and it has become the biggest advertising market in America. Do I have that right? Mr. Chaillan: Yes, I think it is. Mr. Jekielek: Just the concept of that is mind-blowing. And again, this is something that the CCP could have direct control over. Mr. Chaillan: Not could have, it’s pretty clear they do. But it’s also interesting that we’re effectively funding their growth. The advertising revenue is effectively fueling the next innovations, and the next generation capabilities coming from China. Mr. Jekielek: Something just struck me. One of the effects of the shelter-in-place or lockdown policies in a lot of the world, especially the technologically-enabled world, was that people spent a ton more time online, viewing advertising and so forth. There seems to be a connection here. Mr. Chaillan: Oh yes, it’s win-win for China. People are going to spend more time online, and they’re going to live in this parallel universe. You see companies investing in Metaverse and people are disconnecting from real life, living in this dream not come true. But effectively, it is creating sheep. It’s designed to make the human brain less focused on trying to solve problems. It’s crazy how you can see the population now being okay with accepting lockdowns, that limitation of freedom. It’s all part of the same strategy, to effectively make us either dumber, or at the very least, less willing to fight back. Mr. Jekielek: We know on the record that Silicon Valley executives prohibit their kids from using social media. There’s also evidence that shows that many of these technologies were designed to be addictive. Should everyone be banning social media for their kids, and reducing their own use then? Mr. Chaillan: There is moderation for everything. I would not use TikTok, that’s for sure. I’d certainly would want to moderate the consumption. Look, maybe China is pretty smart about it. Limiting it to 40 minutes for kids under 14, and banning it at night is probably the right number. Maybe we should just for once steal some of their concepts. Mr. Jekielek: It’s fascinating to me because they’re also describing video gaming as a kind of spiritual opium. I remember there was something about that a while back in the state media. In some way they’re trying to protect their population from the same impacts that are happening here, but they’re not actually looking to have a critically thinking population. They’re looking to have a compliant population. Mr. Chaillan: They’re competing against two different objectives, but at the same time they want smart people. And so, you want to push them to be able to learn and innovate. There’s 120 million Chinese educated in science and technology. That’s a third of the United States. That’s what we’re competing against. The higher the number grows, the less likely we’re going to be able to compete, just by sheer volume. Then, we have to be smarter, we have to be willing to do it differently, we have to be able to be more innovative somehow with less volume. As you know, the world is pretty much a volume game. It is very difficult, competing against such a number of people. You’ve seen India doing very well. If you look at the Fortune 500, India’s CIOs, CEOs, and CTOs are very good at bringing in top talent, and empowering them across the world to become world leaders. Mr. Jekielek: You’re saying this is something that we have to figure out. Mr. Chaillan: If we don’t, I don’t know how we’re going to be able to compete and still be relevant. I always tell people when it comes to the DOD potentially getting breached by cyber means, I’m very concerned about cybersecurity. But there is one thing that worries me more than the DOD getting breached, it’s the DOD becoming irrelevant, that no one is even trying to hack us. There is nothing worse than being irrelevant. We’re getting close to that, because we have a population that’s divided. The politics that we’ve known for the last years is getting worse than ever. And then effectively, you have more time focused on the wrong problems. When you hear the DOD talk about focusing on climate change and focusing on domestic terrorism as the number one threat, that’s just plain nonsense. That’s not what we should be focusing on as the Department of Defense protecting America. If China is not the number one threat, I don’t know where these people have been living, but they’re not on the same planet. Mr. Jekielek: This is a very valuable point that you raise. A lot of Americans and Canadians just don’t understand the darkness that exists in some parts of the world. They imagine that all the darkness is here, and this is where all the problems are, and that it’s much worse here. Somehow, they’ve come to this understanding. They don’t realize if you get rid of the safeguards, there are some really bad things that will be very happy to come in and install themselves. Mr. Chaillan: You see the failure of education. That’s been pushed, by the way, by China for 30 years, by pushing a communism agenda and socialism agenda into the schools. You’re seeing them reap the benefits of that today. The kids have no clue. It’s funny, as an immigrant, now American, I see the hate of some people born in the United States towards America, and that was grown from the education system. Honestly, they have never traveled. They don’t know what’s going on in the world. They’ve never been to Venezuela, and they’ve never been to China, for sure. They should. They would realize pretty quickly that America is probably not as bad as they believe. That’s why it’s called the American dream. That’s why people like me move here to live and completely change their lives. They completely adapt to this new way of capitalism and thinking, of innovating, and bringing value to America. It’s scary that the schools are completely controlled now by these extremists and effectively dividing the nation. Mr. Jekielek: I want to talk about this. Of course, you are French and you became an American, so why? Mr. Chaillan: For me, it was always interesting how American values and the American dream aligned with my brain and the way I believe in things. It was just a perfect fit. Maybe I was born to be here and it just didn’t happen. But it was just weird, the way of France assisting people and holding their hand for every aspect of life and people abusing of the system. I had employees take two weeks off because they had a pimple on the hand, and they couldn’t type on a computer because the pimple was so disrupting their lives. They had to take two weeks off, fully paid by the French government and by my company. You will see these abuses, because of healthcare being free and people don’t understand how lucky they are to have access to that system, and then effectively bankrupting it by abusing it. It is just interesting how people here also see success as a good thing. There is some jealousy, but it is not the same as in France. In France, you become the target, and you become the bad guy if you’re successful. It had to be because of your dad, or because of whatever help you got. It couldn’t be because of your hard work and starting at age 12 like I did, and creating my first company at 15. My family had no background in IT whatsoever, and I didn’t get any money from my parents, but that’s what people would assume. The socialism and the way France thinks about innovation and the entrepreneur in general is despicable. It pushes people to leave. Suddenly, the funding and the growth and the opportunities are just not that exciting. So, people end up leaving. I think that’s what it is here, the American dream. Mr. Jekielek: You became American. You left the private sector, and were incredibly successful in the private sector. You’ve sold a lot of products to some of these tech giants that we’ve been discussing. But you decided to go a different way and take a significant pay cut and become first Air Force Chief Software Officer. Very briefly, before we get into what things look like today, how did that happen? Mr. Chaillan: For me, it actually started before the Air Force. I started at DHS, I was the chief architect of the Department of Homeland Security. That started because I wanted to make a difference. I literally became part of the DHS a month after I became a citizen. I could not help in any meaningful way before being a citizen. I did everything I could to line up my start date with my citizenship and focus on cybersecurity. Quite honestly, that’s why I saw how bad critical infrastructure was in terms of cyberdefense. The reason was really for me to try to make a difference. DOD was particularly exciting, because that’s where you can really save lives. Mr. Jekielek: This is fascinating. On the one hand, you’re saying that in terms of the mission, there is no better mission. This is where you are, and where you need to be. But actually, you did leave, because of things you didn’t like. You were very vocal about that. Mr. Chaillan: It was tough. I wish I could have stayed. I would’ve stayed as long as I could have. I was a term appointee, so I only had three year term. I could have extended to five. I lasted three, which was pretty good. But I felt like I had to raise awareness. I was just tired of listening to the same people, even different people talk about the same problem, and not taking any meaningful action. We were running out of time, and I saw China slowly but surely taking us over when it comes to hypersonic, when it comes to quantum computing, and when it comes to AI machine learning. Yet, the leadership at the Pentagon would talk about the “almost Sputnik” moment. That was the term, almost Sputnik moments. It wasn’t almost, it really was a Sputnik moment, and we kept diminishing it and messaging it to the public so it doesn’t look as bad, and it doesn’t look like we’re failing. You’ve seen the Afghanistan debacle where no one is held accountable and people get frustrated. I would have so many people reaching out to me in the department, complaining about what’s going on. At some point, you’re being muzzled and you can’t just tell people what you think. With the new administration, particularly, I was already pretty vocal for someone in the government. They were very concerned about me even having engagement with industry, and sharing some of the threats with China. And that’s when I felt like, “Hey, it’s important for me to leave and be able to raise awareness, make sure people understand that we have pretty much a year and a half to wake up.” That was a year ago, to be able to compete against China before it’s too late and that we’re losing the battle. You hear the leadership call China near-peer adversary all the time when it’s not true and they’re fighting the wrong battles. They’re still fighting the old school wars that would not succeed against China. You’re not fighting camels. You’re going to face a real nation that’s going to have real weapons and capabilities. We’re vastly unprepared. Every time we did any type of scenario in Taiwan, we lost communications in 24 hours. That’s exactly why you see Russia failing against Ukraine. The communication aspect is so essential to be able to organize any kind of battle. What you’ve seen with communication is the prime example of what would happen to the United States should China go after Taiwan. Mr. Jekielek: So one year on, have we learned our lesson yet? Mr. Chaillan: It’s interesting, because people ask me if I regret leaving. I think my coming out had a lot of positive impact. For example, the DOD created the first chief digital AI office, which was created to merge a lot of the silos around digital AI, machine learning, and innovation. And they put in a great individual. Craig Martell came from industry too, the commercial side, and he can really get things done. He’s reporting directly to the deputy secretary of defense, which is pretty rare in DOD. That tells you they wanted to really get things organized. The issue is the main objective was to create that office. We don’t need more offices. By office, I mean a team. I don’t mean a physical office. Obviously, they’re all at the Pentagon. But what you see here is, effectively, the first goal of that new team is to within 12 months build a team. That’s just mind-boggling to me. Instead of saying we need to have this weapon capability in 12 months with tangible outcomes for the war fighting, which is why we’re here, we’re just going to organize a bunch of people. That’s just not the velocity and the pace we need to be able to succeed at competing against China. This is kind of a bureaucracy mentality saying, “Hey, we’re going to create more bureaucracy in 12 months, and that’s going to define whether or not we succeeded at doing this engagement.” This is a prime example of the leadership not comprehending the problem, which should be focused on solving tangible outcomes for the war fighter, with tangible capabilities that they can touch and fill in production in theater. Instead, you see people creating emerging offices in the Pentagon. Mr. Jekielek: Okay. So you’re saying that the DOD is overly bureaucratic from what I hear, right? Mr. Chaillan: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: But what about this raising awareness amidst the brass, amidst the people that need to be made aware of the issues. Are they aware now? Mr. Chaillan: What we did by leaving and being so vocal about it, myself and a few other people, we created this momentum and this kind of psychological safety. People now are able to talk. You’ve seen multiple people leaving the department. Recently, we just lost a bunch of great talent, more than I’ve ever seen before. In fact, it’s actually pretty concerning, because of course the people leaving are the good ones, not the bureaucrats. You see people getting frustrated and they leave. You’ve seen recently Preston Dunlap, the Chief Architect of the Air Force, which was the most impactful person I’ve met in the department, full stop. He created most of the top innovations that I’ve seen coming out of the Air Force and Space Force in the last three years, and decided to leave six months ago. You’ve seen some of the best innovators leave, doers that actually do the work, not people like me and Preston talking about it, but people that actually get their hands dirty and do the work, the lower ranks that actually get things done. Some of the team that we created called Platform One, we had nine initial founders in the government and all nine left. So literally, we lost some of the brightest talent. Many left to go on the commercial side, come back, the sell to DOD, which is okay. But the goal of government people is to have the best interest of the taxpayer in mind. So, when you go on the Dark side, which is not really the Dark side, but we call it the Dark side, where you’re going to come back and sell back to the department, obviously you’re not going to be objective. You’re going to want to make money. It’s interesting how the DOD has no problem paying much more an individual coming as a contractor, than an employee of the government. The pay caps are completely ridiculous. Most people leaving end up making much more money, sometimes two to three times the pay on the commercial side. And so, the mission is so exciting. We have this incredible mission that’s attracting all these people, and yet we have a massive pay gap. And despite that, we still find good people. You can imagine if we were to solve this hiring nonsense and limitations of pay gaps, you could really do a real damage in solving all these issues and attracting the best talent. People want to come and make a difference, but are you willing when you’re younger to walk away from two to three times the pay? People need to feed their family. You see war fighters nowadays, because of the flash inflation, not being able to feed their family and recommended to go to the food bank to get food. It’s despicable. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s say you did fix the pay gap that you’re describing, so that people could make competitive rates. But you’re saying, the bureaucracy is still there, and still limiting things. Mr. Chaillan: Yes, but we can hack the bureaucracy, with the right people in the government jobs. The key is to have them in government jobs, not just as contractors, because contractors cannot make decisions. They have to abide by whatever the government employees say. The government employees may not know any better and don’t have the right expectation of timeliness. One of the reasons I left was because I was becoming part of the problem. And so you become part of the problem. It’s actually pretty healthy to be able to leave and come back and leave and come back. The system is not designed for this at all. First, your clearance process is a nightmare. Someone coming from the commercial side, it will be very painful to get through the hiring alone and then the clearance process. Then of course, if you leave, you can lose your clearance and then you cannot come back. None of that is done by accident. It’s designed on purpose to create this DOD bubble. Just like we have the Silicon Valley bubble, and I also call it the kumbaya bubble. But the DOD bubble is this incompetence bubble designed on purpose to make sure that we limit the talent, so that the people coming from outside an industry have a very tough time even getting the jobs. Mr. Jekielek: Wait, it’s an incompetence bubble? Mr. Chaillan: Incompetence bubble. Mr. Jekielek: That sounds terrible. Mr. Chaillan: That’s the issue when you have this self-sustaining bubble. People in the government end up leaving. You have 90-plus percent of the general officers leaving work for the top five primes in the defense initial base to come and sell back the stuff that they were trying to do in their jobs and failed at doing. Unfortunately, there’s a lot of great people, but they don’t know what they don’t know. I always joke that if you take the leadership at the Pentagon for two weeks to SpaceX, their brain will implode. They cannot grasp the velocity of the commercial side, and their system is just poorly designed. You end up building with no communication, no cellphone, right? You will be probably the last to know that there’s an attack against America one day if it happens at the Pentagon, because we are completely disconnected. You probably will get a notification on your app from CNN or Fox News before we ever find out in the Pentagon. That tells you that, effectively, this bubble doesn’t get access to the traditional methods and velocity of the commercial side. We need more people coming from the commercial side, instead of just coming into the government and then leaving to some of the primes to keep doing more of what they already know. They don’t have the ability to see, “Wait a minute, this is how we are supposed to do business.” If they were to go to startups or they were to go to SpaceX or Tesla, whatever company that’s innovative and fast and gets things done, that’s where you would see the return on investment. Mr. Jekielek: One year ago you said that there was a year and a half to catch up. Now we’re one year in. How close are we? Mr. Chaillan: Not only we did not catch up, that’s what worries me again, we actually let China take a lead in many things. The one thing we actually did pretty well is the hypersonic side of the house. We finally started to make more investments and get things done. China still has 200-plus hypersonic launches. We have 11 or 12 now, so still a pretty massive gap. And of course there is fear of failing. That’s why companies like SpaceX are so successful. They have this mentality of, “Hey, if we don’t fail, we’re not learning.” In the department, failing is bad. And so you’re going to take the least amount of risk to innovate. You just can’t do massive innovations if you are always afraid of any kind of failure. What you’ve really seen in the last year is a massive amount of people leaving the department. A lot of it probably has to do with the debacle in Afghanistan, people not held accountable, people getting away with big mistakes and no accountability, and people getting killed. The hiring is at its worst. Not only do we have trouble finding new recruits because of the state of our new generations, overweight, lack of eagerness to go serve, this mentality about America is bad. You’re losing a pretty big chunk of the population. Part of the reason why COVID was so bad in the United States is the population is so overweight and no one wants to talk about it. But it is what it is. You can’t have overweight people in the military, so that compounds a problem. When you look at all these things, that’s why China is so good at fighting this war against the United States. Each of these different pieces are thought as a cohesive plan. We are so siloed in the Department of State, DHS, DOJ, and DOD, that we don’t understand how all of these things play together to create a cohesive plan, and we have no ability to respond to it. Mr. Jekielek: As I listen to you speaking, it almost sounds like you are actually still in there, still thinking about this, and still wanting to be there. Would you go back if you were invited? Mr. Chaillan: I would go back, but I don’t know if they would invite me back. Depending on what happens in 2025, I think we’ll be back. There is this issue when it comes to being vocal about what happened. A lot of the military is taught to keep things in the house, and that’s all great. I kept it for three years diligently until I felt like, “Hey, we are all talking about the same problems for the last three years, and have yet to see the DOD do anything to solve it.” The walk the walk piece was so important to me and to the nation. Honestly, I had no kids when I started. Now, I have three kids because I had twins, they’re four years old now. The urgency and the fear was keeping me up at night. I just could not physically ignore it any longer, because I felt like I’m failing my kids. I’m failing our American friends’ kids if we don’t take action now. We’re running out of time and no one is doing anything about it. At some point, what are you going to do? You could just stay there and not be able to fix it. Honestly, with the administration change, Secretary Kendall is a great person and I think he can really get things done. But some of the appointees, unfortunately, were picked to check boxes by the administration. It’s about gender, it’s about other things than competence. Honestly, these are important jobs. I don’t care who you love and what you like to do in your life, but what I care about is that you are competent? You could find quite a few appointees right now that have no reason for being here in this building other than checking boxes. I’ve seen people getting passed by, because they were white and male. They were great, very competent experts replaced by people that have no business being there. You’re going to go and report to these people and try to educate them, so you’re taking a step back. You spend three years fixing stuff, getting momentum with the people, understanding the problem and you start backwards and it’s just so much work. We need the best of the best and we need to stop being divided. Mr. Jekielek: You’re very passionate about all this. You’re still very passionate about this work. I don’t think there is a new Chief Software Officer yet, at the moment. Mr. Chaillan: No, that tells you something interesting. When the Assistant Secretary, Mr. Hunter testified in front of Congress for his confirmation, because I was leaving right at the same time, he was asked, “Hey, software is important to the DOD, right?” He agreed and they said, “So, we assume that it’s going to be your priority to fill that role.” And he said, “Yes, it’s my top priority to fill this chief software officer role.” You’re now a year after that, and they have not yet appointed anybody, which for this kind of role can be done in 20 days. They’re still doing interviews, allegedly. I’ve yet to hear anything. Apparently they have two people from the commercial side, one person from the building. What’s interesting is the people from the commercial side already told me that they have no interest anymore, because they’ve been waiting for a year, with, by the way, no update. You can imagine waiting for a job for a year with no communication whatsoever. No one wants a job like that, for something that should really take 30 days. It took me probably 45 days to be onboarded and I’m French and all the nightmare that goes with it, with the paperwork. So for most cases, it’s a 30 day decision. And my understanding is that other people left, so we have an acting chief architect. We lost the chief software officer. We’re losing a lot of the cyber expertise. There’s also a DOD chief software officer that was appointed after I left. He lasted a year. He also left very upset about the lack of eagerness to fix the system. Jason Weiss was very competent and one of the best experts in software in the building. He lasted 12 months. So I did pretty good with three years. Mr. Jekielek: Nick, any final thoughts as we finish? Mr. Chaillan: It’s very important for most Americans to understand the threat that the CCP is causing. This is not about China. The Chinese people, they don’t really have a choice, but the CCP is an enemy here. I can tell you that when you take a step back and you look at what’s been done in the last 25 years, you’re going to see a methodical war against American interests. The fact is that most companies still refuse to engage with the DOD. If they struggle and they want to get it done, they need to do it now. I can help them do that. This is something that’s a passion for me too. I helped about 750 products get into the department. So, getting best of breed and getting access to the technology is how we’re going to win. Mr. Jekielek: Nicolas Chaillan, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Chaillan: Thank you for having me. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Nicolas Chaillan 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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