He’s the biggest donor to the Democratic Party. He spent millions to elect district attorneys who are freeing felons to wreak havoc in American cities. Evidence of his influence is everywhere you look, from Ukraine to the U.N. And his billions back everything from the U.S. media to the climate change agenda. The 92-year-old’s legacy will outlive even his fortune. So what’s motivating George Soros to punish the country that took him in? In this revelatory new episode of Over the Target, Lee Smith speaks with Matt Palumbo, author of “The Man Behind the Curtain: Inside the Secret Network of George Soros” to uncover the shocking details about the man remaking America in his own dark image. ⭕️ Watch the full video on EpochTV👉 https://ept.ms/SorosEmpireYT-OT 🔴 Join us on EpochTV 👉 https://ept.ms/FreeTrial_Lee Other videos;

Twitter has begun placing labels on the pages of several news outlets, indicating whether they receive government funding. Outlets include NPR, BBC, and several others. And as the outlets have attempted to challenge the labels, details on the amount of state funding they receive has sparked debate online over whether this impacts the credibility of the news. Meanwhile, as the debates have unfolded, other information has emerged, exposing similar state funding to the organizations that help the news outlets frame the information. It has exposed the media industrial complex, and how layers of organizations are helping frame state narratives. In this live Q&A with Crossroads host Joshua Philipp, we’ll discuss these stories and others, and answer questions from the audience. --- 🔵 Watch the full episode HERE 👉https://ept.ms/MediaIndustrialComplexCR_YT 🔴 Stay Informed, Stay Free. Join us at https://ept.ms/1DollarNOW1 ⭕️ Donate to support our work: https://donorbox.org/crossroads

Florida surgeon general Dr. Joseph Ladapo recently advised healthy men aged 18 to 39 not to get the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines. An analysis by Florida’s Department of Health found sharp increases in cardiac-related deaths post-vaccination. In this episode, he explains in detail what he and his department found. We also discuss his personal journey to where he is today, how he overcame trauma from sexual abuse as a child, and how he found the strength to go against the grain when it came to COVID-19 policy. His story is detailed in his new book, “Transcend Fear: A Blueprint for Mindful Leadership in Public Health.” “People deserve honesty. They deserve transparency. They do not deserve to be treated as objects or means to an end that can just be manipulated or coerced,” Ladapo says. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/exclusive-dr-joseph-ladapo-on-why-hes-not-recommending-mrna-covid-vaccines-for-healthy-young-men-people-deserve-honesty_4808208.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Dr. Joseph Ladapo, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Dr. Joseph Ladapo: Thanks Jan. And thank you for taking time to speak with me. I’m looking forward to it. Mr. Jekielek: You have this wonderful new book out, which I just finished reading, “Transcend Fear.” We’ll dig into that in a moment. Before we go there, I want to talk about this new guidance that you’ve instituted in Florida. Essentially, you’re saying that under 39 men should not be getting these genetic vaccines. So tell me about how this all came about. Dr. Ladapo: Sure. The backdrop is that, as you know, and I think as any honest person would recognize, these last two years, there has not been room in the atmosphere for honesty about the vaccines. So it’s almost comical. Every now and then on Twitter, someone will put out these videos, and I’ll run into one of these videos where it’s showing the president or Dr. Fauci or Dr. Walensky saying that, you will not get COVID if you take these vaccines. These vaccines are going to stop you from transmitting the virus to someone else. Or playing on guilt, I think Dr. Fauci, I watched a video of him talking about how, you don’t want to be that person that is the person that transmits COVID 19 to someone else. And I’m paraphrasing, of course. His speech was imbued with much more manipulation in trying to guilt people into taking these vaccines. And then it turns out that that was blatantly not true. And even, it was actually an issue independent of Delta. Delta made it worse. But the waning immunity, the fact that transmission wasn’t something that was tested in the primary clinical trials. It’s just been an atmosphere of tremendous manipulation, coercion, and dishonesty. So in that setting, evaluations of safety have not been at the level or to the degree they should have been, considering how widely these vaccine products were being pushed. So this is not to say there were no safety studies, there have been some. It is to say that there haven’t been enough of them. And when findings have come out that are unfavorable, they’ve received very little attention, with the exception of perhaps myocarditis. So many Americans, probably almost every American, would be surprised to hear that, for example, these COVID 19 mRNA vaccines specifically, are associated with an increased risk of appendicitis. They’re associated with an increased risk of Bell’s palsy. They’re associated with an increased risk of shingles, which can be severe in some cases. They’re associated with changes in sperm motility and sperm function and sperm count. And most recently, we’re finding that they are present in breast milk. Even though an earlier study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association reported that they were not in breast milk. And by the way, the reference for the increased risk of things like appendicitis and Bell’s palsy, et cetera, comes from a paper that was published in the New England Journal of Medicine. So one of the things that I and other people did during the pandemic that distinguished us … we were talking about Dr. Bhattacharya earlier, is that we tried to be honest and we called things out when they were not honest. And in my role as the Surgeon General of Florida, you better believe that I’m not going to stop doing the thing I’ve been doing during the entire pandemic just because I’m in this position. No, I’ve continued to prioritize safety, honesty, straight talk, acknowledgement of limitations, and communicating what I think is in the best interest of the public. Mr. Jekielek: I just want to briefly comment. You would think that someone taking on the role of Surgeon General of a state or of a country would feel more inclined to do all the things you just described, to prioritize those things, right? Dr. Ladapo: Yes. Instead, they’re busy getting their story straight on, whether it’s no mask, or one mask, or two masks. In terms of the Surgeon General that preceded the current Surgeon General of the United States, Dr. Adams, at one point was telling people not to wear masks and not to go out and get them. And then he said, you have to wear them all the time. And of course, we know how that went when eventually people were asked to wear two of them. And who knows, I don’t even remember how many they got up to in terms of their recommendations. But no, you’re absolutely right. That’s what people deserve, honesty. They deserve transparency. They do not deserve to be treated as objects or means to an end that can just be manipulated or coerced. One of the things that I wanted to do was to provide more clarity about safety in the ways that I am able to in my role as Surgeon General and with the data that we have available in Florida. Mr. Jekielek: So just very briefly, can you describe the study that you did and the conclusions, and the strength of the conclusions and the value of them from a scientific perspective. Dr. Ladapo: Sure. So this has been another interesting thing, in terms of how people have responded. And I think to understand the response, I think it’s helpful to look back at the entirety of the pandemic. So Dr. Bhattacharya, myself, others were, for example … for me it was as early as March, 2020. I was critical of the lockdowns. I stated that they were very unlikely to be effective. And for reasons that were obvious and were eventually demonstrated, you can’t do it forever. You have to open up, and the virus is going to spread more. Turns out, even during lockdowns, the virus was spreading. But that’s another issue. Mr. Jekielek: As people say, virus going to virus. Dr. Ladapo: Yes, exactly. And when those types of opinions were voiced, there was outrage. Oh no, no, no. We have to do this … whatever. 10, 15 days, whatever it was, to stop the spread. And then we have to do it longer and all that. Later on, the masks. I, others, stated plainly that yes, this is a new virus. But we have a number of randomized clinical trials on community masking. In general, the conclusion is that it is an ineffective strategy. No, how could that be? No, he’s wrong. He’s killing people, they’re making things up. No, you have to do this. You’re killing grandma. And of course, if you look at the pandemic and you look at the totality of the data and you look at the randomized clinical trials, that was obviously the correct conclusion. Later on, came the vaccine mandates and passports. I and others said, ineffective strategy. Not going to stop the spread. No, that can’t be. This is what we need. The pandemic will never end if we don’t do this. Obviously, I and other doctors and scientists who reached that conclusion based on the totality of the data were correct. More recently, we issued guidance saying that it doesn’t make sense to give children this vaccine when it is not clear that if a child is healthy, they actually experience a health benefit. There’s a huge question about risk and benefits in children. I mean that is unequivocal with this virus. Outrage. I mean, I heard from every corner of our scientific community how that was supposedly the wrong call. But it obviously is the right call. Other countries have made similar recommendations at this point. And by the way, parents vote with their feet. I mean, the uptake of these child vaccines, COVID 19 mRNA vaccines has been abysmal. And that’s telling you what people believe in terms of the value they hold. So here we find ourselves, again. We’ve done a study, we’ve used a method called a self-controlled case series. It’s actually a very powerful method. It’s not one that we’ve developed or anything, but it’s one that’s been used in hundreds of studies. Hundreds of publications have used this to evaluate vaccine safety, to evaluate the safety of other medications. The strength of the method is that it is self-controlled. So the huge problem with evaluating anything about the effectiveness or safety of any medication once it’s outside of a clinical trial, is that confounding is a B-*-T-C-H. It is just extremely difficult to identify unbiased, unconfounded estimates when something is deployed in the community and different people with different risk factors and different preferences and different behaviors choose to or not to take that medication. It is very difficult to tease out the effects of the medication from the effects of the confounders. The strength of the self-controlled case series is that you actually don’t have that problem. People are their own controls. And what we’ve seen, I saw on social media, indicated that most everyone didn’t understand the method. People were saying things about people’s risk factors, for example. Well, it’s self-controlled. So people’s risk factors are accounted for in the model. People were saying … raised other concerns about having another control group. No, it’s self-controlled. You’re actually looking at people and their own baseline risk and any incremental risk, benefit or anything that increases or decreases risk, associated with an exposure. In this case, we were looking at the COVID 19 vaccines. So the intuition of this method … and as I mentioned it’s been used in hundreds of studies. Is that all you do, you look at people who have an exposure and have an outcome that you’re interested in. And you assess whether the distribution over time of the outcome is random. In other words, you wouldn’t think the exposure has anything to do with the outcome, or whether it’s not random. In other words, perhaps the outcome is happening more after the exposure or it’s happening more later on. And what that tells you in this type of study design, is whether the exposure changes the likelihood of a person experiencing that outcome. And that’s what we did. And we found a number of different things. The COVID 19 mRNA vaccinations are associated with an 84 percent increased risk in cardiac deaths among young men. We had other findings such as, for example, an overall reduction in all-cause mortality in older people over the age of 60. And also, an increase in cardiac mortality among men over 60. So they have more than one thing happening at once. But in young men from 18 to 39, it clearly was a signal for increased risk. So that was the main finding. This is not the first study to find an increased risk of cardiovascular adverse outcomes with the COVID 19 vaccine, specifically the mRNA COVID 19 vaccines. For example, there was a study that was published in JAMA Open, one of the sub journals of JAMA, that looked at Scandinavian data. And there were a number of cardiovascular outcomes, primarily related to cerebral vascular disease … by the way, that also used the self-controlled case series model, that found increases in risk. The highest increase in risk, or one of the highest was intracerebral hemorrhage after the Moderna vaccination. And that was an increase of 119 percent, believe it or not. And it’s right there in the paper. In the appendices. Mr. Jekielek: These are incredibly significant signals. Dr. Ladapo: Oh, absolutely, yes. The blessing, of course, is that it’s not a common outcome. So in other words, even though the increase is profound, the event is uncommon. But there are a number of events. Coronary artery disease, in that study, also increased after one of the mRNA COVID 19 vaccinations. Other cardiovascular outcomes increased in risks. Another study was a study that was published in Nature’s Journal of Scientific Reports. It found an association in Israel between the rollout of COVID 19 vaccines and acute cardiovascular events in young people. It’s not definitive, but it’s another piece of evidence. And then of course, we’ve had a number of studies about myocarditis that show marked increases in risk. So there are a number of studies already. And actually, there’s a fourth one that I should mention, which is a study that the FDA did, but has been very quiet in terms of their communication about, but it’s actually available online. So the FDA has used Medicare data and they found a signal of increased risk of acute myocardial infarction. In other words, heart attacks, specifically associated with the mRNA COVID 19 vaccines. So there are a number of studies that are indicating that these vaccines, mRNA COVID 19 vaccines increase the risk of adverse cardiovascular and cardiac events. And we just added to that with another one. Mr. Jekielek: I can’t help but think of this study published fairly recently by Dr. Aseem Malhotra from the UK, a cardiologist. He essentially had made the recommendation … he looked at a whole bunch of evidence that was present. Including this study that found one in 800 incidents of adverse effects and so forth. His recommendation in the end was that these genetic vaccines should be paused. The deployment of them should be paused until further study is done, because there’s just a lot of adverse effects. What do you think of that study? Dr. Ladapo: There’s never been a time, certainly in my lifetime, where so many, essentially mainstream doctors, doctors who practice good medicine and were respected in the field, are bolting the mainstream message about these COVID 19 vaccines. And that in itself should tell you a tremendous amount. It should tell you that whatever is happening with these vaccines is unlike any other medical issues, probably that we have ever faced. In medicine, the history of medicine, there’s a great book called “The Social Transformation of Medicine.” Medicine went from essentially a very disorganized field to a much more organized field in terms of political organization, concentration of power, organization of how people would actually become doctors and be considered to be among their peers and that sort of thing. And that period of time has seen a lot of conflict, people with different perspectives about how the field of medicine should be. But nothing has ever looked like this in terms of individuals who were literally previously considered to be completely mainstream, just saying things that are not mainstream, and are sometimes even costing them jobs and repute and other important things. So he’s an example of that. A doctor who, as far as I know, was extremely mainstream, is extremely respected and all of a sudden he is screaming alarm. So I think, and I hope that people recognize that that has meaning. Just the fact that that’s happening has meaning. And in terms of specific recommendations for specific groups, what I always try to do, and what I will always do is stay close to the data. Certainly in young men, the data … while our study is not definitive, and we never claimed it was. The fact that there is so much evidence that is consistent with our findings, you obviously should not be giving mRNA COVID 19 vaccines to young men at this point in the pandemic. Are there potential exceptions? Sure. People who have received organ transplants. The calculus is always different in them. Although, truly, they may benefit more from Evusheld, which is the antibody treatment that has … I think it lasts maybe six months or maybe a year. But I think around six months. But they’re very different. Those are special populations. But in the general population, it is obviously a bad call to continue charging forward in the face of the evidence that we have thus far. Mr. Jekielek: There’s some evidence to suggest that some of these vaccine harms actually happen longer than the time period over which you looked in your study. And I guess what I’m curious about is are you thinking about expanding this study and looking at a longer tail afterwards to look at harms that might have happened 3, 5, 7 months down the road? Dr. Ladapo: That’s a really good point. So the model can only estimate what you tell it is happening in nature, and the way we’ve structured the model, we’re telling it that there’s a 30 day … 28 day period of increased risk. And after that, risk is assumed to be baseline. But if it turns out that the risk period is actually prolonged, our model would be underestimating the magnitude of risk. Fortunately, we have very strong biostatisticians and epidemiologists. I think that you would just want to be very careful about how you change the model, because you enter a domain that’s more, not hypothesis generating, but highly investigational. So you may find very important things, but you are also increasing your likelihood of being misled, or finding a false positive or false finding. So I think it requires some more thought about how to go about that. But it is an important question, and Americans should recognize that this is something the CDC should have been doing. The FDA, as I mentioned, has done it quietly—publishing reports. I’m sure that 99 out of a 100 viewers are completely unaware of this. The FDA has found in Medicare that these mRNA COVID 19 vaccines are associated with a … very consistently, and in the booster, with an increased risk of acute myocardial infarction. But I think that one just wants … one needs to be very thoughtful about approaching the safety questions beyond the primary models. Mr. Jekielek: One of the things I understand is in certain data sets, where you have to pool people … these people are vaccinated. These people are unvaccinated. These people had this adverse outcome, these people did not have this adverse outcome. What I understand is, at least in some data sets, people were only marked as vaccinated only two weeks after they actually were vaccinated, which has created this confounding variable. I don’t know if this might affect your study or not, but I’m aware that it has affected other studies that have looked at this. Dr. Ladapo: So normally in clinical trials, we have something, a concept that I’m sure you’re familiar with called, intention to treat. The idea is just that once you’re randomized to receive some intervention, the clock starts ticking. So everything that happens after that is attributed to your randomization arm in the clinical trial. Well, vaccines are treated differently, in general. And the norm tends to be that you don’t start the clock until the vaccine is thought to have had the effect that it’s going to have. I think that it’s not always appropriate to use that. I understand the rationale for using it for estimating vaccine effectiveness. Essentially, it’s the optimal estimate. But in our study we didn’t do that. So our study started because it wasn’t about efficacy, we were looking at safety. And safety starts as soon as a person is exposed. Mr. Jekielek: It’s fascinating that it’s been used in reverse. I have to ask you another question. This is actually from your book, and this was one of the most fascinating things I found in there. You described as a budding medical student, the way you were taught about vaccines and their efficacy was very, very different than the entire rest of the body of knowledge that you were learning. That was almost like a kind of indoctrination. So can you expand on that briefly? Dr. Ladapo: Yes, that is the case. And it’s part of the reason we’re seeing so much irrational behavior now. Because there’s an expansive degree of indoctrination among health professionals, among individuals who do research in public health and in health policy, and clinically as physicians. It wasn’t really something that I appreciated until in fact, this pandemic. And what I describe is the fact that when we learn about vaccines, or medications in general, there’s usually the normal way you learn about the medication. You have your pharmacology, you have your pharmacodynamics. You have your studies of mechanisms, you have data about effectiveness and safety. And it’s fairly neutral. Medications that work well, work well. Medications that are riskier, medications like Amiodarone, for example … which certainly has a role in some clinical scenarios, but has a fairly impressive safety profile in terms of the risks associated with it. That’s acknowledged. And the medication is the medication, it’s not a deity. With vaccines, they are treated instead as something that is inherently good or inherently benevolent. In general, risks are rare or essentially absent. And when individuals feel individuals who choose not to participate in vaccine programs are essentially bad people. There’s a value judgment that is absent from every other medication in medicine. For example, if you have heart disease, if you have ischemic heart disease, you should be taking a statin. Statins reduce the risk of having another heart attack and dying and having a cardiac death. But individuals, you may question the judgment of a patient with ischemic heart disease who chooses not to take a statin, but you don’t consider that person a bad person. That is not the case with vaccines. The result, which I saw and really didn’t think much of until the pandemic, is doctors, pediatricians who refuse to see families who either aren’t participating in the vaccine program, or are participating in it, but at their own pace. So in other words, maybe they spread the vaccines out, maybe they choose to have some, but not all of them. To the best of my knowledge, there are no cardiologists who refuse to see patients who don’t take a statin. They’re no primary care doctors who refuse to see patients who decide they don’t want to treat their high blood pressure with medications. That is a direct result of the indoctrination that health professionals and scientists in the health fields receive at their medical schools, in their schools of public health, and other health related fields. And if your interest is public health, indoctrination will never be the path toward enlightenment and good decision making. Mr. Jekielek: There’s about 15 other questions I have at this point, but we only have so much time to sit here. Just tell me a little bit about your background as a medical doctor, as a physician, as a scientist, as a university professor. Just that whole picture so people can understand where you’re coming from. Dr. Ladapo: So I went to college at Wake Forest University, I was a student athlete there. And then, was very lucky and got into Harvard for medical school. So I went up to Boston from North Carolina. And while I was in medical school, I’ve always had an interest in policy. I applied to the Kennedy School, the Harvard Kennedy School of Government, and their masters in public policy program. I was fortunate to get in. I did that for a year. I was always a science guy and a math guy. I’d never taken an economics class. I took an economics class for the first time at the Kennedy School, and I took another one. And I loved it. I mean, it just really spoke to me. Microeconomics is like a language about how people make decisions. Maximizing their interests, their preferences, and the setting of constraints. And it just really spoke to me. I eventually applied to the PhD program in health policy as a result of this. I ended up doing that. I finished medical school, I finished the PhD program. I went on to do a residency in internal medicine at the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. And after that, I took my first faculty position at NYU in New York City. I was there for five years. I got my first NIH grant there. Then moved to UCLA. I then got my second, third, fourth and fifth NIH grants there, and continued to do clinical research and took care of patients in the hospital. And I was tenured, actually, in 2020 during the pandemic. So that’s the main background. Of course, then I came to Florida and now I’m faculty at the University of Florida. And most of my research has been in the area of cardiovascular disease. I’ve also done a lot of work in health economics. Mr. Jekielek: Just recently, I told my staff on this show that everyone needs to read Thomas Sowell’s, “Basic Economics.” The reason I just say that is because he focuses on looking at things from the perspective of incentive structures, instead of from the perspective of goals. And if you do that, you can actually make sense of a great many things. And that’s what I … Dr. Ladapo: This is true. This is true. Mr. Jekielek: That’s what I’m hearing. And I’ve been thinking about this a lot, because that’s a paradigm shift. It helped create a paradigm shift in my thinking. And I can understand why, I think, why you’re so interested and you became so interested in economics. This is the thing I wanted to ask you. So in public health, it’s always about cost benefit, right? It’s always about cost benefit. Indeed, this is the reason why you made the guidance you made, right? It’s because the costs are so much greater than the benefits. Even though it’s not the definitive study, as you said, right? Dr. Ladapo: Yes. It’s certainly likely to be the case that the costs exceed the benefits. Not definitive, but likely enough that is the appropriate decision at this time. Mr. Jekielek: Right. How is it that we forgot about costs and benefits over the last few years? Dr. Ladapo: I think that is a very good question. And that is the trillion dollar question, maybe. And truly I don’t understand it, it’s so obvious. For some people it was always very clear. Again, to bring up Dr. Bhattacharya, Martin Kulldorff, the Great Barrington Declaration. It was very clear the school closures were an incredibly costly intervention, and now, of course, where we’re starting to see the fallout of that. And unfortunately, based on prior research, that fallout will extend through lifetimes. So not only the lifetime of individuals who fell behind. Early childhood educational outcomes are predictive of income and health, long term, but it’s also contributing to the health outcomes and the life outcomes of their children. But this dysfunction, with being able to calmly, coolly and in a way that is free of bias, evaluate risks and benefits, I don’t understand it. Sometimes I hypothesize that the politics of the pandemic and the fact that people do get very invested, people tend to get very invested in their politics, is what might be behind the confusion and the inability to see clearly. And I think that probably contributes, but I think it’s even more than that and I don’t understand it. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s jump to something in your book. You describe a lot of challenges in your life, and a lot of anxiety and fear. And that was manifesting in your family. I think you’re very transparent about many things in the book. It’s actually very touching, frankly, to read about. And at some point, I think your wife steps in and says, look, something’s got to change. I’ve got something you need to try. And you give it a shot. And in the process, heal yourself. And then right in time to be able to take this perspective. So what happened here? Dr. Ladapo: So I was driving my poor wife nuts. My poor wife, because of the emotional problems and burdens that I carried and brought into our relationship, and eventually into the lives of our kids. And that was a long process in terms of the evolution of that with my wife, and her trying to help me in different ways. And she helped me tremendously, but she was out of steam. Her tank was on empty. And I, unfortunately, was still light years away from where I needed to be to be free of those burdens; to be open and light and heart-centered and alive and present. And fortunately, she found a guy, his name’s Christopher Maher. And fortunately I worked with him, and life has never been the same since. And fortunately it happened before the pandemic, otherwise we wouldn’t be sitting here right now. Because it would’ve been impossible for me to do all the things I did during the pandemic. Mr. Jekielek: You have what seems to be a great relationship with your wife, and obviously a very caring, loving individual. I love your description of the moment where you get the offer to become surgeon general. You have a very, very well established life in LA and you expect there to be some pushback. And you say to your wife, hey, I just got this call. And she’s like, you should do it. Dr. Ladapo: Yes. That’s exactly … yeah. I’m picturing right now. I remember I walked into the kitchen, my wife’s back was to me, she had just come from, maybe a grocery store or something, or running some errands, and she was walking into the kitchen. And I was like, oh, honey. I got a call from Governor DeSantis’ office. Honey, they asked me if I would be interested in being their surgeon general. And she just snapped around, and she looked like someone had just whispered in her ear and it was something she didn’t even know she was waiting to hear, but she just heard it. And she just right there knew that I should do it. And so that was a surprise. And you’re absolutely right. We had actually, believe it or not, we had just moved into a house. We found something, it was a gem. It was in West LA, it had a backyard. And that was really the primary reason we were moving out of our condo, because it seemed to be no end in sight with the crazy school mask stuff at LA, which my wife and I would never participate in because it’s an evil agenda in terms of trying to get these masks on kids and trying to normalize it. We were never going to participate in that. And we needed more space with three boys. More outdoor space, specifically. So we had just moved into a house in West LA, great location, great outdoor space. There were even deer in the neighborhood and other wildlife. And we were probably 70 percent unpacked. And I was tenured at UCLA. I had a handful of clinical trials. Many of my colleagues weren’t being very nice to me. But if you do your work and you do good work, there’s not that much substantively that they can do to you, other than not invite you to parties and that kind of thing. So I didn’t think I would move, and I didn’t think my wife would be interested in moving, considering we literally had our roots there. But without hesitation, that’s exactly what she said we should do. Mr. Jekielek: I just, it really spoke to me personally, because I’ve had a few experiences like that. My wife likes to think things over, typically. It’s usually, okay, let’s think about that. But the few times when she’s just been, snap, it was definitely the right thing to do. Dr. Ladapo: And I think that there’s actually wisdom in that, when something does snap like that. That’s our inner guides telling us the direction to go. Mr. Jekielek: Well, okay, that’s interesting. Let’s talk about the inner guides, because you refer to that in the book. And that’s not necessarily something even many people are aware of. Dr. Ladapo: Yes. So I would say that one of the things about working with Christopher Maher back in December 2019, is that it opened me up to receive more of what is around me in the world. And prior to that … I think it might be hard for many people to imagine this because they may not have this experience. But I was unable to emotionally connect with other living beings, with a few exceptions. My wife being one of those exceptions. And my kids, but even that was stunted. And really with my wife, the only reason it happened was because we fell in love. I didn’t know it. I fell in love with her without knowing it, through our conversations on the phone. She was in a different city. Had she been in the same city, things would not have been the same because I would’ve been wrapped up in what I thought things should look like and be, and things like that. But instead we were on the phone, and I had no intention of doing anything but talking. And I fell in love on the phone from our conversations. And so therefore, I was able to emotionally connect with her. And of course, one of the things about love is that it pushes to the surface everything that’s not working in your life in terms of your emotions. And so that started or prompted our journey. Because falling in love meant that all of these things that were preventing me from doing the thing that is, in a way, the most natural thing you can do, which is to emotionally connect with another human being, all of those things came to surface. Why can’t I do that? And it wasn’t something that I was conscious of as a problem, it was how things were. So I thought that’s how things are, and that’s normal. So working with Christopher … and just to really summarize very briefly the kind of work that he does. It’s based on the concept, and really the reality of chi and flow. Things that are not in the conscious domain entirely, but affect our being and how we show up in the world. And what his work is, is a combination of physical activities, physical exercises, isometric, concentric, eccentric contractions that change how your muscles exist, how parts of your body exist. And in doing so, changed the ability of chi to flow through your body. And it was not a concept that … I had no familiarity. I would never have even believed it was possible. The first day I worked with him, I thought it was nonsense. It cost a lot of money. And I went home and I thought, this is not going to work. I’m wasting my money, I’m wasting my time. And what happened was, I went to sleep … got home. Did the routine with the kids, Brianna, went to bed. And I woke up in the middle of the night and I felt different. And I wasn’t even sure … this was after the first day. I wasn’t sure. I still remember waking up and I was like, what is that? There was a sensation of something not being present anymore. And in its place, some lightness and smoothness. And in my heart area. And it just felt strange. Went back to bed, and then I got up in the morning. And that morning … our kids were smaller then. And everyone who’s a parent … now our kids are nine, six, and the three year old will be four in a month. But back then they were almost three years younger. So there was a lot of chaos in the household. Because smaller kids, I mean, it’s a big challenge with little kids and trying to get them to … okay, time to eat. Okay, time to shower. Okay, time to do this. So I was a stress case every morning trying to get them ready with my wife, and then get in the car, get them dropped off, get to my office. I was a stress case every day. And that morning I told my wife, honey, we’re not out the door yet. Things aren’t … not like everything’s ready. But I’m not stressed. I’m not falling apart, I’m not stressed out. And she had some disbelief because this was over a decade into our relationship, and it’s been a struggle every step of the way because of my problems. But I just told her, I just don’t feel stressed. I usually feel really stressed right now, honey, and I don’t feel stressed. And she’s like, good, honey. Good, baby. And I dropped them off, got in an Uber and had … believe it or not, but it’s true, the first conversation with another adult that wasn’t Brianna, in which I emotionally connected with that individual. And it blew my socks off. I mean I was … Thanks. Thank you. Mr. Jekielek: It’s such a powerful experience. Dr. Ladapo: Thank you. Could I have a tissue please? Thanks. I don’t want you guys not to get anything. Please show the whole thing. It’s not … everything. All this, all of it, please. Yes. So I was in the Uber, and the driver was a nice guy. He had a daughter, and I think a son also. And we talked about the kids and we talked about his life. And I was there and I was with him. And I felt him and I felt his feelings and his experience and I felt close to him. And I was blown away that it never happened to me before. And when I got to Christopher’s condo in Marina del Ray in Los Angeles, I told Christopher about the fact that this had happened. And I said, Christopher, if we stopped right now, it would be worth it. It would be worth every penny I have to be able to have this ability. To be able to connect with … I was like, we could stop right now. But fortunately we didn’t stop, and it only got better. So part of working with him and getting rid of the trauma of and the stress that was stored in my body, in different parts of my body … with chi, there are different channels. And the channels do different things and they connect to your organs in different ways. They oversee different parts of our being, from our inner strength to our vision. To the parts that control whether we are fearful or fearless. Whether we’re loving or withholding. Different channels connect with them and oversee them. And we worked on a bunch of different ones. And there was still more to do. After that week, we worked together and we’ve since worked together a few more weeks. And basically once a year I work with Christopher to access more of me. As you do that, your ability to see more, and not just with your eyes, it’s your ability to feel more. Your ability to … Christopher calls it, he calls it true body intelligence. But basically, our bodies are extremely intelligent. And more intelligent than, pretty much almost every living person accesses. But you can access more of that if you’re able to get more chi flowing through your body, through different parts of your body. And that’s how things are supposed to be. We’re supposed to be in flow, but most, nearly 99.9 percent of us are not in flow because we’ve got all this stuff that’s literally in our bodies preventing us from doing that. And so as you get rid of more of that stuff, you have more access to more knowledge and more absorption and appreciation and identification of what is around you. Both stuff that you can see with your eyes, and things that you can’t see with your eyes. And the voice of God runs through all of us. And there are angels and guides that help direct our lives. And that is part of what I fortunately have more access to. My wife has always actually … and there are many people on this earth that just have more connection to that. That just have more intuition in those areas and it’s just a gift that they have from God. My wife happens to be one of those people, and there are other people like that. Of course, my wife having that intuition and insight is how she got me to the right guy to help me. Mr. Jekielek: So we have some, let’s call it analogous experiences. And thank you for sharing so thoroughly here, on this with me. I’m truly honored, actually. You actually talk about this, I think in your first prescription, is the making better public health decisions. Part one is to the individual, right? Dr. Ladapo: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: That was probably one of the most important parts of the book to me. I feel like we live in a society where people have forgotten that. Dr. Ladapo: Oh, that’s for sure. That is absolutely for sure. That people think that it’s all about the degrees or the titles or other things that are external to you. In crisis, in emergencies, the most important thing is you. What you bring with you to that emergency, to that crisis. So I appreciate that you appreciated that, Jan, because it is the case. That is the single most important thing, to make good decisions in high stress environments. How much work you’ve done on yourself to maximize the authenticity of who you are prior to walking into confronting that crisis. Mr. Jekielek: I can’t help but think, as we speak right now in Florida, in Orlando, there’s a conference on treatment of both what’s called long COVID, basically spike related disease, or vaccine injury. Those people that are exploring how to do this. Treatment in any way other than vaccination has been something that has been dramatically suppressed throughout the pandemic. I think it would be an understatement, almost. Again, how is it that in this one instance we forgot about treatment, or just decided not to recommend treatment? Just from what I’ve learned from many doctors I’ve spoken with, it’s just, treatment is what you would try to do when there is disease. Dr. Ladapo: Yes. Well, this actually ties in very well with everything that we’ve been discussing. So one of the benefits, and not just for oneself, but really for all around the person, of really working on yourself so that you clear out as much garbage from your emotional, spiritual, physical being when encountering a crisis like the COVID 19 pandemic, is that you can see more clearly. And this tragedy with treatment is just another abject example of that. So back in November 2020, around November 2020, I wrote an article about the fact that everyone knew at that point that we were going to have a surge of cases as winter came. What I wrote was that, okay, we’re going to have a lot of cases. We know how to do science. What we should do is make the best use of the fact that we’re going to have a lot of cases by immediately running prospective studies of high risk people who test positive with potential candidates for therapy. Because as you recall, there were thousands and thousands and thousands of cases daily. Eventually many, many, many thousands. We were over a 100,000, as a nation. Enrolling patients, testing different medications, whatever plausible medications that an investigator thought ought to be tested and getting answers about COVID 19 hospitalizations and COVID 19 deaths and the relationship, if any, between that and medication and those outcomes. We could have had that in a few weeks. We could have had damn near definitive answers within a few weeks. And that’s exactly what should have been done, had the goal been to save lives. That was the best thing that we could have done at that point. Mr. Jekielek: Still is. Yeah. Dr. Ladapo: Right, yes. And the dynamics have changed, but then the case fatality rate was much higher. Many people, I mean many, many, many people unfortunately died that winter. Many, many, many people’s lives could have been saved instead. So when I wrote that, fortunately, it actually connected me with a few people like Steve Kirsch, who at that time, had just finished a … or funded a clinical trial of Fluvoxamine. It was a small trial, but it yielded favorable results. That was obviously one of the medications that should have been tested in a larger setting. And there were other medications. Personally, from my review of the evidence, I think that early outpatient use of hydroxychloroquine, it likely reduces COVID 19 hospitalizations and other severe outcomes by probably at least 20 percent from the randomized clinical trials that I’ve looked at. Again, basically the main finding is, for most of those trials report a reduction where the reduction isn’t statistically significant, but the reduction tends to be in the same direction. You do a meta-analysis. It’s possible, maybe likely that you will reach a significant result. There was a lot of attention on Ivermectin at that time. I was less familiar with that medication, but obviously that would’ve been another candidate for testing. Inhaled budesonide would’ve been another candidate for testing. There were some other agents, I think even some that were being used in Asian countries that potentially could be candidates for testing. But the most important part of that whole thing is that we test. We find out, we get answers. And you use those answers in real time to save lives. It’s so obvious, it’s almost blinding. But instead, because of how screwed up so many people were, things that should have been obvious if you were just looking very cleanly, not caring about politics, not caring about whether you made the wrong decision. Not being fearful of death is such that it’s paralyzing and leads you to think that the only answer is to hide in your house and tell other people to do the same thing. And that way everything will be okay when you’re free of all of those things, you can see more clearly. But instead, unfortunately, people have been so entangled by things that are really not aligned with, I’m sure what they would really want, if they chose before any of this happened, what their highest values would be or what their principles would be in the setting of confronting an emergency. So instead, terrible decisions were made, treatment was stigmatized, instead of being just another thing that you look at and see if it helps people. And folks were told the wrong thing. And many, many people died as a result, that would still be alive today. Mr. Jekielek: You just reminded me, this is from an article, “Fear and Loathing in COVID America,” that you wrote. Good title. “Fear Stoked by the Press gave birth to the dogma that preventing COVID 19 cases isn’t an issue only of health, but of morality. Even if prevention comes at the cost of livelihoods and duties, or increases in poverty and domestic violence or sacrifices in children’s educational and emotional wellbeing.” That sentence really encapsulated what you were just talking about, about just the whole pandemic. But also the fact that the media played such a significant role. Dr. Ladapo: Oh, gosh. I would watch the news every day, and mostly with disgust. So much of the media did such a disservice to the principles of honesty, of honest communication, of informative communication. It’s difficult to even wrap one’s mind around it. So many things that were said, including all of the propaganda about masks. All the propaganda about the notion that when people contracted COVID 19, it was because they let their guard down. There was so much nonsense circulating in the media and misleading people, that I don’t even know where to start in terms of an accounting of it. It’s unfortunate. It seems like it’s something that they’ve gotten away with—haven’t really been held accountable for. When people are held accountable for things, it helps prevent those things from happening again. But so far, those things can just happen again. Mr. Jekielek: As we finish up, your book title … I’m going to read it again. “Transcend Fear: A Blueprint for Mindful Leadership and Public Health.” I hope that our viewers can see from this interview that your book and your thinking lives up to its title, which I certainly believe it does. And people say that courage is contagious. Reading your book, I think it gave me a little more courage, I think. I mean that seriously. And I just subtly, I noticed that at the end. I thought, this is so straightforward. And as we talk here, so many of us are so careful about not wanting to offend the sensibility of the so many people out there who simply just don’t have good information. And this is difficult. It’s a bit paralyzing. People have this in their families, people have it in the workplaces. I mean, never mind the people that have been ostracized. So I guess as we finish, my question to you is what do you recommend to people who are thinking these thoughts that I’m just sharing right now? Dr. Ladapo: Well, I’m really happy to hear that you felt more courage after reading it. That is meaningful to me and that makes me very happy that that happened. Indeed, we are all courageous beings. It’s the stuff that we pick up in terms of the stressors and the effect that different experiences have on us that can get in the way of that. And I think that what I would say, I wrote the book because I love people. I love each and every individual. I want folks to be happy and to be free of burdens. And I think that what I would say is for people whose voice is calling them to do something or to resolve something or to achieve something that they want. That has to do with them becoming more aligned with who they are, more authentic, freer of the burdens and the things that we all pick up during this life. I hope it speaks with them and I hope they listen to their voice and their intuition and they follow that. Mr. Jekielek: Well, Dr. Joe Ladapo, such a pleasure to have you on the show. Dr. Ladapo: Thanks. Thank you very much, Jan. Thank you. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Surgeon General Joe Ladapo 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

The Chinese regime has established police departments outside its borders, including in New York City where officials announced criminal charges against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) agents. Among the individuals being charged are members of the CCP’s Ministry of Public Security, and the crackdown could help shut down similar overseas police stations operating elsewhere. Meanwhile, New York City is rolling out new robot police. The new K5 units will start by patrolling the transit system, and are slated to help improve public safety around the city’s subways. The systems are being met with mixed reactions, with both a want for better rule of law, yet also with concerns about how similar robot police are used in other countries. 🔵 Watch the full episode HERE 👉 https://ept.ms/CCPPoliceInNYC_CR_YT 🔵 Feature Films | Crossroads with JOSHUA PHILIPP: The Final War Documentary DVD An unprecedented combination of personal story and geopolitical struggle, history, and present, “The Final War” follows Epoch Times reporters and top China watchers through their journeys of awakening to the CCP threat. The investigative team behind the viral documentary Tracking Down the Origin of the Wuhan Coronavirus set off on a new journey. Chapter 1 Post-Pandemic War Chapter 2 Stealth World War III Chapter 3 CCP’s Secret Agenda to Defeat America Chapter 4 Deceiving The Sky Chapter 5 What Price Will We Pay? Chapter 6 Defending America

“HHS has lost track of around 40,000 kids. I mean, think about that. We have no idea where they are. We don’t know who they’re with. We don’t know what they’re doing.” Today, I sit down with Julio Rosas, a senior writer for Townhall and a U.S. Marine in the Reserves. Since 2020, he’s been traveling to the middle of the action to report on chaotic, and often dangerous, situations. “These are big stories, and we can’t rely, unfortunately, on the rest of the media to accurately relay the importance of it or tell the story,” says Rosas. We discuss the recent hearing on the border crisis in Yuma, Arizona, in which the House Judiciary Committee spoke with local residents about how mass migration has affected their community. “The only major hospital for many, many miles around … they’re out $26 million dollars because of medical care that they’ve had to provide to illegal immigrants. But they’re not paying them back, the migrants,” explains Rosas. We also discuss his book, “Fiery But Mostly Peaceful: The 2020 Riots and the Gaslighting of America,” and how well-intended policies and our obsession with race have ended up exacerbating racial tensions, enabling crime, and stoking further division. “There are so many parallels between the border crisis and the crime crisis because just like with the cartels, the criminal elements are more emboldened than ever,” says Rosas. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/julio-rosas-the-destruction-of-law-and-order-in-america-from-the-crime-crisis-in-cities-to-migrant-chaos-at-the-border_5149800.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Julio Rosas, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Julio Rosas: Thank you for having me. Mr. Jekielek: I have to call you a genuine field reporter. Whenever I see your work, you’ve gone into the middle of the action and you’re there reporting. To start, tell me what drives you to do that? What is your operating principle here? Mr. Rosas: One of the reasons I do it is because I see field reporting as one of the purest ways to do actual journalism. One of my heroes is Ernie Pyle, who was a combat correspondent during World War II, and he was super famous back then. The joke was that you would have rather get a feature by him in the newspaper than get a medal. That’s how cherished his work was, and that’s how important his work was. Because it wasn’t just about the combat, it was about the actual person, about the American GI that was actually fighting. I see his work and compared to the work that’s being done today, it’s just so completely different. When it comes to chaotic situations, stories that are uncomfortable or inconvenient to get to or report on, people get lazy, and the mainstream media generally gets lazy. I like that Town Hall allows me to get to the heart of it and to actually see what’s going on for myself, so that I can have a better idea of how to relay it back to our audience. It doesn’t matter whether it’s the riots back in 2020, or what’s happening now at the border. These are big stories. Unfortunately, we can’t rely on the rest of the media to accurately relay the importance of it or to tell the story. Therefore, it has to be conservative media picking up the slack. Mr. Jekielek: I can’t help but notice that you were a Marine, looking at your lapel pin here. How does your hero, this embedded military reporter, figure into your philosophy here? Mr. Rosas: As, ”embrace the suck.” Don’t get me wrong, some of the work that I’ve done has been tough and taxing, both mentally and physically. There’s one thing that we were always told, especially during bootcamp, they always said, “Someone has it worse than you right now.” Today, you have to be comfortable with being uncomfortable. That’s especially true with just going to the border. Sometimes you do five, six drives back to back. You wake up early and go to bed really late, just because there are different things happening at different times. You can’t slack off. You have to actually put in the work, or all of a sudden, you’re wasting a trip. You’re there, you do the work, and you can rest later. Being a Marine definitely made me want to do the more crazy things. Because obviously, you have to be kind of crazy in order to join the Marines in the first place to want to willingly go through something like that. Mr. Jekielek: You went down to the border just recently and you were actually reporting on something a little less chaotic this time, the first House Judiciary hearings at Yuma, Arizona. Please tell me about that. This is a different story for you, isn’t it? Mr. Rosas: Yes, and it’s because we’ve had Democrats who obviously weren’t going to do something like that. The House Judiciary Committee had their first field hearing in Yuma, Arizona. It’s a place I’ve been to many times. It’s a community that’s been heavily impacted by the influx of illegal immigration. None of the Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee showed up. It was only Republicans. The Democrats said, “They didn’t consult us on the trip,” which is a lie. The GOP side was telling them about it for over three weeks. They didn’t want to see the reality of what was happening. One of the things that really stuck out to me was that the hearing was held at the Yuma City Hall Council Chamber, and it was open to the public. They reached capacity from the local community because that’s how obviously invested they are. One of the things I’ve always heard time and again from Texas to Arizona is that the locals feel abandoned by the federal government. They’re accurate and they’re right to a certain extent. They’ve been abandoned by the executive branch. To have pretty prominent figures like Jim Jordan, Matt Gaetz, Dan Bishop, come to their town and talk to them about this issue that they’ve been raising the alarm about for over a year-and-a-half now means a lot to them. It’s a small gesture saying, “We’re here. We want to help you fix this problem, and we’re going to try to do our best. We’re going to come to you to try to solve this problem.” I talked to a few of the residents and they were very happy to have Congress there. Understandably, people can be cynical about congressional hearings. In the past, we’ve had hearings and they’ve made a big scene, and then nothing’s done about it afterwards. That might happen. Mr. Jekielek: This is my next question. It seems like the people appreciate it, but Congress doesn’t have a good reputation on taking action at the moment, certainly in the mind of the populace. Mr. Rosas: During my panel today with the Homeland Security Committee Chairman, Mark Green from Tennessee, he was saying that they have the most conservative border security bill ready for markup by the end of March, and they’ll put it on the floor by April. There is going to be follow through. The Republican Party really understands that they can’t waste this moment. They can’t waste the small amount of goodwill that they got from the midterms, and so they’re actually going to make an effort to solve the problem. Even if it’s a slim majority of Republicans, the border crisis hasn’t stemmed from the legislative branch, it has stemmed from the executive branch. I don’t think anything is going to be solved until there’s a change in the White House. At the same time, we can’t just say, “We’re going to wait until 2024,” because what if 2024 doesn’t go the Republicans way? Then, things are going to continue. It’s a tough topic, and it’s a tough challenge. We’ll see what happens. But I can tell you that the locals really appreciate politicians getting out of DC and seeing the problem firsthand. Mr. Jekielek: There were some powerful testimonials given. Tell me about some of those that you witnessed. Mr. Rosas: The Yuma County Sheriff told them, “We’ve always had problems with the cartels, but it’s gotten worse than it’s ever been in our county’s history.” The president of the local hospital, the only major hospital for many miles around, said that they’re out $26 million because of medical care that they’ve had to provide to illegal immigrants. The migrants are not paying them back, and they’re losing out on all this money. Because they prioritize care on who needs it the most, a lot of times illegal immigrants get the priority. Understandably, that has caused a lot of frustration in the local community. The hospital system is only designed to accommodate a population size of around 140,000 between Yuma, San Luis, and Gadsden. Over 300,000 people illegally crossed into Yuma since late 2021. That is almost three times the number of people, and a lot of those people need significant medical care. We’re not even talking about broken bones and bumps and bruises and some dehydration cases. We’re talking about people that need heart surgery. We’re talking about mothers delivering, taking up space in the maternity ward, and then their babies need to be in the NICU [Neonatal Intensive Care Unit] because they didn’t have prenatal care during their pregnancies. Obviously, a lot of the places they’re coming from have no opportunities for this. That’s the thing, we’re a compassionate nation, as we should be. We also shouldn’t forget the fact that it is also negatively affecting the taxpayers, the people who are American citizens. We need to also make sure that we’re not leaving American citizens behind either. It’s a balance. They’ve had to contend with that while the Biden administration just says, “It’s not a big deal.” Mr. Jekielek: Just a few days ago, the New York Times published a piece about the children that were in the cages during the Trump administration. Then, they talk about how a lot of these kids are now basically doing child labor as a matter of course. It’s a scathing indictment of what’s happened at the border. It was fascinating to read this piece because there haven’t been many on this topic or anything remotely related that criticize the administration’s border policy. What do you make of that? Mr. Rosas: It became too big of a problem for even the mainstream media to ignore. It’s insane that in 2021 Secretary Mayorkas said, and I believe it was from the White House podium, “Any child that comes by themselves to the southern border, we’re not going to turn away.” What do you think happened after he said that? Parents willingly separated themselves from their kids to send them on a very dangerous journey, if they made it to the southern border. Then, they continued to get exploited after they get released because HHS [U. S. Dept. of Health & Human Services] and DHS [Dept. of Homeland Security] are not doing the full background checks. They’re not checking up on them. Tom Holman, former ICE [U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement] Director in the Trump administration who was on the panel today said that HHS has lost track of around 40,000 kids. Think about that. We have no idea where they are. We don’t know who they’re with. We don’t know what they’re doing. Some of them have ended up at pretty dangerous jobs working in meat processing plants, and working in packaging facilities. Honestly, as bad as it sounds, those are the lucky ones. Because the alternative is sex slavery. That’s why I get so fired up about the issue, because it didn’t need to be this way. Of course, if you say, “We’re not going to turn away unaccompanied minors,” they’re going to send them across by themselves. I’ve seen kids as young as six, seven crossing the border by themselves without their parents, going who knows where, to who knows who. The Biden administration has the gall to say that this is a more humane approach to the border and to immigration. It’s a complete lie. It is not humane in the slightest, and it’s avoidable. But they say, “No, we’re going to do it this way.” Mr. Jekielek: What are the options? This article intimates that the state should be taking care of all these kids. That’s another curious thing. Mr. Rosas: Again, they think that their way and their approach to trying to help the less fortunate is the better way. I have to go back to the ripple effect that this will continue to have for years. Even if they were to completely reverse the border policies that they’ve been pursuing, starting today, the secondary and tertiary effects are going to be with us for a very long time. We’re going to be basically in another DACA [Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals] fight. We already had the dreamers from the first go-around back during the Obama administration. There’s been so many kids who have been born during this new surge. Now, there’s going to be another fight about this next generation of dreamers. It’s all self-inflicted. That’s why reporting on it is important. I’ve been covering the border since 2019 and things were radically different. Moving forward on this issue is a matter of political will. Obviously, that changes as easily as the wind. We’re setting ourselves up for more dysfunction. We’re setting ourselves up for more polarization on this issue. The Biden administration is willing to take those political hits, because they think that this is what needs to be done. I don’t know what the future is going to hold. But this is going to be something that we’re going to have to deal with for a very, very long time. Mr. Jekielek: How do you view the incentive structures from all the reporting that you’ve done that are getting so many people coming across, using all these different mechanisms that exist? Mr. Rosas: It’s everything from start to finish. If you illegally cross, you’re not going to be turned away. You’ll get processed and released. You’ll get a work permit. Even if you lose your asylum case, we’re not going to deport you, because you’re a low priority to us under this administration. I really don’t fault people for taking advantage of that if you’re in a less fortunate country. It doesn’t even have to be Latin America. I met people as far away as Uzbekistan, India, and Russia. Mr. Jekielek: China. Mr. Rosas: China. Mr. Jekielek: I have reports about Chinese migrants. Mr. Rosas: When I was in El Paso in December, I met a family from China. They’re just responding to the incentives that the Biden administration has put forth. “You can skip the line, you can get in, and you probably won’t be deported.” To a lot of people that’s a no-brainer. I feel bad for the people who went through that very lengthy, very expensive process to come the legal way because now they’re thinking, “What was the whole point of all that?” It’s not just about Americans who were born here. It’s also about the Americans who actually did it the right way. Mr. Jekielek: A lot of people don’t understand the traumatic reality that a lot of the people that are coming through have to face at the hands of these coyotes and the cartels. Mr. Rosas: I’ve gotten some pushback from the Left and they say, “What about your family? You’re just one of those people who slams the door once they get in.” The reason why illegal immigration shouldn’t happen is precisely because of what happens to the migrants. At best, they just get into massive amounts of debt that they have to pay off to the cartels. At worst, they have to go into slavery. The vast majority of the people that are coming across, they’re not coming across unscathed. They get victimized in some way. I was in Eagle Pass, Texas, and I found it was a spot where people had been picked up by Border Patrol. They discard most of the things that they don’t need anymore. One of the things that I saw was a used package of birth control pills. It’s because they know that they were probably going to get raped on the way over. There have been National Guardsmen, and there have been Border Patrol who have been shot at from the Mexican side. That is a really big indicator where the cartels feel more emboldened than ever. They know that if they were to actually shoot or kill a member of the military or American law enforcement that we’re going to come down hard on them. But they don’t have that fear. Why should they? The Biden administration is really not going to do anything. Some of these organizations have shifted their focus from drug smuggling to human smuggling and human trafficking. Because with drug smuggling, there’s a chance that your product is going to be intercepted, so you lose out on that money. From a business standpoint, who could fault them? They’re just making money, right? They’re going to do the thing that makes them the most money. It’s very telling that some of these groups realize the value in shifting their focus from drugs to people. Mr. Jekielek: Not to mention that when there is a flood of people coming across, it means that it is a lot easier for the drugs to come across. Mr. Rosas: Yes. One of the talking points from the Democrats is, “Most of the fentanyl that’s seized, it’s seized at the ports of entry, and it’s mostly being smuggled by American citizens.” Statistically, that is true. But why is it true? It’s because when you have a controlled access point that’s monitored with technology and agents a hundred percent of the time, you’re going to intercept more people and drugs that are trying to sneak in. But when groups send out 500 people at one time in one area, the Border Patrol that’s already stretched thin has to then focus on that group to take care of the transport and process them. That takes them off the line from the rest of the area. There are hundreds of miles that are not being patrolled. What do you think the cartel’s doing with that open border? They’re smuggling the people who are paying to not get caught. We’re not talking about giant sacks of marijuana, which actually still happens, don’t get me wrong. But we’re talking about something that can fit into a backpack and make more money than a giant bundle of marijuana. Fentanyl has completely changed the game when it comes to drug smuggling. They make more profit. It’s more powerful. It’s not limited to a growing season. Of course, the numbers are going to be skewed. Although recently, for this fiscal year, Border Patrol has been able to— Border Patrol, not customs agents. Customs agents are at the ports of entry. Border Patrol is between—Border Patrol has been able to seize dozens of pounds of fentanyl this fiscal year. Because they’ve been able to get agents back out into the field, they’ve been able to do more of their real job, instead of processing people. That’s why Fentanyl seizures have gone up because they’re back on the line. This idea that, “The fentanyl smuggling and the human smuggling are two separate issues.” No, they’re one and the same. It’s dumb to think that they wouldn’t take advantage of an unsecured border. Mr. Jekielek: You wrote a book not too long ago, Fiery But Mostly Peaceful. That’s the title of your book about protests from that infamous CNN chiron. In the subtitle, you talk about the gaslighting of America. What do you mean there? Mr. Rosas: It was just the fact that we had cities on fire. We had mass chaos in major American cities, and the mainstream media and Democrats were saying, “It’s mostly peaceful.” Mr. Jekielek: The statistic was that something like 8 percent were violent. Mr. Rosas: Like 93, 92 percent were peaceful, and 7, 8 percent were violent. The overwhelming majority were peaceful. You know what I said to that? I said, “Thank God that only 8 percent were violent.” When you talk about the money aspect, billions of dollars in damage were caused by these riots. Could you imagine if 50 percent were violent? That’s probably a civil war-level of destruction. But again, it’s skewed because all it takes is one riot to massively set back a city. Look at Newark and look at Detroit. The riots happened back in the sixties. Are those places any better to live in today? No. I’m not saying it was just because of the riots, but it certainly didn’t help the quality of life in the aftermath. Take a look at Minneapolis right now, the epicenter of it all. What has happened since then? I have sources within the department. I don’t even know how they still do their jobs because they are quite literally unable to do any enforcement. I attempted to do a ride-along. It was a whole story. I literally got to the unit and then City Hall said, “No, he can’t,” despite my getting prior approval. But anyway, they have what they call enforcement days that happen every couple of months. It’s the only time the Minneapolis Police Department is actually able to go out and do proactive police work. The majority of the time, they’re always reacting, and they’re super short-staffed. Mr. Jekielek: Wait a second, you’re telling me that in the inner city, there is no proactive policing? Is that what you’re saying? Mr. Rosas: No, and it’s not just Minneapolis. It’s also Chicago and Portland, Oregon. Mr. Jekielek: Isn’t proactive policing a critical thing in these communities? Mr. Rosas: Yes. Now, you’re constantly reacting to a shooting. Then, when someone is arrested, they get low bail or no bail, or they plea down to a misdemeanor. The issue today isn’t defunding the police. That was an issue back in 2020. Since then, take a look at Minneapolis. They went from wanting to abolish their police department to increasing funding. But the problem is that the message has already been sent. Now, no one wants to be a police officer. Today, the issue in Chicago, New York City, and Los Angeles is manpower. The primary issue is the progressive DAs who are Soros-backed. That’s not a conspiracy. It’s a fact that he’s backed all these soft-on-crime district attorneys. They’re letting these criminals out onto the street who then commit serious crimes. We’re not talking about just taking a candy bar from the convenience store. We’re talking about shootings, and we’re talking about carjackings. We have fewer officers making fewer arrests because the DAs aren’t doing anything to prevent these people from going out and committing serious crimes. Oh my gosh, I covered a few riots in Philadelphia, and they were bad. Now, just like everyone else, they’re also short-staffed. You have one of the worst district attorneys there. This is what I’m talking about where it ripples. That’s why I wrote the book because it helps explain to the nation how we got to where we are today. Because back then people were saying, “It’s not that big of a deal. Yes, there might be some violence, but the broader message is justifiable, so that’s just collateral damage.” No, businesses move out. In Chicago’s Magnificent Mile, it’s a ghost town. It certainly has more vacancies in terms of business and leasing spaces than ever before in recent history. The quality of life in these cities could be so much better, but they’re not, because Democrats think, “Equity. We have to atone for our racism that happened a hundred years ago.” There are real problems today that they should be focusing on. They’re ignoring them, saying, “It’s racist to try to crack down on crime.” What is that? Really? No, I think preventing black people from being shot is the most non-racist thing you could do. We have just lost the plot. Mr. Jekielek: What is it like reporting from one of these riots? Mr. Rosas: It’s a lot of fun, actually. It’s a lot of fun. People are going crazy, but it’s also pretty stressful. We saw a total breakdown of what we know to be a civilized society back in 2020. Sure, it caught a lot of people off guard. But as time went on, the response from these democratic cities was very lackluster. I give Minneapolis some leeway because it was the first city to experience the riots. Okay, they might have needed more time to update their plans and get things in order. But then, when a city like Kenosha popped off, the Democrat governor said, “The only reason why we deployed 150 National Guardsmen initially is because that was the size of our quick-reaction force. That’s all we had.” Why was that? You didn’t think to update your plans? You didn’t think, “Maybe we should increase the force and lessen the time it takes to have a quick reaction force deployed.” Because Minneapolis is right next door to you, and that happened only two to three months prior. What are you doing? As time went on, there was no excuse. Look at January 6th, I covered that. That’s in the book. January 6th was the most preventable riot of all of them. Everyone knew the date and the time. They knew how passionate people were about this issue. And yet, leaders in DC said, “No, we’re not going to take the steps necessary to protect the Capitol.” Mr. Jekielek: There are these after-effects. These riots are kind of passed over. Of course, a lot of these cities became blown out in lots of ways. To my eye, New York hasn’t recovered. It definitely looks very different. You mentioned how people don’t want to be police officers anymore in these cities like Minneapolis. What other after-effects are there now? Mr. Rosas: Criminals have no fear. They don’t have any fear of repercussions. Back in 2020, there was a high intensity breakdown of law and order, and now it’s at a low intensity. Instead of 500 people looting stores, it’s now organized theft rings; smash and grabs, that hit all these cities like Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago. It happened here in DC fairly recently. They’re doing it because who’s going to stop them? Store employees? No, they can’t. The cops? No. There’s so many parallels between the border crisis and the crime crisis, because just like with the cartels, the criminal elements are more emboldened than ever. I was reporting in Memphis about the whole Tyre Nichols case. During my time there, I found out there was a significant problem with smash and grabs. There were 8,000 vehicles that were stolen in Memphis in 2022. Mr. Jekielek: Compared to what? Mr. Jekielek: Compared to just a couple thousand before. It’s no coincidence that this is happening after these riots with all of the anti-police rhetoric. I’m not saying the cops are perfect, but we need them. They are a necessary force in having the quality of life that we are able to have. I always chuckle when people complain about corruption within police forces, which I’m not trying to downplay. But I said, “Do you know how bad it is in places like Mexico and in other countries?” Obviously, we should focus on making sure that our police forces are the best that they can be. But there’s a day and night difference compared to some of these other places. That’s why we have a border crisis. People are trying to flee some of these areas. I think we’ve lost perspective. I joke that the Biden administration’s approach or solution to solve the border crisis is to make America unlivable, so that people will stop coming. That’s kind of what I joke about. But it’s not just about crime. It’s inflation, it’s the economy, it’s cost of living, and it’s foreign affairs, like the way we pulled out of Afghanistan. Everything that they try to fix or try to address, they end up making it 10 times worse. A lot of times it’s deliberate. Other times it’s just because of incompetence. Mr. Jekielek: I’ve been reading this book by James Lindsay, the Marxification of Education. What he explains in the book is that we’re living in the educational system of Paulo Freire. The stated goal is to teach people arithmetic and writing and reading. But the real goal is to help them achieve a kind of class consciousness in the Marxist sense. Do you see some kind of analogy here in this context? Mr. Rosas: Yes. They say to stop doing certain things at work because they’re racist. Therefore, they do these other things that don’t work. They think, “We’re going to do it because we want to feel good about ourselves when it comes to equity and racial tensions.” I don’t know where we’re going, but it’s obviously not anywhere good. What’s the end goal for all this? We’re in a very scary spot right now as a nation. I hate to sound like the end-times sandwich board preacher, but it’s only because I’ve seen the worst of humanity when everything was just a free-for-all. It doesn’t take much for things to go south very quickly and for people to go into their fight or flight survival mode. People will do pretty crazy stuff for just another day to be alive. For that to be there collectively for our nation is not a recipe for success. Mr. Jekielek: I have a feeling like you do that things are really out of hand in a whole range of areas. On the other hand, we still enjoy a level of freedom that most people haven’t had the pleasure of enjoying in history. That is still the reality. I don’t know if you agree. There’s this terrible reality that you’re describing, but there’s also this beautiful reality. Mr. Rosas: For me, we can be in a much better spot. We’ve been to the moon and back. We have gone through very turbulent times. This is one of them. But we’ve also had some pretty triumphant times, and it’s because of the American spirit and the hope that it brings. A lot of progressives, they hate that. That’s why they’re trying to root it out of the next generation through multiple ways. I’m not saying that it’s over and we’re done. But we’ve got to do a lot of things in order to correct the course that we’re currently on. Mr. Jekielek: You’ve said that the media has played a role in stoking these racial tensions. Please explain to me what you see, and what the level of media complicity is in all of this. Mr. Rosas: You see it all the time. One of the worst examples, and I write about this in the book, is the police shooting of Jacob Blake in Kenosha, Wisconsin. What happened? A video went viral of a black man being shot by a white cop. Media just ran with it, “Armed black man, shot by white police officer,” over and over and over. There was no time to figure out the context. There was no time to figure out what actually transpired. It was just, “This is what happened”. This was just like George Floyd. Jacob Blake was violating the protective order that the mother of his children had taken out against him for allegedly sexually assaulting her. He was in the process of kidnapping the two kids in the car. They were in the backseat. That was one thing that never made sense. I thought, “Wait, why is there this situation with two kids in the backseat?” It was because he was trying to take the kids away from her. The mom called 911 and said, “He’s going to take my kids.” The police respond, and on the way they find out there is a warrant out for his arrest. Obviously, he doesn’t comply. He gets combative. They tried the non-lethal options and tasering. None of it worked. Mace didn’t work. He wasn’t unarmed. He had a knife. He was getting ready to get in the car and drive away, and the police wanted to prevent a chase with two kids in the backseat. Obviously, that changes the circumstances quite a bit. It wasn’t just cops just pulling up to a random guy and start plugging away. But what happened? Riots broke out. $50 million worth of damage was created in only a few days. The whole Kyle Rittenhouse thing was born out of that, because of the absence of law and order. He was innocent by the way. He was shot in self-defense. And for what? Because the media thought, “We got another thing that we can capitalize on,” which is just another example of how racist this country is. Working class Americans and minorities in a town that they don’t even care about had to deal with their rhetoric. Do you think CNN has ever apologized for any of that? The title of my book is from that riot in Kenosha; Fiery But Mostly Peaceful. That’s the worst kind of example. But then you look at the recent BYU [Brigham Young University] alleged case where they were saying that the BYU student section was yelling the N-word at this black volleyball player. There was no evidence of that. The investigation proved that she made it up. She might have actually misheard what was being said. Even today people think, “Yes, this is a racial hate incident that happened.” What? Say what you will about Mormons, they’re some of the nicest people I ever met. The person that BYU temporarily banned to try to appease the mob was a fan who was mentally disabled. Congrats. You got your sacrifice. He didn’t do anything wrong. The media just stokes the flames all the time in big and small ways. It’s not healthy for a nation. For me, being a minority, I’m not a victim of white America. I don’t have a college degree, and yet I’ve managed to carve out a career for myself. That’s not to brag or anything, but if I were truly oppressed, I wouldn’t be where I am today. The reason why I don’t play up my heritage is because that’s not what makes me a good reporter. That’s just happenstance, something I was born as. What matters is the work that you put out. Is it accurate? Is it fair? Is it honest? That’s what matters. Mr. Jekielek: What is the cost of so many media turning to enforcement of some of these racial narratives, versus truth-seeking, which is what I hope all media would be doing? Mr. Rosas: It’s just what we’re seeing, the divide. They want to talk about stopping Asian hate. Yes, we should. Who’s carrying out these crimes? It’s not MAGA Republicans. But they’re pushing this narrative over and over to try to segment people. It’s this whole issue of duality. Duality is such a big problem, and this is probably getting into another kind of discussion for another time. Seeing my Mexican heritage they say, “You have to be for this because you’re…” What? No. First off, my people are American. The oath that I swore to protect and defend the Constitution wasn’t the Mexican Constitution. It was the U.S. Constitution. That’s not to say I don’t appreciate my heritage. I’m very proud of it. I love many aspects of it. But at the end of the day, I’m an American, and that comes with certain responsibilities and certain rights. I just hate that because they want to segment me because of the color of my skin. Isn’t that what we are supposed to be against? The result is just that they’re trying to pit us against each other, and it’s working. It’s all a balance. Again, that’s not to say racism doesn’t exist. It does. It will always exist. We are humans, there are always going to be problems with humans. But that doesn’t mean that we then have to completely swing the pendulum the other way to try to make things worse for the rest of the country. But that’s what they’re doing, and it’s sad. Mr. Jekielek: Any final thoughts? Mr. Rosas: You have to be informed. Read Town Hall, read Epoch Times. Watch our stuff, because we’re up against billions of dollars from media that have this groupthink. If you want to make sure that the truth gets out there, support us. Mr. Jekielek: Julio Rosas, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Rosas: Thank you for having me. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Julio Rosas 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

Dr. Kat Lindley is a family physician and president of the Texas branch of the American Academy of Physicians and Surgeons. She was one of a few doctors using repurposed medications to treat COVID-19 patients early in the pandemic. We discuss how doctors lost their autonomy over the last two decades and how hospitals are financially incentivized to follow fixed protocols, instead of to do what’s in the best interest of the patients. “If you do everything by the protocol, then the hospital hits all of those right numbers, all of those right checkboxes, so they get paid the most amount of money they can get paid,” Lindley says. During this pandemic, Lindley says she saw in America signs of the same totalitarianism she fled from in communist Yugoslavia. “The state makes you fear something really bad. And then they isolate you so you cannot discuss what’s going on. And then they start telling [you], well, if you do this, I’ll give you a little bit of that—until it gets to the point that you just can’t do anything unless they give you permission,” Lindley says. We also discuss proposals for a global pandemic treaty and amendments to the international health regulations. “What the WHO [World Health Organization] would like to accomplish is something they call one health, one world. They would like to have global control over any future pandemics that happen,” Lindley says. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/how-doctors-became-automatons-dr-kat-lindley-on-treating-covid-19-the-corporatization-of-medicine-and-the-whos-global-pandemic-control-ambitions_5169575.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Kat Lindley, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Dr. Kat Lindley: Thank you for having me. Mr. Jekielek: Dr. Lindley, you’ve been practicing medicine here in the U.S. for quite some time in Texas. You originally immigrated from the former Yugoslavia. Please tell us about your path to getting here. Dr. Lindley: I grew up in Yugoslavia and I lived there until I was 18 years old. It was the time when you have to decide what you want to do and what type of life you want to have as an adult, but there were rumblings of things happening. There were attacks in the northern part of Croatia. We were still Yugoslavia at that time. My family got worried and they decided for me to go to Italy, so they found me a job as a nanny. I actually left one day before the war started in Yugoslavia. With one suitcase to my name, I got on the ferry to Italy. I didn’t really know the language, but I understood some of it because I’m from Dalmatia. Our dialect is very similar to Italian. I left as an 18-year-old, really a child, because I was very much sheltered at the time, and started a new life. I didn’t realize that it was going to be a completely different life. Mr. Jekielek: First of all, what an amazing place to grow up on the Dalmatian Coast. I can hardly imagine. It must have been hard to leave. But you escaped an incredibly destructive genocidal war by one day. Dr. Lindley: It was hard. I actually ended up living with a wonderful family. After the town of Split was attacked, probably for about six, seven months, I couldn’t reach out to home because the lines were cut off. Mainly, we would get the news from television and you had these boats of people from Albania escaping and coming over. Then, very sporadically you would hear something. But at the time when Split was attacked, they had snipers shooting and it was very difficult because my mom’s sister lived in Serbia. My brother-in-law was from Bosnia, so we are all interconnected. If anyone knows the history of Yugoslavia, this was like five republics with two provinces. That’s how Tito kept everyone together. When the war started, this was truly a civil war because I had cousins in Serbia, Bosnia and Croatia. It was really difficult for all of us. Mr. Jekielek: This history that you had, those 18 years in the former Yugoslavia, is very important to our discussion and we’re going to bring that up in a moment. Let’s talk about your medical practice and how you came into doing that. Dr. Lindley: People always ask me, “When did you decide to be a doctor?” I didn’t. What happened is when I came to the States, I actually worked as a nanny for two ophthalmologists and I was going through undergrad at Atlantic University in Florida. One day, one of the eye surgeons said to me, “Why don’t you go to medical school?” I was really a good student and I thought about it for a second and said, “Yes, why don’t I?” I applied to medical school and decided to become a physician. That’s important because in communist countries like Yugoslavia you don’t dream. You don’t have this thought from when you’re a child, “I’m going to do this, I’m going to be that.” You track into the life you’re going to have. When I came to the States, this country was so very important to me. The idea of freedom, that you can become whoever you want to be if you work really hard is the biggest treasure that we have as a country, because you don’t have that in other places. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s discuss your philosophy of medicine and what your practice is. Dr. Lindley: I’m an osteopathic family physician. In osteopathic medicine, one thing we are taught right away is that a person is more than just a body. You treat body, mind, and spirit. When I started my medical education the whole ideology was a little bit different from our allopathic partners. Our schooling is exactly the same. We go through the same residencies and things like that, but we look at a person a little bit differently. I worked in private practice for a while. I actually even worked for a hospital system as a medical director and I got a little disillusioned by it. Because with the electronic medical records, CMS, Medicare, CPT codes, there are so many rules that you start losing the essence of who you are as a physician, because you have to chart all day long. You have 10, 15 minutes with a patient. Everyone becomes a number, not because you want them to, but it just becomes a reality. I decided to step out of that system and I actually practice independently. I do direct primary care and it’s an affordable membership fee. It’s just me and a patient. There’s no middleman. They can call me and text me 24/7. When I travel, I’m accessible. If they need to come to my office, they come to the office. But it’s really just that one-on-one relationship and there’s nothing in between us. Mr. Jekielek: First of all, it makes me think of how medicine is supposed to be and I’m sure you would agree with that. Dr. Lindley: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: But it also makes me think about what is the reality of medicine in our society today, because what you’re doing is very atypical. Dr. Lindley: It is. One of the reasons we got caught in this mistrust of medicine that we are currently in after the pandemic and everything that’s happened, is because physicians have lost their autonomy. For the past 10, 15 years, big hospital systems have been acquiring physicians’ practices and big specialty practices, and you then practice what I call the corporate practice of medicine. When you are in the system, whichever the system is, you have to get the labs from the hospital that you work at or whoever they contract with. You send your patients to the specialist that they have a contract with. You live within that network and you get incentivized or you can lose some money and incentives if you don’t do certain things. You get dictated to by this way of medicine. That also happens in the hospital when someone comes in with a heart issue that we think could possibly be a heart attack. There’s a protocol that gets initiated the moment a patient enters the doors. Because if you do everything by the protocol, then the hospital hits all of those right numbers, all of those right check boxes, so they get paid the most amount of money they can get paid. Mr. Jekielek: Basically, you’re saying in this model it’s not just the patient’s care, but also the financial incentives that become very significant? Dr. Lindley: Exactly. Mr. Jekielek: Why is it more significant in that model than in primary care, when the independent physician is one-on-one with a patient? Why is it so different? Dr. Lindley: Let’s take pneumonia, for example. If someone comes into the hospital with pneumonia, they’re going to get blood cultures, certain labs, medications, and IV antibiotics right away, something like that. Then, they’re going to wait for the cultures to come back and see if they did the right thing. They might readjust the medications and things like that. I don’t look at any of that. I look at the patient first, and then based on the exam, history, and other things, I’ll decide what the patient has. I might not order all the labs that the protocol would ask me to order. I would just order what I think is significant. By doing that, you individualize the medical approach. Especially for patients who have high deductibles or don’t have insurance, you actually save them money, because you’re trying to use your thinking cap. You don’t say, “I have to do this, this, and that.” You just say, “This is what I have and this is what I need,” and that’s what you go with. Mr. Jekielek: I think of the Hippocratic Oath, which is, do no harm. It seems to me with this model of medicine, this doctor-patient relationship is incredibly important. Other guests that I’ve had on the show have spoken to this, that just like you said, the patient becomes more of a number. These larger structures, which are incentivized by things other than necessarily the best outcome for the patient, are directly or indirectly influencing your decision-making. My question is, when the pandemic hit, what happened to you? Dr. Lindley: I was actually in that period when I was transitioning to my new practice. I had my practice and it was going well, but I was working in urgent care to supplement the income because my practice was still growing. In urgent care, I actually remember one of my first Covid patients came in and she was complaining of congestion. She said it wasn’t a big deal, but her O2 saturation level was very low, which was not normal for someone who was speaking so well and had no issues. I ended up sending her to the hospital and she actually passed away three days later. After that, the system closed and we were told not to see anyone. I was getting paid by being in urgent care. If anyone came with symptoms that we considered Covid, we actually had to send them to the hospital to be triaged through the hospital, be seen, and then taken care of, which didn’t make sense because I’m considered frontline. Frontline is supposed to figure out what’s going on and do the best we can. We accept that risk. If I didn’t want to do it, I would not have worked. We ended up taking care of just minor emergencies that had nothing to do with Covid, but anything that was Covid-related would go to the hospital. That’s what made me look at this through different eyes. Because in my practice, whoever came in, I just took care of them, treated them, and they did fine. I saw them. Mr. Jekielek: If there was a compelling reason to go to the hospital, you would send them, as you did. Dr. Lindley: Yes, definitely, but I saw them in person if I had to see them. At the time, we were all told to wear a mask. Sure, that wasn’t a problem. But the fact that we were told not to see the patients in person, was very alarming to most of us. It just didn’t make sense. Mr. Jekielek: For the benefit of our audience, you had this urgent care practice associated with the hospital, and then you also had your private practice, which then you transitioned to. Dr. Lindley: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: Which is where you had this different approach. Dr. Lindley: I was doing 1099-type of work with urgent care so I could supplement my income while I was growing my own private practice. Mr. Jekielek: I see. You decided to take a bit of a different approach pretty quickly from what I understand. Dr. Lindley: Because literature was starting to come out saying that certain medications work. But even if we didn’t know anything about the medications that no one talks about, as a physician, if someone comes in with cough, or inflammation, or shortness of breath, there are other things we can try. If you are bleeding and it’s a small wound, you put a little bandaid. But if you’re bleeding a lot, you suture that wound. There are things we can try, even if you don’t know exactly what’s going to end up working. The fact that we were told not to try anything, but to send people to the hospital didn’t make sense. A lot of private practices just closed their doors and until they figured out how to use the telemedicine component, they didn’t really even do much. Mr. Jekielek: What did you do? Dr. Lindley: I just did my job. In my private practice, I saw everyone, I took care of them, took phone calls, and they came to my office if needed. In the other job that I was supplementing, I did what the administration told me to do. Mr. Jekielek: How many Covid patients did you come across in your private practice? Dr. Lindley: I live in a small town, so I’m not sure exactly how many exactly I had, maybe in the 100s, 200s. Initially, I pretty much just did my job. Then eventually, I got a little bit more, I don’t want to say daring, but maybe braver, and put myself on the FLCCC [Front Line Covid-19 Critical Care Alliance] list and AAPS [American Association of Pharmaceutical Scientists] online list. Then, people started calling me from all over Texas. Mr. Jekielek: All right. I want to also add that you’re pretty active in the physician’s community. You’re a small town doctor, but you actually have a lot of contacts and you work with a lot of people. You even head up one of the Texas physicians associations. What were you hearing from other people? Dr. Lindley: I was lucky enough to really know Peter McCullough and Ryan Cole before this, so it was easy to hear what they were doing and what was happening. Even before COVID, I did a lot of legislative work in DC, because I always realized the way the medicine was going, there was a short track to try to achieve socialized type of medicine. Whether you call it Obamacare, or Medicare for all, or whatever plan Bernie Sanders had, those types of things don’t work because healthcare is a bureaucracy. You have a lot of people behind the scenes making rules and making decisions that have nothing to do with patient care. When Covid hit, we pretty much just started talking to each other. We would say, “I tried this, what did you try? What did you do when you had this?” It was almost learning as you go, until we all figured out together how to come up with the different protocols. Then once you start treating, it wasn’t a big deal. None of my patients, thank goodness, passed away. I only had two that ended up in a hospital, but mainly because they didn’t start medication right away. Mr. Jekielek: Before Covid, you had a network of people that were suspicious of the socialized medicine model. Is that right? What were you actually working to do? Dr. Lindley: Before Covid, during the Trump administration, one of the things that his administration liked was the free market-type of medicine, which is what direct primary care and direct specialty care is. It’s a membership fee and patients have 24/7 access to me. We also have a network of labs that are affordable, and radiology that’s affordable. There is the Surgery Center of Oklahoma which you can find online, where they do surgeries for cash. There’s a dropdown box and you choose which surgery you’re going to have, and it tells you exactly how much it’s going to cost. That administration figured out that you can have Medicare and Medicaid for people who need it, but when it comes to younger individuals, the free market will work. You can get blood work for $3 to $4, X-rays for $25 to $40, CAT scans for $150 to $250, and an MRI for $400. Even with people who have insurance, some of them actually end up paying cash, because their deductible is too high. Mr. Jekielek: Just for comparison, these numbers in the socialized system are how much larger? Dr. Lindley: It’s really interesting because the hospital systems just arbitrarily decide what they’re going to bill, because no matter what they bill, insurance is just going to give them so much. Let’s say they decide to bill $1,000 for an MRI. The insurance will say, “Okay, we’ll pay you $750.” But then, once the insurance says how much they’re going to pay, they end up charging people who don’t have insurance that same amount, $750. In reality, on a free market, that’s something you can get for $350, $400, $450, depending on where you go. People don’t realize that you can negotiate. Even at a hospital, if you don’t have insurance and then you end up with this huge bill, you can go back and negotiate, because they want to get paid. They really don’t want to not get paid at all. Mr. Jekielek: It’s fascinating. I’m Canadian, as many of our viewers know, and I come from a country where it was just a given that socialized medicine is the greater good. This is how things should be and what are those Americans across the border doing? It’s interesting to hear about this. Dr. Lindley: One of the reasons I always hated the idea of socialized medicine, is because if you need a knee replacement or if you need something that’s not urgent, depending what type of demand they have, you might have to wait months to get on the list to have a surgery. Here in the United States, if you have insurance or if you go to the Surgery Center of Oklahoma, you can have this done when you need it. You don’t have to wait months for it. Especially in the American market, the supply and demand is going to cause such an imbalance. There is no way of really getting care that you need appropriately, if you have someone behind the scenes deciding if you need it. That’s why I like my model because it’s me and the patient. We decide what’s best for them. We don’t have this third party who tells us, “You can have this, but you cannot have that.” Mr. Jekielek: In your view, how does this account for the people that can’t afford some of these lifesaving procedures? This is always brought up, “We want to be fair to everyone.” Dr. Lindley: That’s why we do have Medicaid for people who cannot afford insurance. You have Medicare for the elderly. But even then you have to be very careful how it’s administered, because there’s a lot of money wasted in those programs. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s jump back to the pandemic. You signed yourself up, and now you’re working with these different groups to do early treatment for Covid. What happened to you? What happened to your practice? Dr. Lindley: My practice just stayed, if anything, it actually got larger. When the pandemic hit, I always realized something was different this time around, this was global. Every country did exactly the same thing. One president would say it’s something, another leader would say exactly the same thing,”Build Back Better.” They all had the same message that never made sense. When I decided to get involved, I reached out to different places, especially the UK and Australia, to see what’s happening there, what they’re doing, and what things they are struggling with. We were all doing the same circles. Now, there’s talk of digital passports that has been going on in the UK, and Canada is trying to introduce it. Some states here, silently, have the digital passport already in their system, but they just haven’t turned it on. There is this global response. Mr. Jekielek: Which passport are you talking about specifically, vaccine passports? Dr. Lindley: I’m talking about vaccine passports. Yes. Mr. Jekielek: That’s right. Okay. Dr. Lindley: Vaccine passports are going to lead to all these social credit scores and different things like that. It was very important for me to connect with physicians and other groups around the world. Actually, I was on the steering committee of the World Council for Health for a little while, because I felt that we have to respond globally, not only in our own little communities. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s go back to your upbringing in a communist country, the former Yugoslavia. This has informed your viewpoint around all these things and I want you to tell me about that. Dr. Lindley: I saw the pandemic through two eyes. One was as a doctor, and when we came to that point where they told us pretty much to stand back and tell patients to go to the ER if they can’t breathe, that didn’t make sense to me. I started seeing it through different eyes, and that was the eyes of someone who grew up under communism. What I started recognizing was fear—watching TV from China, from New York, the numbers, how many died, and all those things that were just staring at us. Then, they said, “You have to stay home.” Everything was closed, school was closed, and that never made sense. Churches were closed, everything was closed. Only essential workers could go out, which was weird. I’ve never stayed home because I was considered an essential worker. But it was really weird how this virus just shut down the whole world. I started recognizing the fear and the isolation. Then, we started negotiating; if you are six feet apart, you can stay in line, and you can go to the store. I remember some stores would be open early so the elderly could come. They said, “If you wear a mask, you can start doing more things.” Eventually, there came this newer technology. If you get vaccinated, you can travel, and then you can go see your loved ones. I recognized that as the tactics of totalitarianism. That’s really what happens. The state makes you fear something really bad, and then they isolate you so you cannot discuss what’s going on. They start telling you, “If you do this, I’ll give you a little bit of that,” until it gets to the point that you can’t do anything unless they give you permission. Mr. Jekielek: There seems to be this implicit assumption that it’s up to the government to decide how many rights you have, which is the upside-down version of what it’s supposed to be, at least in free countries. Dr. Lindley: Yes. It was very hard for me to recognize that. In a sense, once I recognized it, it really undermined my belief in the United States, and in what the United States stands for. I live in Texas, and even in Texas, we had our lockdown. Luckily, it didn’t last long. Our governor realized that Texans would not put up with it for too much longer. There was this willingness to surrender it all, in order to feel this false sense of security. If anyone has a child, when your kids have RSV [Respiratory Syncytial Virus] or a cold or a flu, you all know it just spreads. Everyone gets it, then we all get better, and we’re all fine. To believe that locking us down is going to somehow lock this virus—what is the virus really going to do? Just vanish, and it’s gone? The whole idea of it never made sense. But the fact that we all so willingly gave up our freedom to feel a little safe, that made me sad. I didn’t think Americans would do that. Mr. Jekielek: Do you remember a specific moment when this dawned on you? Dr. Lindley: You watch those movies when people are in a different country, something happens to them and they go to the embassy and the embassy saves them. Even before Covid, actually one year before Covid, I was in Croatia with my kids, and I did something that you never should do. I had my passport and everything with me in my bag. I was keeping track of my boys and wasn’t paying attention to my bag and someone took everything out. I lost my passport, our credit cards, and money. We were American citizens and I called the embassy for help and they were not very helpful. I jumped through hoops to actually get everything back. If I wasn’t with my family, I don’t know how I would’ve done it. But that was the first time I started feeling, “It doesn’t work this way.” Then, when Covid happened, I understood, “two weeks,” for a brief moment because of what was going on in New York. But when they extended those two weeks, for me it was the governor from Michigan. She said that you cannot go buy seeds at Walmart, and she actually put tape around those seeds. I said, “What does this have to do with Covid?” It was all about control. It was all about making people do what they wanted us to do. That was when I completely knew that this had nothing to do with the illness. It had to do with our government taking control of our lives. Mr. Jekielek: You were also quite outspoken about this. Dr. Lindley: Yes, because Americans might not realize this, but for people like me and for people in Cuba, and for people all over the world, America is a beacon of hope. It’s a place where we were always told you can be whatever you want to be. You can be this person who is born in poverty, but you can become the president, or you can become an astronaut. You can do whatever you want as long as you wish it. Mr. Jekielek: Or an osteopathic doctor. Dr. Lindley: Yes, exactly. Freedom is the most important thing in the world. If you don’t have freedom, do you really have a life? The fact that we were willing to give it up so easily, it’s just very discouraging. Because if there’s no United States of America, is there anything else that you can really look up to? I don’t want to sound arrogant, but this is really, truly an incredible country with so much to give. When there is a disaster, the American people are the first ones to give. Even the people who don’t have much, they will give. We really have to think about this republic that our forefathers created. We can’t give it up. We have to leave a better future for our kids. The way we’re going, some days I’m not sure we will be able to. Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned this negotiation for rights, which was one of these red flags that reminded you, “Wait, I recognize this from before.” Are there other things of this nature that you’ve noticed? Dr. Lindley: The hardest thing that I’ve seen is that obviously physicians have been blamed for a lot of what has happened, in the sense that there is a loss of trust in physicians. But I would say it has happened in every industry. The same thing with lawyers, the lawyers really didn’t do much. We have few that are doing the hard work of many, but we need all of them to wake up. With civil rights, one thing that actually gave me a huge pause was last year when the Department of Homeland Security said, “If you speak out about Covid or elections, you’re considered a terrorist.” That hit me so hard. We were actually supposed to go to speak at an event a couple days later. It hit me so hard and I have a great imagination. I’m thinking to myself “We’re going to go to this event.” “There’s going to be FBI agents in the audience and I might say something that they think it’s bad and I’m going to end up in jail.” I have a really vivid imagination, and I went through this cycle of grieving and being scared. Then, I realized it doesn’t matter how hard it is, we have to speak the truth. I wasn’t free to say things while living under communism, and now I’m going to die in this country that’s going to consider me a terrorist if I say something. It hit me very hard. The thing that stuck to me is our kids deserve the same opportunities we all were given. If you don’t fight for them, they’re not going to have them. Mr. Jekielek: Often when I speak with people about this they will say, “I have to do this. It’s for the kids.” Dr. Lindley: I have five. Mr. Jekielek: That’s interesting, because I’m just thinking of someone else who has five kids, who also told me, “What else would I do?” Dr. Lindley: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: They said, “A lot of people have chosen to do very different things, or just ignore it, or just ride it out.” You have this broad network of people, not just in the U.S. but also in Canada and across the world, who are in the mode of challenging this way of dealing with the disease and this whole outlook. What is it that makes these people different? It’s a significant group, but it’s not the majority of the population. Dr. Lindley: I’m not sure, except that I get messages from people I don’t know at all. They’ll send me an email or sometimes they’ll send me a note. Someone wrote a verse for me. It says, “Perhaps you were born for such a time like this.” I thought about it and it’s true. The life I had before led me to this moment in time to recognize the dangers ahead and that’s the reason that I need to speak out. It is for my children and it is for the future that I would like them to have. Most people who are standing up or saying things are doing it for someone else, not for themselves. Mr. Jekielek: Surely there’s more people out there that are living for others. It’s not necessarily that people aren’t curious. There is just a significant portion of the population that just doesn’t see this. In societies like communist China, which I’m very familiar with, or the country my parents came from, communist Poland, the tools of information, management, and propaganda were very strong. This is something that I’ve observed here as well and I know you have. Do you see any parallels here with what you saw in former Yugoslavia? Dr. Lindley: Institutions, our governments leaders, everyone has really employed these global psyops, that vaccines are safe and effective. That narrative has been broken down so many times, but they’re still going with it. The same thing with masks. We have proven so many times that masks don’t work, but they’re still pushing for it. Dr. Walensky said that the CDC is actually going to encourage masks in school. People are afraid, that’s the thing, and some people are still living in that fear. They did a great job with the numbers on deaths. I don’t know if you remember watching Fox News or whatever station, there was always that ticker on the bottom that kept on saying how many people died in a day, in a week, in a month. That number kept on going up and up, and up and up, and up. People don’t really realize how much stimuli they had. Then, what was happening in New York, and in China with the people that were lying on the streets, they did a great job initially with that fear. I would say that some people, especially older ones, still have that fear. We did it to our kids. We told our kids that they cannot go see their grandparents because they could kill their grandparents. We told the children they have to wear a mask. Actually, one of the things they say all the time, the masks on children served a purpose. The purpose was to make those children compliant. There were pictures of kids walking outside, and they had to put the hand on the shoulder of the other child, so they know they have to keep their distance. That all was done to make our children compliant at that young age, and they learned these things very easily. All that was a big psyop. There is still a residual fear left. It’s dissipating, but especially with older generations, even in Texas, I still see some of them wearing a mask because they feel more comfortable. In the same way communist countries did it to their own citizens, our countries have done it to us with this pandemic. Mr. Jekielek: Another thing that you’ve been writing and speaking about is these international structures. In particular, the WHO is working on further tools of control or facilitating compliance. Please tell me about that. Dr. Lindley: The WHO was initially funded by the United Nations to be the health arm of the United Nations. It was initially funded by the countries that were members based on their GDP [Gross Domestic Product]. But in recent years they’re funded by these private partnership companies. You have the Gavi Foundation, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the Wellcome Trust, and you have different countries that still fund them. With this pandemic, there is a connection between all of these groups. What WHO would like to accomplish is something they call “One Health, One World.” They would like to have global control over any future pandemics that happen. There are two venues where they’re trying to reach that. One is the pandemic treaty that they are negotiating right now, and that would go to the World Health Assembly to be voted on in 2024. Once it’s voted on, it goes to different member countries to get ratified. In the United States, you need two-thirds of the Senate for the pandemic treaty to be ratified, so I’m not too worried about that. I don’t think they’ll ever be able to get two-thirds of the Senate to say yes, but you never know. The other venue is something called International Health Regulations. Those were initially established in 1969, but then they were amended in 2005. That’s an international law. Currently, they’re working on amendments to that to be voted on this May. Some of those amendments would allow the Director General, Tedros at this time, to actually have a lot more control on how every country responds. If there is a future pandemic with the amendments that are on the table, it would give him tools for the WHO to come in and actually take over the response of the country to the pandemic, which means that they can tell you what type of tests, medications, or vaccines you can use. Obviously, that would interfere with sovereignty of nations, and it’s something that everyone is really watching and making sure it doesn’t pass. Mr. Jekielek: What are the networks you’re involved in doing about this? Dr. Lindley: Currently, I work with Global Covid Summit physicians, and we do a lot of educational seminars and talks all over the world. We just came from Sweden where we had a conference. And then, there is FLCCC and the other networks. But specifically, we’re trying to raise awareness on what’s happening with the vaccine in your population, because not many physicians will actually treat vaccine injuries. I know you had Brie Dressen on recently. I worked with Brie and Joel Wallskog from React19. They’re finding that when you see a physician, a lot of them will not acknowledge that what has happened is because of the vaccine. Now, they’re having to navigate this world by themselves. Our goal is to create a network of physicians who will help and make sure that the vaccine injured are taken care of. Mr. Jekielek: You have been advocating for a new oath for doctors, correct? Dr. Lindley: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: I thought the Hippocratic Oath was actually pretty good, if only it was followed. Please tell me about what it is and why. Dr. Lindley: I wrote a new Hippocratic Oath called, “The Oath of a Medicus.” Medicus means a healer. One of the things that we’ve lost during this pandemic is the trust. People don’t talk about informed consent enough. But if you really think about it, the Achilles heel of the whole program is the informed consent. It was not given because no one knew what was in the vaccine. No one knew what could happen with the vaccine. Even if this was EUA [Emergency Use Authorization] and experimental, you still have to disclose to the best of your knowledge. According to the documents, they did know lots of things when they were giving the vaccine. Mr. Jekielek: The companies knew, but the package inserts were blank. Dr. Lindley: They were blank, exactly. Mr. Jekielek: Right. Dr. Lindley: The basis of the oath is just restoring the trust and giving a personal pledge to the patient, that their wishes and their desires matter above all, and that we would never discriminate. I would never discriminate against anything. We haven’t touched on the new Z code, but that new Z code is going to label people as vaccinated or not. There were even places where you couldn’t have transplant surgery because you were not vaccinated. It’s very difficult for me that for people who need an organ to survive, there are hospitals who would say no to that. That’s really in contradiction to our oath, so that’s why I decided to rewrite it. At the end it says, “I solemnly pledge to stand by the oath and advocate for the patient,” because that’s our job—to advocate for the patient. Mr. Jekielek: This is something that is so bizarre. Let’s just say for argument’s sake that not taking this vaccine was a really bad health decision. People make all sorts of really bad decisions about their health all the time, but no one has ever said, “Sorry, I’m not going to treat you because I don’t like your lifestyle.” Dr. Lindley: That just honestly never made sense. Even when patients are smokers, they come to see you and you have to counsel them that they shouldn’t smoke. But you didn’t stop seeing them if they developed cancer because of their smoking. You still saw them and you took care of them. You might give them a little bit of a lecture why they should have stopped, but you still took care of them. It’s like we created a class that’s a lesser class; the people who are not vaccinated. I know this is controversial, but when the whole thing started with the vaccine, I said to a lot of my friends, “This is going to be the yellow star.” The vaccine status is going to become the yellow star. That’s what it has become. If you’re not vaccinated, it’s almost as if you have the yellow star like they had in Nazi Germany. Mr. Jekielek: Tell me about these codes. You started talking about new codes that identify someone as being unvaccinated, and there are some others, but why is this significant? How is this different from the past? Dr. Lindley: With these new codes, there are several categories and you can be unvaccinated for religious reasons if you have a religious exemption, or for medical reasons like medical exemption, or you can just be unvaccinated and they don’t know the reason why. We’ve never labeled something that does not have the disease status. This is not the disease status, this is just that you’re not vaccinated. This will potentially label someone that they have not been vaccinated. But interestingly, we don’t have a code for the vaccinated. There is a concern that this can be used for whatever reasons. In the past, if you are not vaccinated for MMR or for hepatitis B, we don’t have a code to say you’re not vaccinated for MMR or hepatitis B, but for this one we do. We’ve done everything differently with this one. Mr. Jekielek: You’re talking about the genetic COVID vaccines? Dr. Lindley: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: What are the implications of this? You’re saying that never before in history have we put codes on a non-disease. Dr. Lindley: I don’t think anyone knows what the implications are. We can speculate, but no one truly knows why they’re there. If I wanted to speculate, I would say so they can be tracked. For whatever reason, I can know that you, someone else, or this person chose not to be vaccinated. If you want to go further, let’s say later on we have digital social scoring that can be brought into that. It’s hard to tell what the purpose is, it’s just something we haven’t done. Mr. Jekielek: You’re talking about how this could be part of a social credit system. Dr. Lindley: Some kind of tracking system. Mr. Jekielek: Which discriminates based on your status. Okay. Here we are, a lot of people are ready to move on from the pandemic. Actually, there are many of these emergency restrictions apparently coming to an end. What are the next steps for society? What do we need to do here from your viewpoint? Dr. Lindley: I’m not sure. In a sense, I think about it a lot. They talk about Marburg virus now. They talked about Ebola recently, and the Avian flu has been in the news. They’re still trying to figure out how to keep on going. They’re creating a lot of new vaccines on the same mRNA platform. From everything we’ve seen, that’s the platform we should not use. We have way too many people who are injured, people that passed away, and way too many questions with this. During these past three years, they have taken a lot of our freedoms away, some that we don’t even realize, and I don’t think they’re going to give them back. They’re not just going to say, “Hey, you can have this back.” Mr. Jekielek: Why not? Dr. Lindley: Once the government takes something away, they just don’t give it back. Mr. Jekielek: But the government is us, isn’t it? Dr. Lindley: I used to think so. Let’s just say that not every vote seems to be equal where you live. I want to believe in the system and part of me still does, but I’m not sure that we’ll ever get back to normal, whatever that normal is. This is our new reality. It’s time for people to get more involved in their own communities. We can’t influence too much what’s happening in DC. We’ve all seen the votes that are coming out and all that. There’s too much partisanship and too many squabbles there. The best thing to do is get involved in your own community with your family, with churches, with school, run for offices and make influences locally. If we don’t do that, we’ll lose this country completely. Because they like to say, “We’re doing this for your own good.” A lot of places talk about guaranteed income and things like that, sure. But once you start getting into these programs, you’re going to have to do these things to get that. Mr. Jekielek: Right. You’re talking about universal basic income and you’re saying, “If you want that, you’re going to need to get your status right.” Dr. Lindley: The code we talked about before could be used for that. Mr. Jekielek: Right. Dr. Lindley: You have this code, so you can get this amount of money, but you can only get that amount monthly. When you have someone else deciding what you can and cannot have, that’s when you stop. You really don’t have any more freedom. Mr. Jekielek: As we’ve discussed, there’s been a lot of trust lost in the medical system. I don’t know if everyone is going to be saying the Oath of Medicus as you described. For the typical person who’s struggling out there, who might be struggling with this and saying. “Maybe I need medical help. I don’t know, can I really trust my doctor?” What do you say to them? Dr. Lindley: When you go to fix your car, you find the best mechanic around. You ask your neighbors, you get recommendations, you decide the price, and how much you can pay. It’s the same thing. Don’t just go to anyone. Interview your doctor, decide if you share the same values and if you don’t, then don’t go. It’s really that simple. The problem is we’ve elevated medicine to this different status than the rest of the world. People used to almost worship their doctors, but doctors were normal people. Someone might like me, someone might hate me, and you just have to do the same thing. You choose who your physician is going to be, because your physician is supposed to partner with you when it comes to your health. I always tell my patients, “I can lead you to water, but I can’t make you drink, and I don’t want to make you drink.” I have five kids, and I don’t need another child. That’s the type of a relationship you want to have, a friend as your physician, so find someone you trust. Mr. Jekielek: Dr. Kat Lindley, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Dr. Lindley: Thank you. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Dr. Kat Lindley 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

When the COVID-19 pandemic began, decisions had to be made. This was the moment for scientists around the world to come together and offer solutions. At the time, Dr. Simon Goddek, a systems dynamics biotechnologist from the Netherlands, had developed a comprehensive model for the human body. And when he mapped out the immune system, he got an insight into one crucial factor that could save many lives during the pandemic. It was simple and cheap. Anyone could do it with their family physician. It would make experimental products and heavy government assistance unnecessary. Goddek emailed his research to politicians and doctors, but none replied. So he published his model in the peer-reviewed International Journal of Infectious Diseases. And that’s when the trouble began. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/the-most-important-factor-for-strong-immunity-dr-simon-goddek_5174456.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Dan Skorbach: Dr. Simon Goddek is a German scientist with a PhD in biotechnology. He has dedicated his career to improving human health. And when the pandemic hit, he was doing research at a world-class University in the Netherlands. How it Started: The Vitamin D Model Dr. Simon Goddek: I had a huge model with many interrelations of many factors, which I could use for everything. And when COVID started, I looked at the model and it was like, hey, look, this vitamin D—that’s the factor they need to address because it’s immunoregulating. Why didn’t they do this? That’s what I was asking myself, and I was writing emails to politicians, to doctors. [I] got no answers. And I was like, you know what, I’m going to write a publication. I’m going to explain why it’s necessary to inject vitamin D into literally everybody in the world. Because in the beginning of the pandemic, I [thought], okay, this might be dangerous, because I just saw the pictures from Bergamo and China. And I [thought], okay, if everybody has a proper vitamin D level, nobody has to fear anything. Dan Skorbach: This is what the paper looked like, and this is the diagram that Dr. Goddek modeled: Here’s what it means. When you take vitamin D, it encourages the body to stop using parts of the immune system that cause inflammation and instead use the immune cells that have anti-inflammatory effects. And this is important when you consider that COVID can cause fatal hyper-inflammation in the lungs. That happens when an overwhelmed immune system decides to throw the kitchen sink at the problem which results in organ damage. And people with certain underlying diseases are more susceptible to this outcome. Consider that every fifth American has at least one autoimmune disease. That’s 50 million people with an immune system that is at odds with their body. Meaning these people are already in an elevated state of inflammation. So Dr. Goddek hypothesized that based on existing research and his models, vitamin D3 could rebalance the immune system and encourage it to fight COVID in a less destructive way. But rebalancing is not the only thing that Vitamin D does. It’s actually an essential component to a strong immune system. And it has to do with antimicrobial peptides. Why Vitamin D3 is Essential to Immunity Dr. Simon Goddek: Vitamin D helps regulate the production of antimicrobial peptides. These are small proteins that defend against bacteria, viruses and other pathogens in general. So if you have a low vitamin D level in your blood, you most likely cannot fight off diseases. So this is what you need to know, in general. And this vitamin D literally helps to regulate immune selectivity. So people with an appropriate vitamin D level, which I consider higher than 50 ng/mL, usually don’t get sick at all. So while I was writing my publication, I read many papers that literally show data that people who have adequate levels usually don’t get cancer. They don’t get sick, they don’t have any health issues. Actually I should have said the most important thing is a healthy diet. The second one is exercise. And the third is vitamin D together with omega-3. But I focus on vitamin D because if I talk about exercise and diet, that’s what everybody does. But usually people don’t talk about vitamin D From Backlash to Blackout Dr. Simon Goddek: So I wrote this publication. And I published it in the Journal of Infectious Diseases. It’s quite a high impact journal. And I explained why K2 is necessary to administer it together with vitamin D. And it was published somewhere in June—July—August—2020. And shortly after my university received emails–complaints that one of her scientists was publishing pseudoscience, dangerous pseudoscience, and stuff like that. Eventually it got me into big trouble. But I couldn’t care less because it was peer-reviewed by several peer-reviewers and I’m kind of proud of this publication. Dan Skorbach: But the more Dr. Goddek tried to get this information out, the more resistance he got. Dr. Simon Goddek: I got lots of negative feedback, especially on Twitter. I had a very small account back then. I had an account with 20-30 followers. Super small. I posted my study there. I [said], “hey, guys, this is my study. Please read, it’s important.. And people started attacking me. Especially virologists. They went all in. [Also] people from the skeptics movement. They call themselves skeptics, but they actually [are] like the rectum of Big Pharma. They sent emails to my university. And with all publications or especially this publication, they said it’s pseudoscience. And they claimed that I was selling vitamin D products back then and I just wanted to promote them, which was not true. And guess what, my university didn’t like it. Not what they said, they didn’t like what I published. And eventually I had a talk with them. And they agreed that what I did was correct and that I’m a scientist, and that I can express whatever I think. But I didn’t keep my job for too long. Three months later, I was dismissed and I had to find a new job. Dan Skorbach: So what are the skeptics hung up on? Vitamin D seems to be in a similar situation as ivermectin. We talked about this drug in a past episode. When it comes to vitamin D, many studies use a low dose to measure its effectiveness. This low dosage is based on sufficiency studies that try to determine how much vitamin D you actually need. How Effective is Vitamin D? Dr. Simon Goddek: So for example, there are sufficiency studies that show that the improvement is 53 percent. And the amount of sufficiency studies is 144. And there are more than 160,000 patients being treated. However, there’s one big issue. Many of these papers–and I screened many of them–maybe I read 50 or 60. They say, “oh, it you’re already vitamin D sufficient if you have a blood sample of 20 ng/mL. But I don’t consider that sufficient—sufficient is [when it’s] more than 40 ng/mL. So, it depends on the perspective you have. So if they say 20 ng/mL is sufficient, of course when people have 21 ng/mL and they get sick, they catch COVID—they can turn very ill because it’s not sufficient, even though it’s called sufficient. On the other hand, there are many treatment studies. And you have to distinguish between prophylaxis, early and late treatment. And I’ve read them all. It’s a total of 100 studies. [And] there is an issue with these studies. For example, the first one is the proper dosage. Many of these studies only administer 800 IU per day. And it depends on the age, the weight, the skin color, etc. But you should administer approximately 4,000 to 10,000 IU per day in order to achieve vitamin D blood serum level of higher than 50 ng/mL. So this has usually not been done. The second issue is the duration of the supplementation. It takes a while until your blood serum level plateaus. It takes about two to four months. So when you do this kind of study, at least prophylaxis, you should wait four months after you measure the effect. And this is often not being done. And the last issue is the achieved blood serum level. So you should have a blood serum level between 50-100 ng/mL. Because this provides you the best immune response. But most of the studies don’t go there. They go to 30-40 ng/mL and they check whether it has an effect. But we can see studies that aim at 50-100 ng/mL—they show a very great effect of vitamin D. It’s far above 90 percent of efficiency—or effectiveness in this case—so it’s very effective. The Proper D3 Dose Dan Skorbach: So what should be the proper dose of Vitamin D3? Dr. Goddek told us that people should aim at getting at least 5,000 IUs per day, together with 200 mcg of vitamin K2. These two are crucial pairings because high dosage of vitamin D3 increases calcium levels in the bloodstream. And you need enough of K2 to put that extra calcium to use around your body, otherwise it can start accumulating in your arteries. And again, these are not the daily values that are currently recommended by the medical establishment. But even if you do a quick search you will see that medicine is 17 years behind research. Of course, you still want to talk to a doctor you trust about this and see if they can guide you, especially if you’re taking other medication. After everything that happened, Dr. Goddek devotes his time now to raising awareness about vitamin D and its health benefits. He’s also running a startup where he’s formulating vitamin D supplements that have effective absorption and rounded health benefits. And all of Dr. Goddek’s information can still be found on twitter, at least for now. Dr. Simon Goddek: I kind of felt [it was] obligatory to continue speaking out. Then I was banned very quickly. But since Elon [Musk] took over, it’s way more fun because I can speak my mind. Dan Skorbach: So what do you think? Do you take vitamin D supplements? Or have you ever checked your vitamin D levels? Tell us in the comments below. And please, share this story with one friend. This is Frontline Health, I’m Dan Skorbach. Stay healthy, America. - 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 “EpochTV” for 20% off.

“Amazingly, President Biden is warning Israel that allowing politicians to be involved in nominating judges is going to perhaps affect our shared democratic values. Well, of course, in America, politicians do exactly that.” Eugene Kontorovich is a scholar of international law, an expert in the Israeli-Arab conflict, and a professor at George Mason University’s Antonin Scalia Law School. At a time when many have lost faith in international organizations, I sat down with him to discuss what role they should actually play. “With all international institutions, the trade-off—the lesson—is how to be able to rely on them for small things, small routine things, and not put faith in them for important things,” said Kontorovich. We also discuss the current protests in Israel and the U.S. State Department’s role in funding some of them. “The United States is giving political support for the efforts to crush democracy in Israel. And by crush democracy in Israel, I mean insulate the Supreme Court as a permanent, aristocratic, democratically unchangeable body,” said Kontorovich. He argues that despite what we are hearing in the mainstream media, the judicial reforms proposed by Netanyahu’s coalition are not a threat to Israel’s democracy. In fact, a judicial overhaul is necessary in order to restore the Jewish state’s separation of powers and transfer authority back to elected officials, says Kontorovich. “In Israel, the court picks its own successors … so, what you essentially have is the supreme power in the state held by a self-selecting group of people completely insulated from any democratic process,” explained Kontorovich. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/whats-the-deal-with-protests-in-israel-professor-eugene-kontorovich-on-supreme-court-power-grabs-us-involvement-and-where-the-real-danger-to-democracy-lies_5162195.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Professor Eugene Kontorovich, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Eugene Kontorovich: A pleasure to be here. Thank you. Mr. Jekielek: We’ve been planning this interview for quite some time. Lo and behold, as you’re sitting here at the Capitol, these protests have erupted in Israel, ostensibly about democracy. Democracy in Israel is being threatened. That is the mantra that we keep hearing. This is something that you have deep knowledge about, so let’s start here. What’s happening in Israel? Mr. Kontorovich: What’s happening there, as sometimes happens, is almost the opposite of what you would conclude by reading the mainstream media. There are serious challenges to democracy in Israel, but there are challenges that come from the almost all-encompassing power of the court and government bureaucrats. In the absence of the constitution, the Supreme Court has taken massive powers for itself and for a cadre of government lawyers. For example, the Supreme Court has said that it can strike down statutes. Even beyond that, they went on and said that they can block any government action that they don’t think is a good idea. They can set refugee quotas. They can control military tactics. Most shockingly, they’ve said they can even remove a sitting prime minister absent any statutory impeachment provisions. They’ve gone on to say that if the Knesset were to pass laws to pass a constitution, they could strike down the constitutional laws as being against some higher constitution known only to them. In short, they have said that they are the absolute final power over all government action and over all matters of public policy in Israel. What is additionally alarming and what makes the matter particularly intolerable is that these final judges of every democratic decision are not picked in any manner that is democratic. Indeed, they control their own selection. Unlike in America, the judges are not picked by the prime minister or the president. They’re not picked by the legislature. They’re picked by a committee that is controlled by judges. Needless to say, they are not going to pick people who disagree with them or who think they’ve wrongly decided any of their cases. They’re not going to pick people who believe in judicial restraint. They’re going to pick people who basically are yes men to what they are currently saying. Essentially, the supreme power in the state is held by a self-selecting group of people completely insulated from any democratic process. As a matter of fact, they have also said that the attorney general, who’s not a member of the cabinet, but is really an officer of the Supreme Court and a representative of the court in the government, can veto any government action. If the government wants to hire someone, fire someone, or appoint someone to a committee or take any single action, the attorney general can prevent it from happening simply by saying, “No, I don’t think it’s a good idea,” without any legal rationale. Indeed, the attorney general has currently said that the prime minister of Israel, who was just elected a couple months ago, is incapacitated and is not allowed to be involved in judicial reform because of some legal proceedings against him, even though he was elected with the public being fully aware of these legal proceedings. They said now the prime minister of Israel, just elected, is not allowed to talk about the single most important issue in the country. In America, the president can fire the attorney general. In Israel, the attorney general can fire the president and the prime minister. That is extraordinary. What these reforms do is they seek to put some democratic checks on this. That is to say, a system of checks and balances is very important. In Israel, there’s currently one power with no checks on it—the court. The current proposal is to put in a modest check, not take away the powers of the court, allow it to continue to review laws, and certainly allow it to defend minority rights, but not to allow it to pick its own successors, but rather to have rotating governments, Right-wing and Left-wing as the people elect them, have a primary role in appointing judges to the court, so that it does not function as a kind of politburo selecting its own members and selecting its own successors. Mr. Jekielek: What you’ve just outlined seems like a pretty serious issue. Why all of a sudden has this come to the fore? Mr. Kontorovich: One reason is that the court’s power grabs have only increased with time. If they had simply satisfied themselves with saying, “We can strike down laws as being unconstitutional if they violate minority rights,” even though there’s not a legal basis for that, nobody would have minded. But in recent years, they’ve made some fairly extravagant extensions to their self-proclaimed power, including claiming to be able to remove the prime minister. They’ve claimed to be able to strike down amendments to the laws they previously said were constitutional. They have now said that they can decide not only what the constitution means, but what goes into it, which is a fairly shocking aggrandizement of power. These efforts have been many years in the making. Politicians have complained about the court’s overreaching power for many, many years. Indeed, they have been trying to do things about it for a long time. But what they found is that if you try to fix on a small level, it gets blocked. This government chose to fix it on a broad level. Another reason that it’s happening right now is because it really couldn’t happen in the past six years, because Israel has had five elections in six years, all of them caused by the Supreme Court. In fact, it was because the Supreme Court struck down a very important legislative compromise between the religious and secular factions about army service. In the absence of that compromise, there was a cycle of elections. The Supreme Court also invented a rule that when you have a lame duck government, a government that doesn’t have a majority support, it cannot take important actions. The court, in fact, has been the government for much of the past six years, and the government has been incapacitated from dealing with major questions, including judicial reform. Basically, the court has been resisting any kind of reform until now. Finally, there’s a significant stable majority in favor of reform in the parliament. The court has been predictably Left-wing in its rulings, not always Left-wing, but primarily favoring the Left. Those politically allied with the Left say, “Why should we allow these reforms? We have power now. Why change it?” Under the reforms, all parties would be able to appoint judges to the court. The Left would appoint when they get elected. The Right would appoint when they get elected. But currently, the Left thinks, “Under the current system when we’re in power, there are Left-wing judges appointed to the court. When the Right’s in power, there are Left-wing judges appointed to the court. Why should we change that? That’s great. Heads, I win. Tails, you lose. Mr. Jekielek: It’s fascinating to hear about this. This is actually very different from the mantras that we’re hearing in the legacy media. This is yet another example of a propaganda information war miasma that almost any issue of significance becomes mired in. The thing that I find very interesting is there are actually recent revelations that there’s even some U.S. funding of some of these opposition protests. Can you clarify that? Mr. Kontorovich: The protests are extremely well-funded and extremely well-organized, and there is a question where they get the money from. It’s completely legitimate for people to protest wherever they get the money from. It has turned out that some of the groups who are organizing these protests have received funding from the State Department in recent years. Those revelations have only shown a small amount of funding to those groups, but that’s direct funding from the State Department. That raises the question of whether they have also received indirect funding from the State Department through other groups that would be easier to conceal. Much more important than the funding is the fact that the United States is giving political support for the efforts to crush democracy in Israel. By crushing democracy in Israel, I mean insulate the Supreme Court as a permanent aristocratic, democratically unchangeable body. There is one reason America has managed to have a reasonably healthy civil culture over the decades. Let’s say the Supreme Court makes a big mistake. Supreme Court judges are independent. They have life tenure. They can make mistakes. Let’s say they make a mistake. They don’t have to lose faith in their country or give up because they think, “We can elect politicians who are eventually going to appoint judges who have judicial philosophy consistent with our values and, over time, we can change this result.” We can’t disobey the opinion of the court. It has the force of law, but it’s not from Sinai. It’s not biblical. It’s not dogma. In Israel, the court picks its own successors. If it makes a bad decision, it’s not going to correct it. It’s not going to change it, and the people really have no hope. The people can elect a prime minister, and the attorney general can say he’s not allowed to be prime minister absent any statutory authority. Amazingly, President Biden is warning Israel that allowing politicians to be involved in nominating judges is going to perhaps affect democratic values, when in America, politicians do exactly that. American Supreme Court judges are not picked by the Supreme Court judges. Imagine if we had a rule that said the majority of the court or the chief judge could veto Biden nominees. That’s how it works in Israel. President Biden, amazingly, unhappy with some decisions of the court, threatened to pack the court, which would effectively make it a tool of his own policies by increasing the number of judges. He could make a vast number of new appointments and immediately change all the decisions of the Supreme Court. The same Biden administration, that was just recently threatening to pack the court, is now objecting to the Israeli government seeking to appoint just two judges to the Supreme Court in its term, which is what these proposals would entail. The political backing of the Biden administration of the protest movement is alarming and hypocritical. Mr. Jekielek: There are clearly quite a significant number of people protesting what they believe to be threats to democracy. Are they somehow defining democracy differently? Are they misled? What kind of information are you getting on the ground? Mr. Kontorovich: The protestors are a mix of people. Some of them, and you can tell by their slogans, reject the legitimacy of this government, much like the resistance to President Trump. This person, Prime Minister Netanyahu, cannot be prime minister. He’s illegitimate, despite winning election after election. Some of them are seeking to topple the government, which is a legitimate use of protest. But it’s a farce to pretend it’s truly about democracy. Others are alarmed. As we’ve learned in recent years, fear sells. One side is saying, “Democracy is ending. Take to the streets now or you will be living in a fascist state.” People don’t want to be living in a fascist state. They may worry. Whereas, the other side is saying, “We have some reforms that are going to improve the democratic accountability and the democratic functioning of the country.” One is a promise of hope, and the other is fear. Fear, I think, works better. People have mixed views and mixed motives. The opposition leader, Yair Lapid, just lost an election. He wants to preserve a mechanism where his preferred policy results can be mandated, even if he continues to lose elections, and the Supreme Court is such a mechanism. Mr. Jekielek: To finish up this topic, where do you see this going? Mr. Kontorovich: The government is going to pass a law which simply says that judges are not going to be the judges of who are going to be the judges. That’s all it says, “The judges are not going to be the judges of who are the judges.” It does not affect judicial independence. Judges would still serve life terms or until their pension. The government would not be able to fire judges. But the nominations for judges would now not be veto-able by the judges themselves. The Supreme Court in Israel believes that it has authority to decide any issue. It has no notion of political issues or issues that are not legal issues. The Supreme Court will almost certainly be invited immediately to rule on this reform, and it’s very likely that they’ll strike it down. That is to say they will say that a constitutional law change on how they are selected is not legal, and that no one can change how the new judges are picked. In other words, there’s simply no ability to check the court. That would really imperil Israel’s democracy and lead to a significant constitutional crisis. Most alarming is that many Western leaders, because they’re sympathetic with the general political tenor of the court or hostile to the political tenor of the Netanyahu government, might seek to support the court in this crisis. It would be unthinkable for the Supreme Court if two judges were added to the Supreme Court with some kind of court packing plan. It would be unthinkable for the court to be able to veto that, because it’s up to the political branches to decide on the structure of the judiciary. But the Israeli Supreme Court believes it is the guardian of Israeli society and that it has the superior insight into what is democratic. They don’t believe there’s any barrier to it. They’re being encouraged to do this even by the opposition. The question is whether countries like the United States are going to say, “We’re not getting involved,” or whether they’re going to say, “You have to respect the ruling of the court.” But, of course, the ruling of the court makes them a judge of their own powers, which is fundamentally inimical to checks and balances. Mr. Jekielek: You’ve said over the last five to six years we’ve seen quite a bit of dysfunction in Israeli politics. This has had significant implications, not just for Israel. What you’re describing is very likely greater dysfunction and growing dysfunction with no clear solution. Mr. Kontorovich: Hopefully, the Supreme Court will understand that deciding that they get to be the judges of who is going to be the judges of how you pick the judges would undermine their legitimacy, fundamentally, and that they should not do that. But, in fact, there is a real struggle, and it’s part of a broader struggle in the West over definitions of democracy. There are definitions of democracy that essentially mean rules by supposedly enlightened elites, as opposed to democracy in the sense of people voting for things. This is really a clash between notions of popular democracy versus expertise and enlightened rule. It’s maybe similar to other things we’ve seen in recent years, including the COVID issue, which in many ways was a controversy between popular will and bureaucratic mandate. Mr. Jekielek: In this vein, I don’t know if there’s ever been a greater test of whether expertise, in fact, is a good way to govern. We may want to look at this in the future. At least that’s what I’m thinking. Mr. Kontorovich: You’re talking about the COVID lockdowns? Mr. Jekielek: Yes. I’m talking about all sorts of COVID-related policies. Mr. Kontorovich: It’s an interesting illustration in the following way. It’s completely legitimate, fundamentally necessary and there’s no other way—if you have some kind of medical question about how to treat or deal with a virus, the people you will consult with will be doctors, epidemiologists. Maybe they’ll all get it wrong, but it’s hard to think of a better system. But that’s about actual narrow medical questions. When you talk about public policy decisions, those are combinations of medical judgment, how dangerous is this virus, how transmissible is this, with other kinds of values. Those values are political values. It’s not unrelated to the Supreme Court issue because, in Israel, the court thinks that questions of how many judges there should be, how many refugees should we take, and what should be the map of the de facto border, are all purely legal questions. Whereas, they’re a mixture of law and mostly policy. In fact, they’re political questions. The question of should we have a lockdown, even assuming a certain level of dangerousness of the virus, is a policy question, because it weighs one the medical facts to the extent we can determine them, against something completely different, which is values and the value of liberty. No epidemiologist is actually an expert in the value of liberty or can claim to be an expert in the harm caused to people by not being able to work and go to school. Mr. Jekielek: There are two other issues that strike me. The first one is that just one group of experts happened to have the megaphone, and another group of experts had very different, but much more scientifically valid perspectives. There is that issue. Mr. Kontorovich: We see quite clearly the experts that had the megaphone were the government experts, the experts who were in the government bureaucracy led by and coordinated by the National Institutes of Health. But another lesson that we see here is that experts are not always disinterested simply by virtue of being experts. They can have agendas, and having a PhD does not make you free of politics and free of personal self-interest. There were things they were trying to achieve, some self-interested, and some out of ideas of how to control a population and what you need to tell people to get them to behave a certain way. It was quite clear that the notion of not telling people exactly what you see as the full truth to ensure a proper outcome was legitimated, which is a kind of paternalistic view, that we can tell people things that may not be exactly right, because it’s actually better for them in the long run. With the delegitimization of dissenting views and the centralization of a kind of official science, which came to be known as, “the science,” it’s clear that the government experts were wrong or purposely misleading. Again, this is not a fundamental indictment of expertise. We need expertise because we need to know about things that we cannot establish ourselves. But it’s about who gets the last word on what you do with the information from the experts. Every specialist deals with a narrow set of things, and there is no neutral or expert way of valuing different kinds of costs. That is to say there is no expert who can tell you, “On the one hand, we want to protect old people. On the other hand, there’s going to be emotional harm to lots of teenagers.” There’s no formula for that. It’s a policy preference choice, which is why that’s where expertise stops, when you’re weighing those kinds of intangibles. It seems quite clear that they did not significantly consider or weigh emotional harm to children or really to anyone. As a kind of model of cost-benefit regulation, it was not particularly expertly conducted, but you wouldn’t expect them to do this. That’s not their job. But that’s a reason why the politicians need to be the bosses of the experts, not vice versa, because it’s impossible. There is no objective or neutral way to integrate multiple different kinds of values. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about this whole COVID picture. This is something you’ve written about, especially when it comes to Communist China’s co-option of the international system. You’re an expert in international law. The Arab/Israeli conflict has been your focus, but you’ve also looked at what happens in these multilateral international organizations like the UN and, of course, by extension, the WHO. There’s a huge amount of skepticism about the value of these multilateral organizations right now because, again, they pushed policies which turned out to be quite bad or some of which appeared to be at the behest of the Chinese Communist Party in the case of the WHO early on in the pandemic. Are these international organizations actually doing their job, and is it even possible for them to do it in this type of context? Mr. Kontorovich: It’s very easy to overstate the harms caused by the World Health Organization, but it is almost impossible to understate the benefits. That is to say, most international bureaucracies, like the WHO, are nothing burgers. That is to say they create an appearance or aura of authoritatively being the central international forum for dealing with something. The United Nations is another example. But they’re really just bureaucracies that are incapable of dealing with significant issues that run into or contradict the interests of nation-states. Because they’re incapable, it doesn’t mean they’re going to cause harm, but they will certainly not do benefit. If one was relying on them to help, that would be a false reliance. To the extent that one has a hope that this World Health Organization is going to monitor China, is going to force China to report somehow, and is going to get to the bottom of this, that is an unrealistic hope from the get-go, which does question the value of these institutions. A lot of international institutions function reasonably well when you have low stakes and constant things. If we’re talking about reporting on scarlet fever on an ongoing basis, World Health Organization, I don’t know if it’s the cheapest bureaucratic way to do it. But when you get to things that significantly affect the interest of nation-states, the WHO depends on all these nation-states for their cooperation. The WHO is very heavily funded by China. We see they’re not going to have a showdown with the nation-states who they depend on for ongoing bureaucratic functioning. That’s going to hurt their institution. The real failing of the World Health Organization was not confronting the Communist Party, and also engaging with them as if they were well-intentioned. We’re all looking just to get to the bottom of this. The World Health Organization can only know about China one way, whatever the Communist Party chooses to tell them. Anyone who’s going to rely on the World Health Organization’s rubber stamp is not exercising due diligence. One of the disappointing things that came out of the early days of Covid is that I would have thought the American intelligence apparatus would have some kind of effective way of figuring out if some dangerous epidemic is spreading somewhere. But apparently, there was reliance on the World Health Organization. The problem is that nation-states rely on it. You don’t have to rely on it. Mr. Jekielek: Basically, you’re saying, “Why have these institutions at all? It’s performative.” Mr. Kontorovich: You can have them for low stakes things. Mr. Jekielek: It’s a lot of money. Mr. Kontorovich: That is to say the money is the least of the problems, compared to the harm that could be caused if you actually rely on them for resolutions on high stakes things. International organizations are bureaucratic and they’re expensive ways of solving anything. With all international institutions, the lesson is how to be able to rely on them for small routine things and not put faith in them for important things. For example, you can have the International Atomic Energy Agency inspections. They’re probably useful for double checking that Britain or France has the nuclear weapons stowed correctly. But for monitoring Iran’s nuclear program, a high-stakes, noncooperative country, it would just be folly to rely upon them. Mr. Jekielek: Their main function is to create a veneer of legitimacy for governments that don’t deserve it. Mr. Kontorovich: That is certainly true of United Nations human rights institutions, which are heavily populated by countries with horrible human rights records, like the PRC [People’s Republic of China]. It lets them participate in a human rights forum, be treated warmly and receptively, and potentially use those images back home. Here we are voting on a resolution against Israel at the Human Rights Council. This does explain part of the strong anti-Israel bias at the UN. You have all these dictatorships getting together. They have to vote against someone. Who can they all agree is the lowest common denominator? Israel. It serves as an expiatory distraction function. The United Nations can do treaties about mail or international aviation which serve technical, useful coordinating functions. But on fundamental things that touch upon national sovereignty, it’s a false hope. If you simply ignore them and don’t take them seriously, then the harm comes from the credulity of those who look to these kinds of institutions for fundamental solutions to problems caused by bad state action. Only other countries can solve that. To stand up to the CCP, you need power. Most countries wouldn’t do it. The question isn’t that the World Health Organization didn’t call out the CCP; neither did the United States, and neither did England. That’s the fundamental question because the international bureaucracies are unaccountable because they don’t have a constituency of their own citizens. Countries are accountable to their citizens. We can’t hope for more from the international bureaucracy. We can hope for more from western democracies. Mr. Jekielek: You have a point because you could argue the U.S. just copied what the CCP said was the correct response, this kind of draconian response which it instituted. There’s a lot of debate about how much of it was propaganda, and how much of it was real. We certainly saw there was very significant death through all sorts of proxy measures in China early on. I’m still trying to figure out what that was, because it didn’t seem to be from the virus that actually came out to the West. Mr. Kontorovich: There was a panic. I’ve studied the history of pandemic response in the United States, and what’s extraordinary is that the measures the United States adopted during Covid were not measures that had ever been implemented in any pandemic, including the 1918 Spanish flu, which was significantly more severe in its consequences. The idea of sweeping, prolonged lockdowns was not only never done before, but in plans and strategizing and war gaming out pandemic situations, which the federal government had done extensively, the notion of a global pandemic respiratory virus was not surprising or new. It had been anticipated and thought about for a really long time, mostly in the context of influenza or maybe a SARS-like event. But the scenario was not surprising, and none of those plans involved lockdowns of this nature. Indeed, the federal pandemic planning document talked about isolation of sick people as being the primary tool. Where did this lockdown response come from? It’s impossible to say definitively, but what seems to have happened is that the Chinese government implemented a policy that was not a big stretch for them, being repressive and draconian. The Western countries where it reached, Italy first, and then the west coast, just copied that response saying, “We have their virus. We’ll have their response.” Governor Newsom was the first to implement this in California. Other west coast governors followed immediately and, very quickly, it spread. Mr. Jekielek: You’re absolutely right. There were official pandemic plans that were drawn up and tried and tested and used all the way through to today. Lockdowns, from what I recall reading, were looked at, but were never accepted. On the other hand, there was this national security-type wargaming response which had some similar measures that may have also contributed. With this new pandemic treaty that the WHO is working on, and also these new international health regulations which many countries are subscribing to, they are definitely giving more powers to international bodies. You’re an expert on international law in general. I’m not going to ask about these specific documents. You’ve also been looking at how international law has been co-opted in dealing with Israel. I know this has been a big focus for you. Please explain to me the value of this. Is this something that’s useful? Is this something that we should be trying to build, and how do you actually enforce it if you do? Mr. Kontorovich: International law is clearly useful and can be very helpful for certain purposes. The key is knowing for what purposes it can be useful and not placing any kind of broader or ultimate hopes on it. The backlash against international law comes from overly aggressive claims made on its behalf that it will usher in some kind of new world order of countries that follow rules, regardless of their interests, as a kind of global consensus system of public morality. It’s not going to be very effective for that. International law could be useful for lots of little things, deciding jurisdiction over vessels on the high seas, providing background rules of diplomatic immunity, facilitating information sharing, ongoing routine functions, civil aviation, and thousands of uncontroversial contexts. International law is going to be most limited when it seeks to constrain states from doing things that are particularly important to them and their power. The first thing you have to ask about international law is, “What is international law? Where does it come from?” International law can only come from nation-states. International law is rules that countries agree to. That is where it comes from, typically in treaties or through some other mechanisms. So there is no supreme authority above countries, and there’s no supreme enforcement mechanism. What does that mean? That means international law will work well in a situation of reciprocity. If you search our ambassador’s bag, we can kick out your ambassador. We both have ambassadors. But in highly disparate endgame scenarios, let’s say China kicks out the U.S. ambassador. The U.S. can then kick out China’s ambassador. But let’s say China now violates human rights and oppresses a minority. What’s America going to say, “We’re going to show you, we’re going to oppress our minority, too?” It doesn’t work. There’s no logic of reciprocity. Those kinds of international law ideas are going to be much more aspirational. They’re not really going to be law. They’re going to be statements of values and, if one takes them as such, they’re not going to do much harm. But if one places hope in them, then they will ultimately be distracting because there is no mechanism. The United Nations certainly is not going to be the mechanism for making them enforceable. Mr. Jekielek: I’m thinking of it in the context of harms, like the crimes against humanity and genocide that were developed after World War II. The Chinese Communist Party is very much involved in this. Mr. Kontorovich: Simply defining the crime is not going to create the policeman who’s going to go enforce it. That requires political will on the part of countries. What we’ve seen is calling it international crime does not create that political will. If Western countries did not want to create sanctions or consequences on China for creating the COVID disaster, what are the chances that because of international law they’re going to do something about groups in China? International law is used often as a substitute for direct moral appeals. “International law says,’ is a way of saying things because we don’t have a global religion. We’re not united by a shared faith. International law might become a proxy for that. It doesn’t really work well as a proxy. I think appeals to morality are more honest and effective. Mr. Jekielek: We have certainly seen that there doesn’t seem to be very strong enforcement mechanisms removing PNTR [Permanent Normal Trade Relations] for China by the U.S. unless they fix some of their human rights problems. That might be a useful tool. Mr. Kontorovich: But it’s not going to come from international law. It’s going to come from political will in the individual country. That’s the key. When countries delegate powers to make decisions, those decisions are now out of the hands of democratic processes. That is something to be careful about. That’s why the United States has also not joined the International Criminal Court. International institutions can be used as a mechanism of insulating political decisions from democracy. That’s why the Obama administration got the Iran deal passed as a security council resolution because that’s not something Congress can veto. There was an idea after World War II that it could be a basis for some kind of shared morality, which is still appealing to some, but in fact it is not. Actors like the Chinese Communist Party have a cynical viewpoint. They can sign the treaties and not believe in the ideals. Mr. Jekielek: It would be an understatement to say that the international situation right now is fraught. You’re telling me that these international institutions in this context are not going to be helpful. Mr. Kontorovich: No, but that just makes it like the entire rest of human history. There’s no genie in a bottle that’s going to fly out from the United Nations, whatever organization, and solve all of humanity’s problems. We are left with the problems as nation-states. I take a different perspective. We live in an extraordinarily peaceful time by global standards, by standards of militarized conflict. We live in an extraordinarily prosperous time. What much of the Western world at least is struggling with is more the question of what are its values now that the normal problems of getting food and avoiding being conquered have been taken care of. These are advanced problems, at least. Mr. Jekielek: I was told recently by a high-level government official that we might end up voting ourselves into a situation like Venezuela. The Chinese Communist Party has a disregard for basic humanity and is waiting in the shadows to assume the mantle of a global power broker and decision maker. Mr. Kontorovich: I agree that the United States does not seem sufficiently prepared or interested in the global challenge posed by a Chinese communist expansion. That’s been seen for a long time already in the South Pacific Sea, which is an area I know well, because it poses lots of international law issues. China has made some extraordinarily broad territorial claims against most of its neighbors. The premise of this has created these military base islands, which the United States has not been particularly effective at challenging, but which now projects their power deep into the Pacific. At this point, it just seems they’re more interested in winning. Mr. Jekielek: That doesn’t look good to me. Mr. Kontorovich: We just have to get it, but the United States is capable. It’s a matter of interest. Mr. Jekielek: Any final thoughts as we finish? Mr. Kontorovich: On the whole, despite that all we do is talk about problems, they are all surmountable problems. They are more problems of knowing what we want, rather than not being able to get it. Mr. Jekielek: Professor Eugene Kontorovich, such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Kontorovich: Thank you so much. Great pleasure to be here. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Professor Eugene Kontorovich 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

“When there is nothing to die for, there is nothing to live for … and that’s why I think that nationalism is a very good word when it goes together with freedom and human rights. The moment you separate them, you’re getting awful dictatorship or empty, shallow, decadent life.” I sit down with former Soviet political prisoner Natan Sharansky. He is what they call a “refusenik”—a Jew who was once forbidden from emigrating to Israel from the Soviet Union. “This connection between the desire of people to belong and the desire of people to be free, in Israel is much more full—much more deep—than in any other parts of the world,” says Sharansky. Sharansky now lives in Israel, where he advocates on behalf of the Jewish people and continues to speak out against the threat of communist and totalitarian regimes. “Many dissidents, including myself … we were very often upset, and even infuriated, by the readiness of the free world to buy the lies of the communist leaders,” he says. Sharansky shares his thoughts on Russia, Ukraine, Iran, Israel, and China, and explains his “3D test of antisemitism” and why calling Israel an “apartheid state” is merely a new version of a very old hatred. “What apartheid? Arabs are sitting on the Supreme Court. In fact, [an] Arab judge sent [an] Israeli president to prison for sexual harassment. And 25 percent of all the doctors are Arab. There is nothing to discuss about,” says Sharansky. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/natan-sharansky-on-todays-evil-empires-the-war-in-ukraine-soviet-communism-and-the-new-antisemitism_5103919.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Natan Sharansky. Such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Natan Sharansky: Thank you for inviting me. Mr. Jekielek: Many people watching this show will be aware of who you are, of course. You were brought up in the Soviet Union and you became a dissident and had many adventures. Please tell me about what it was like growing up in the Soviet Union. Mr. Sharansky: I was born in the Soviet Union in the city of Donetsk, which then was called Stalino. Today, it is in the center of a war of barbaric aggression by Putin against Ukraine. But in those days when I grew up there, nobody could imagine that one day there would be war between Russia and Ukraine, a Russian-Ukraine war, debasing this global friendship of people by this Soviet empire, the leader of the communist world. We were a very powerful country which controlled one third of the world. We grew without freedom, because from our very childhood we knew that we could not say publicly what we really think. Without the identity of being a Jew, we had nothing Jewish in our life. We knew nothing Jewish except from antisemitism, and life was full of antisemitism. After 1967, when Israel’s victory was big, it was a frustration and a failure for the Soviet Union, and Israel entered our life in a very powerful way. Because all the world was looking at us and saying, “How did you Jews do it? You understand that whether you want it or not, to the world, you are connected to Israel, and you don’t know why. You start reading underground and discover that there is a history, there are people, there is a culture, and there is a faith that you want to be part of it. That’s how I became a Jewish activist and a Zionist. This discovery of my identity also gave me strength to fight for my rights, for the rights of other people, and for freedom. That’s how I became spokesman of two movements; the Jewish movement and the human rights movement in the Soviet Union. I was accused of being an agent of American imperialism and spent nine years in prison. Because of the pressure of all the free world and President Reagan, specifically, I was the first political prisoner who was released by Gorbachev. I spent nine years in the Israeli government and then nine years as the head of the Jewish Agency. It’s the organization dealing with the connection between Israel and diaspora Jewry. I have two daughters and eight grandchildren that are the great achievements of my life. Mr. Jekielek: There are so many things I want to touch on, but let’s start here. You said that you started looking at some underground literature. What did you see? Do you remember a specific moment where you had a sudden moment of realization that changed your thinking? Mr. Sharansky: In fact, the realization that I have to hide my thoughts came very early. I was five years old when Stalin died. My father explained to me, a five-year-old-boy, “You have to remember all your life that a miracle happened just when we Jews were in big danger. Stalin died, it’s good for us, for Jews.” But he said, “Of course, don’t say that to anybody. Just do and say what everybody does.” I go back to kindergarten and they cry together with all the children about the death of Stalin. They sing the songs about the great sun of all the people, Stalin. I remember that miracle happened, Stalin died, and that I should be happy. I have no idea how many children are really crying or how many are crying like me. That was the beginning of my life as a loyal Soviet citizen. That’s when I learned that you are not supposed to say what you really think. It was a very uncomfortable feeling that you have to live with this self-censorship. But that’s how loyal Soviet citizens live. I had no freedom and I had no identity. As I said, there was no value for being a Jew except that it meant that there are restrictions and discrimination. Nothing positive. But I discovered my identity through other people when the victory of Israel happened. They treated you as if it was your victory. You understand there is a connection and then you start reading the books. You find books like Exodus by Leon Uris, or History of the Jewish People, and you suddenly understand that there is a whole great history, which doesn’t start from communist revolution. It starts from the Exodus from Egypt thousands of years ago. It’s so easy for you, and it’s more natural to feel yourself part of that history and not the history of hiding your thoughts and being afraid of repressions. That was one thing. On the other hand, when you are not afraid and you start speaking openly your mind, you can finally read the books which are describing real Soviet life. You read Solzhenitsyn about the gulags and you knew about it. You were whispering about it. It was like a non-existent world somewhere behind, like ghosts are in this world. Suddenly, it is your world. It becomes real through these books. With time, I became like an unofficial spokesman, meaning that I was connecting the dissidents with the outer world. Using some diplomatic channels and some tourists, I was getting different books which we were then distributing all over the Soviet Union. Once I sent a note to my friend in New York who sent us 100 copies of Exodus, saying, “We will make a Zionist revolution here . It was simply a book about Jewish history, yet it was having such a big influence on people. They were suddenly discovering their own identity, and they felt that it could change all their reality. The same was true of the books of Solzhenitsyn or the letters of Andrei Sakharov and many other great books, which we started reading through samizdat. Mr. Jekielek: You were playing this dual role. On the one hand, you were working to kindle this sense of Jewish identity among Jews in the Soviet Union, of which there were a significant number. But on the other hand, you were also acting as an anti-communist dissident. Mr. Sharansky: Yes. I have to say that when I became active in both movements, in the movement of the national revival of Jews, and at the same time was fighting for human rights, there was pressure or warnings from both sides that you have to choose—are you a nationalist or you universalist? Are you concerned only about your own tribe, or you are concerned about everybody? You had to choose. I felt from the beginning that was absolutely wrong. You don’t have to choose. If in fact I have strengths now to fight for freedom, for human rights for everybody, it’s only because I discovered my own identity. That is the source of my strength. When I was nobody, when I had no identity, the only value in my life was survival. I learned from childhood that because you’re Jew, you must be the best in physics, mathematics, chess, or whatever, because that’s the way of survival. There are no other values but survival and career. But when you do get your identity, suddenly you want to belong to something bigger than yourself. You have this desire to belong with your people in your history, in your identity, and in something bigger than your own career. You feel yourself strong enough to fight for world values. I always felt and feel until this day that this attempt to separate and divide the world of identity and the world of freedom is absolutely wrong. The really full enjoyable life is when people satisfy both desires to belong and to be free. Mr. Jekielek: Absolutely fascinating. I want to talk about this doublethink that you mentioned earlier, because you’ve actually written about this recently in Tablet magazine. You describe that not saying what you think is actually becoming quite prevalent in our society. Mr. Sharansky: It’s very alarming and these are things that I hoped would disappear with the failure of communism. We defeated communism. In one way or another, this phenomenon of Marxism will be coming back, and this is how it’s coming back to a free society. I see it in these theories that say all the world is divided between oppressors and the oppressed. The oppressed are always right, and the oppressor is always wrong. They say that human rights are a relative value. They are not an absolute value, because every culture has its own values. It happens that in some cultures, human rights are valued, and in some others they are not. Everything becomes relative, and suddenly, there are no absolute values. Maybe the most alarming thing about the so-called philosophy of political correctness is that you are not supposed to say things which contradict the official dogma of this moment. As a result, not in the Soviet Union because of the fear of the KGB, but here in free America you see there are more and more people who prefer not to speak publicly about their own views. I remember it was about 15 years ago when I was traveling over to American universities as a minister in the Israeli government dealing with the question of antisemitism. I was speaking to many Jewish students on the campuses. One of them was explaining to me that she very much wanted to sign the letter in support of Israel, but she knew that her professors would not like it, and it could damage her career. She decided that she would be silent for a couple of years and then she would start speaking when her career was behind her. This was not in Moscow University. It was in Harvard Business School, post graduate, the center of the free world, and the people were afraid to say what they were really thinking. That was 15 years ago. Today it’s even bigger. Mr. Jekielek: It was at Harvard in the late seventies that Solzhenitsyn gave his address. Everyone was expecting that he would celebrate the West, and talk about how terrible the Soviet Union was. But he actually did something very different. Mr. Sharansky: I remember the address well, because it was about 1975, just before I went to prison. That is true for many dissidents, including myself. We admired America, and we admired the free world. But we were very often upset and even infuriated by the readiness of the free world to buy the lies of the communist leaders. I was in prison at the time of President Reagan’s speech about the evil empire, and it was a big relief for us. Because finally, the leader of the free world showed that he fully understands the nature of this regime. Just before this speech I was in prison and I remember we were shocked. A leading pastor from the United States of America comes to the Soviet Union, and the authorities permit him to preach in front of big crowds. He gives an interview to the leading Soviet newspaper and the prisoners can read it. He says, “You have your problems with human rights. We have our own problems with human rights. We have to accept that all of us are different, and we have problems, but we have to be tolerant of these problems.” We are trying to explain all the time that it’s principled in different realities, the authoritarian regime and free word. They are absolutely different realities. People in the free world are ready to buy this propaganda; leading intellectuals, thinkers, and priests are ready to buy this propaganda that everything is relative—let’s live in peace together. Mr. Jekielek: Years ago there was a film that came out called The Lives of Others. I love this film because it was one of the few that could help someone in the free world get a sense of what it’s really like to live in a totalitarian society. It’s very hard to imagine. A lot of these intellectuals that you’ve been describing just now, they had this romantic notion, and they wanted to believe that the system was good. Maybe some of them were bought off, and maybe some of them were agents. Some of them just really wanted to believe it. They couldn’t imagine what it would be like to really live in a society where you really can’t say what you think, and where you have to hide your identity. Mr. Sharansky: Yes. I remember this film and I watched it in a cinema in Jerusalem. When the lights went up, and we were leaving, a group of young people saw me and rushed to me and said, “Is it true? Is it true?” I said to them, “Yes, but the reality was much worse.” Because that was happening in East Germany, but the Soviet Union was much tougher, and the KGB was much tougher than that. But it’s good that they really showed us what it is; permanent doublethink, permanent self-censorship, and the knowledge that they hear you, and they watch you. Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned a Harvard student who was afraid to write something in support of Israel. I’m reminded that you have devised a method of assessing whether something is a criticism of Israel, which is perfectly fine, versus something that is actually anti-Semitic. Could you please explain that? Mr. Sharansky: When I started dealing with the so-called new antisemitism, I saw how often criticism of Israel turns into another form of antisemitism. I started speaking about it as a minister of Israel’s government. There were many political partners all over the world who told me that they were not anti-semitic. “We are not anti-semites. You are simply using this awful word to stop criticism of Israel.” Of course, it was nonsense. Israel is full of self criticism. Israel is a very free society. Nobody can stop any Israeli politician from criticizing. In fact, if you want to stop criticizing in Israel, you have no political future in Israel. Of course, the world has a right to criticize Israel. Therefore, I proposed the so-called 3D criteria. I said, “What is typical for the anti-semite for thousands of years is the demonization of Jews, the delegitimization of Jews, and applying double standards for Jews.” Then, I can give a whole number of examples in these thousands of years. Today we can see that people are not simply criticizing Israel, but demonizing Israel, much like Sartre said, “For all anti-semites, a Jew is the closest to the devil.” They compare Israel with a satanic force. They delegitimize Israel, saying that Israel is not a legitimate state, or apply standards that are not applied to any other countries. In the most free countries and the most dictatorial countries, these are not applied. That is anti-semitism. Why did I choose 3D? Because if you go to a 3-D film and don’t put on 3-D spectacles you will not understand what is happening. But the moment you put on the spectacles, you see that’s a horse, that’s a person, and that’s an ocean. I was saying that if you see some criticism of Israel apply this principle. If somebody says some very not nice nice things about Israel, but it’s not comparing it to something demonic, or that you are Nazis, and if there is no denial of the right of Israel to exist, and if the criteria which applied Israel are the same as to the other countries, then it’s not anti-semitism. But if there is demonization, double standards, and delegitimization, then you are an anti-semite. That’s what I proposed. Mr. Jekielek: This demonization has almost become a norm here in America and in Canada, my home country. You describe people that you don’t agree with politically as Hitler, or Nazi or far-Right or racist. Mr. Sharansky: People are less and less ready to go into deep debate and to argue against the arguments of the other side with your own argument. The simplest thing is to simply accuse your opponent of something awful. For 20 years already, Israel has been accused of apartheid, because everyone hates apartheid. We all defeated apartheid, and we are all very happy that it disappeared. Then suddenly today, Israel is today’s apartheid. It came from South Africa, from the international conference of the United Nations against racism in Durban, and now suddenly, it’s all about Israel having apartheid. You can try to appeal to the logic of the people. Many times on the campuses there is a special apartheid week. I remember how I came upon one young girl demonstrating with the slogan, “Israel is apartheid.” I said, “You are too young to know. I’m a friend of Nelson Mandela. I was an international observer in South Africa during the first elections. Let me speak to you for a few minutes and describe to you the reality of apartheid, and then you tell me what you see is a similarity. She and all her friends started shouting, “We didn’t come to talk to you. We came to demand a boycott of Israel.“ But then, professors started speaking up, and then the human rights organizations published reports about apartheid. The more they have to deal with the reality of Israel, where is the apartheid? Arabs are sitting in the Supreme Court. In fact, an Arab judge sent Israel’s president to prison for sexual harassment. And 25 percent of all the doctors are Arab. There’s nothing to discuss here, so what do they say? They say that the very idea of the creation of the Jewish state in 1948, where Jews will have the right to come, is apartheid. Of course, that’s a double standard, because there are so many nation states. Nobody asked why Germany permits Germans from the Soviet Union to come, but not from 200 other nations, to immigrate and get citizenship. This is absolutely arrogant and illiterate. These extreme accusations are used in order not to debate. Then, they are covered by intellectual bodies like think tanks. Mr. Jekielek: You have made a very interesting parallel of critical social justice or woke ideology to the ideology that you had to live in and escaped from. Mr. Sharansky: All the other ideologies were declared to be false and bourgeois. You had to study Marxist-Leninist ideology and pass exams. It was like permanent brainwashing, which you have to impose on yourself in order to continue your career. It was all about struggle between the classes that are oppressors, and the oppressed. In order to see the full picture, you have to listen to the oppressed, because they know the truth, and the oppressors are always wrong. Inevitably, there is a revolution by the oppressed against the oppressors. That’s what brings this absolute happiness of communism. In the modern world, you think all that is already dead, and that communism was defeated, and the Cold War was won by the free world. Then suddenly, in the name of fighting against racism, which of course is a very noble human cause, or in the name of fighting for the rights of women, a very noble cause as well, suddenly there is the same rhetoric. Take so-called critical race theory. Instead of putting in the word class, as in critical class theory, if you look at the same texts that you studied in school and in the institute as Marxist-Leninist theory about the dictatorship of the proletariat, instead of class, it’s now about race. There is the race of the oppressed, and the race of the oppressors. We have to listen to the oppressed. We should not even permit the oppressors to speak. That is how the world will become better. Mr. Jekielek: This is a view that’s become common here in the U.S. It’s certainly common in Canada. What about in Israel and in other countries that you visit? Mr. Sharansky: This is discussed in academia in America, and sooner or later we will also be discussing this in academia in Israel. Israel is part of the free world. Your ideas and dogmas are moving freely. But Israel is unique in its constant effort to connect its identity to freedom. Israel is a Jewish democratic state, and we are part of the Middle East. The Middle East is the most dense place for all the dictatorships. Look at the picture of the map at Freedom House. The biggest concentration of black spots where there are detentions is in the Middle East. There is a small white spot and that is Israel. The desire of people to belong, and the desire of people to be free, is much more full in Israel, and much more deep than in any other part of the world. The world is divided between the free world, which believes that freedom should be absolute with no national prejudices, and the world of dictatorships. It is not accidental that an Israeli family brings into the world many more babies than any other family in a free society. It’s not a habit. It’s simply a kind of optimism and a kind of stability. This deep meaningful life of belonging and freedom is expressed in the most natural way in Israel. Mr. Jekielek: Nationalism isn’t a bad thing, is what you’re telling me. Mr. Sharansky: Nationalism and freedom, when they go together, are giving real meaning to your life. The life without identity, with only freedom, is the life of decadence. You know that John Lennon wrote that great song, “Imagine.“ He dreams about a world where there are no nations, no government, no borders, no God, and where there is nothing to die for. When there is nothing to die for, there is nothing to live for. It becomes very decadent, and not so deep. That’s why nationalism is a very good word when it goes together with freedom and human rights. When you separate them, you are getting awful dictatorships, or an empty, shallow, and decadent life. Mr. Jekielek: You are an unabashed supporter of Ukraine in the Russia-Ukraine war. At the same time some people in America are suspicious of supporting Ukraine, because of the strong backing of these globalist elements. These are people that believe in the nationalist freedom vision that you just described. Mr. Sharansky: First of all, I’m not against Russia, I’m absolutely against the barbaric aggression of Putin’s regime against Ukraine. I’m glad that the free world finally understands more and more that it’s not about a piece of land between Ukraine and Russia. It’s an attempt by Putin to rebuild the Russian empire, to change the rules, and to go back to the time when their strength was a source of national pride. This was when nationalism meant colonialism, and national pride meant that you have to occupy those who are around you and bring them back. That is what the Russian Tsars were doing all the time. In order to explain the difference between the nationalism of Russia and the nationalism of Ukraine, I’ll put it in a different way. What is the difference between Russia and Ukraine in terms of how they developed after they became independent? In fact, there are a lot of similarities. Both countries didn’t have any strong or even weak civil society institutions and they had to develop them. Both societies started dramatic privatization. As a result, there was a new class of oligarchs who were all closely connected with politicians, and there was a lot of corruption. So, where is the difference? In the last 22 years, there were five presidents in Ukraine. Each one won the right to be the president in a very tough competition. They were accusing the previous one of corruption. The people were also condemning them for being corrupt. You had to win the elections. Then, a year after this you are accused of corruption. People go to the demonstrations and there is confrontation. And then, there are free elections again. At the same time, in the same 22 years, there was only one president in Russia, who from the very beginning started working on one thing; how to stay president forever. He took control of the press and then he took control of the finances of the parties. He took control so that those who benefit from corruption are all those who are loyal to him and the courts. As a result, we now have two classic examples of nationalism. There is Russian nationalism or Putin nationalism, which means that he is appealing to the pride of the Russian people. He says. “Look at these neo-Nazis, they are threats to Russian people. They are not a nation. We have to bring them here.” On the other hand, there is Ukrainian nationalism, which means that we want to live in freedom. We want to live as a free nation with our own history, and our own traditions. This nationalism is a feeling of belonging, which gives you the strength to fight for freedom. Is there corruption that is not transparent in Ukraine? Yes, but there are ways to deal with it, because it is a free country. Today I hear that we should not support Ukraine, because there is not enough transparency. “Who knows what they’re doing with their money?” You know what? Because it’s a free country you can work to make sure there are enough ways of controlling what they’re doing with your money. You have to thank God that there are people who are ready to sacrifice their life, to fight, to protect, and to defend the free world. They’re not asking you to fight for them, they’re asking you to give them weapons. Otherwise, if Putin defeats Ukraine, you will have to fight for your freedom. You will have to not only give more and more weapons to this fight, you will have to give more and more lives of your own people. Mr. Jekielek: You’re the perfect person to ask about this because I’ve heard so many different variations. There are these so-called Azov battalions, the Nazi battalions in Ukraine. Russia uses this as a pretext. You mentioned it earlier as we were talking. What is the reality of that? Mr. Sharansky: Have you ever had the opportunity to speak with somebody from the Azov battalion? I recommend that you actually speak to them. Some of them are alive, some of them went to the Russian prisons, and some of them continue to fight. It’s true that in 2014 there suddenly was a need to fight against Russia. There was not enough of a regular army, so there were some privately-based regiments created. There were some anarchists and other elements who joined. In 2014, you could find some with neo-Nazi slogans. In 2016 they already didn’t exist, because the officers of Azov and the government created their own order. If you are speaking about neo–Nazis, they are all over Europe. There are many parties which are competing, and sometimes they are gaining some influence in the parliaments of practically every European country. In Ukraine, the neo-Nazis tried to compete in the election. They didn’t even get one percent of the vote. They didn’t even get one-tenth of one percent of the vote. Ukraine is the only country in Europe where a proud open Jewish-Zionist person was elected in a free election, with tough competition from at least two very good Ukrainian candidates. This shows that it simply was not even an issue. Of course, it’s absolute nonsense. But Putin is using it, hoping Americans will believe it. He uses it for his own people, because he wants to give the people this feeling of having a historic mission. “We, the Russians, are the ones who save the world from Nazis.” That’s the official statement. “The Americans and the British were only pretending that they were fighting. The real fight was from our Russian people who saved the world from the Nazis. Today, we have to do it again.” Mr. Jekielek: One of the things that the president of Ukraine, Zelensky, has been accused of was attacking Israel, and demanding that the Iron Dome be given, and the Pegasus cyberwarfare technology. In fact, he’s often agitating Israel. What do you think about that? Mr. Sharansky: I met Zelensky. I went to Kiev and met him and we had a very good conversation. He was telling me that as a Jew and as the Ukrainian leader, he is the one who’s speaking all the time about how much Ukraine has to learn from Israel. He cannot understand how Israel, along with Hungary, are the two countries in the free world that have refused to give weapons. I have heard all of the arguments from Israel, but I really felt very uncomfortable, because in fact, I do agree with him. On the other hand, when I’m speaking with our military experts, with those people who are responsible for defending Israel, it’s very difficult for me to argue with them. What they are saying in Israel is that the public opinion for the support of Ukraine is absolutely unanimous. The humanitarian assistance which the Israeli government and the Israeli people are giving is permanent and constant every day. But Israel refuses to give the weapons. What do they say to me? “First of all, we have to guarantee the existence of the state of Israel. We have an enemy who openly says and does everything to destroy us, and that’s Iran.” Almost every night our airplanes are attacking Iranian bases in Syria, and the columns of trucks from Iran with weapons for Hezbollah. In the last month there were even targets in Iran. What to do? It was the weakness and the appeasement of the West which gave Putin control over the skies of Syria, and which permitted Putin to bring in his troops and build his base. As a result, when we are attacking Iranian bases, we need the silence of Putin. We don’t need his assistance, but we need that he will not fight against it. This is an understanding between us, that the moment we start giving weapons to Ukraine, it will be much more difficult for us. Putin will make sure that it will be much more difficult for us to attack Iranian bases. I speak with all the top politicians in Israel. They say that the United States of America made this terrible agreement with Iran in 2015, which immediately gave Iran billions and billions of dollars, a half-a-billion in a suitcase in cash. It went directly to Hezbollah and turned Hezbollah into a big army. It made the challenge of defending Israel much more difficult, and now they’re going to do it again. Europe and America, those who are responsible for negotiations with Iran, are looking for ways to have this agreement. You understand correctly that they are uniting in their efforts to fight Russia, but they are ready to leave us alone again with Iran. We have to be ready to fight Iran with all means. Again, I disagree. I have my own arguments. I believe that this is the crucial struggle for the future of the free world. Israel, as part of the free world, has to do more. But it is also clear to me that this is a situation in which there are two evil empires who coordinate their efforts more and more. The West and America are ready to help Ukraine to fight against Putin, and at the same time are looking for ways to pacify Iran. Israel has to fight Iran, and at the same time is trying to pacify Putin. It is absolutely impossible. What is needed is that the free world takes a very clear moral position. It needs to make its evil empire speech like Reagan did, saying, “We hear the voices of Iranians, and we hear the voice of Iran’s neighbors. There should be no appeasement with this regime. We are not going to have any agreement with this regime.” If they make this statement, I also expect Israel will make its position morally clear. “We are not going to appease either this dictator or that dictator. We are going to fight against them.” That is the ideal situation. In the meantime I keep insisting that we have to start giving weapons directly to Ukraine. Our experts are explaining what they are explaining. The fact is in the last few months Iran and Russia are becoming very close. It will help all of us make our positions much more clear. Mr. Jekielek: Iran and Russia are also getting very close to another dictatorship, which is actually much bigger, communist China. I understand that prior to going to jail, Jimmy Lai was actually in communication with you, trying to figure out how to deal with the predicament in Hong Kong when the national security law was coming into effect. Mr. Sharansky: First of all, I agree with you that China is potentially the biggest threat to the free world. The free world has to take a much stronger position on human rights with China. Hong Kong is the most recent example. There was a clear understanding between Britain and China that Hong Kong would remain a part of the free world, even when it became part of China. That was violated in the most brutal way, and the world more or less accepts it. A friend of mine connected me to Jimmy Lai, feeling that my experience could be useful to him. We had three long zoom conversations, during the Covid pandemic. It happened a month-and-a-half before he was arrested. We did not know, but he was actively preparing himself for being arrested. He was 74 years old, the publisher of one of the biggest Internet newspapers, and a leader in this democratic movement in China. This person had to prepare himself for perhaps spending the rest of his life in prison. He read my books about prison, and he definitely wanted to know how you cope with time, and how you make sure you are strong enough to resist. It was absolutely fascinating, and I really felt such a deep sympathy and love for this person. It really felt like we were kindred spirits. I told him, “Jimmy, you have British citizenship. You can get a ticket on an airplane. Hong Kong is still not under such an iron curtain as the rest of China. You know that you can be arrested. Can’t you simply go to Britain?” He said “Absolutely not. Because I have been explaining to my people the importance of resisting this. If I run away, what will my people feel about me? What will I feel about myself?” That immediately gave me such a powerful connection, from all of my past experience of being in prison. I think all the time about what is my place in history at this moment? You would prefer to be a free person rather than in prison. I think about him often. Then, of course, he went to prison. On the day he was arrested, I wrote an article in the Washington Post, I wrote an article explaining why Hong Kong must be the cause of the free world. We must fight that all these leaders of the Hong Kong democratic movement will be released from prison. I’m sure that’s enough to get the attention of the leaders of the free world. I would like them to have the moral clarity that President Reagan had in dealing with the Soviet union. It is very painful to think that Jimmy will be in prison until the end of his life. Mr. Jekielek: For the pro-democracy activists, the Tibetans, the house Christians, and the Falun Gong practitioners in China, who are persecuted, some even at a genocidal level, what is your message to all these people? Mr. Sharansky: Those who live in accord with their deep religious, national, or cultural beliefs, should enjoy their freedom the most, even while living in a dark dictatorial place. The most meaningful and deep experience of a free person I had was in prison. To the free world, these people that know the value of freedom are your main allies. There is a big threat to the free world from these dictatorships. The real allies that you have are these people who insist on being free, even while inside these dictatorships. Every day you have to think about how to help them and how to fight for them. Mr. Jekielek: Natan Sharansky, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Sharansky: Thank you. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Natan Sharansky 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

The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), which is part of the NIH, received $400 million from Moderna in a “catch-up payment,” according to a newly disclosed contract that The Epoch Times obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request. So where is the money going? Which government officials are getting the money? Kash Patel argues that it poses a major conflict of interest for scientists at the NIH to be able to receive royalties from patents. “Do people in the Department of Agriculture who work with private-sector farmers and come up with some new seed receive millions of dollars from the farming industry? No,” Patel said. “What about the army guy that comes up with the technology for our next aerial asset, [and] we enter into a contract with Lockheed Martin or Boeing to make billions of dollars worth of this? Is he going to get a royalty from that? Absolutely not,” he said. The NIH received up to $2 billion in royalties from 34 drug contracts between 1991 and 2019, according to a report from the U.S. Government Accountability Office. We also take a look at new allegations of bribery in FTX founder Sam Bankman-Fried’s case. On top of the 12 counts he was already indicted on, he’s now being charged for allegedly bribing Chinese officials to the tune of over $40 million to get his accounts in China unfrozen. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/kashs-corner-sam-bankman-fried-bribed-ccp-officials-with-over-40-million-modernas-400-million-kickback-to-nih-scientists_5163369.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Kash Patel: Hey everybody, and welcome back to Kash’s Corner. Jan, we have an interesting episode today, some quickfire subjects and some long-term subjects. Where do you want to start? Jan Jekielek: The Senate has just rescinded the authorization for use of military force in Iraq. This has some pretty incredible implications if it actually goes through to the end. We definitely want to touch on that. Sam Bankman-Fried with his new indictment is fascinating. But the big thing I really want to talk about is the $400 million that we’ve discovered Moderna paid out in the not too distant past to NIAID, Fauci’s agency. Mr. Patel: Yes, that’s a lot, we’ll try to simplify it. AUMF is the authorization of use of military force. We call it the AUMF. Congress has to act under the law every time the United States commits its military to a theater of war for operational purposes. That’s the law. If we go to war, congress must act. That’s an oversimplification, but that’s what the AUMF is for. The Defense Department or the United States government goes to Congress or the president and says, “I want to conduct operations in X.” I’ll give you an example. The attacks on the World Trade Center, the Pentagon, and in Pennsylvania occurred on 9/11. Very swiftly after that, in order to invade Afghanistan, Congress passed a law, the AUMF, the authorization of use of military force to hunt terrorists in Afghanistan responsible for the 9/11 attacks. Now, what’s supposed to happen is every time you enter a new theater of war, a new area of operational review, as we call it, you are supposed to do another AUMF. In this instance, you’re talking about the AUMF for Iraq. On a side note, the 9/11-Afghanistan AUMF has been stretched and some people believe overstretched, if not violated, in order to to allow United States military operations in other countries, such as Somalia and Syria, by continuing the manhunt for terrorism. Whatever your thoughts are on that pursuit itself, it’s different from the legal component. As the former chief of staff of DOD, I want to do everything out there to protect American citizens in the world from terrorist activities and war that will bring harm to America. What’s interesting about the Senate’s move here is they’re saying, “We don’t need an AUMF in Iraq anymore.” If the House agrees, that will be a full rescission of the authority to conduct military operations in and around Iraq. On a technical basis, that doesn’t mean that we can’t still do things in Iraq from a military standpoint, because we could bootstrap to other AUMF’s that are currently active, i.e. the 9/11 one, to say, “Under this authority, we are going in here and staying in this region to do X, Y, and Z.” It sends a strong message to Americans in the world that we’ve been in Iraq for a long time. It started in the first Persian Gulf War, and then we’ve just stayed there since 9/11. We have a massive base of operations throughout Iraq. I’ve been to most of our platforms there. It will be interesting to see how the defense industrial complex reacts. Because when you shut down a massive theater of war, like we just shut down in Afghanistan, they stop producing equipment and machinery pursuant to whatever contracts were outstanding, because those authorizations are gone. If we’re not committing forces to military operations, then we don’t need any more of that. With the defense industrial complex, I’ve always said they provide one of the most valuable services of any sort of private sector industry. I’ve also said that they are, in my opinion, the worst in terms of overusing taxpayer dollars and literally lighting them on fire for purposes that I cannot understand. We took them on when we were in the Pentagon and we said, “You guys provide great, valuable services, but you’re also providing programs and things that we don’t need.” Why are they doing that? Why are we allowing that? That’s a conversation for another day about the defense industrial complex, but we will see their reaction play out in the public square. A third of the United States Senate still said, “We want to maintain operational control and lawful authority to execute programs in the Iraqi theater of war.” That’s not a small number, Jan. I don’t know what the House is going to do. If they will take it up and put it on the floor for a vote remains to be seen. Then, do they have enough votes in a bipartisan fashion? Maybe the Republicans will just take it on its face value and move the entire block behind it. That remains to be seen. Until both chambers act, there’s still a long way to go. This isn’t going to be resolved next week or next month. We’re probably looking at the rest of this year to see where this goes. Mr. Jekielek: Fascinating. Put on your legal hat now and let’s look at this new indictment. I was kind of surprised there’s yet another indictment of Sam Bankman-Fried at this point, and this one has to do with China. Please give us the picture. Mr. Patel: First of all, it just hit me this week that Sam Bankman-Fried’s name is Bankman, and he’s committing some of the largest fraud in the banking history of the United States and the world. Sam Bankman-Fried was already charged with a dozen counts of wire fraud, bank fraud, and conspiracy. What the DOJ did, and what they’re allowed to do is supersede. They issued a superseding indictment, meaning they added a charge or charges. That means they have been continuing the investigation into Bankman’s case. Even though he’s already been charged, they didn’t stop. That happens frequently. It’s not an unusual tactic, and I want to be clear about that. We charge people all the time and then continue with the investigation. Tactically speaking, and I don’t know if this is the case with Bankman, what I would do as a former federal prosecutor is go up to the target and say, “Okay, this is the current indictment.” I go up to his lawyer and say, “Here’s the current indictment. Would you like to work out a plea agreement on this indictment?” If they say, “No,” you would make them aware of the possibility of a superseding indictment, which exposes them to more criminal liability, a longer prison sentence, and bigger fines. I don’t know if that’s the case here, but that’s generally a strategy prosecutors utilize, because resolving a case short of trial saves the taxpayers and the judicial system an enormous amount of time and money. Remember, less than 10 percent of federal cases ever go to actual jury trial, they mostly resolve in plea agreements. I don’t know what the behind the scenes maneuvering is here, but likely those conversations happened in some fashion. This guy, Bankman, as if it wasn’t bad enough, is alleged to have committed this multi-billion dollar Ponzi scheme, bank fraud, mail fraud, wire fraud, and conspiracy. He has defrauded so many thousands if not millions of people around the world. He bribed the Chinese Communist Party to perpetrate this scheme. This guy, Bankman, and his colleagues are identified as CC-1 and CC-2 in the superseding indictment. Just a quick offshoot, the DOJ doesn’t identify those individuals on purpose, because it’s unlikely that they’re charged at this time. They could be unindicted co-conspirators, or they could be cooperating witnesses, we don’t know. They just label them CC-1 and CC-2, but identify them as senior level executives at FTX. FTX and the Alameda Research company were the two organizations that Bankman ran to conduct this scheme. Bankman had billions of dollars in a Chinese financial institution in mainland China. For some reason the Chinese Communist Party, and we don’t know this for sure because this information hasn’t come out yet, froze those funds. What does that mean? That means Bankman, his company and his executives literally could not get that money out. That’s a lot of money. Remember, his whole thing was a cryptocurrency deal, which isn’t necessarily my wheelhouse. But there are banks that do trade in crypto specifically, and monetarily, it syncs up with the dollar for evaluation. That’s how we’re talking about it, and that’s how it’s talked about in the indictment. If you look at the indictment, and if the facts alleged are true, he’s been at it for some time. First, he tried to stand up what we call dummy corporations or dummy companies to try to siphon the money out of the frozen accounts into strawman accounts, as we call them, to trick the Chinese government. He said, “No, no, no, it’s going from this to something that has nothing to do with me.” The CCP didn’t go for it. After months, they basically said, “No, we’re not allowing any of this money to be siphoned to this other institution or financial account.” Then he, Bankman, directs his executives to go out and literally send through the cryptocurrency exchange $40 million to CCP officials to unfreeze the money that the government in China froze. And shockingly, they do it. Literally, as the indictment alleges, the money is released shortly thereafter from the frozen bank accounts due to this bribe. That’s what it is, and that’s what he’s been charged with. That money was utilized by Bankman to continue his fraud and his scheme and his conspiracy, which is outlined in the indictment. It’s interrelated to the bigger criminal enterprise that they’ve charged him with. One of the things that caught my attention in the superseding indictment was not that he bribed CCP officials, it’s that after the bribe was successful, he continued his operations. The indictment doesn’t define an exact quantity, but Bankman continued to spend tens of millions of dollars to continue the bribe. That means the $40 million he paid, plus the tens of millions the DOJ hasn’t exactly defined. Is it $100 million? Who else in the CCP did he pay? Did he pay anyone in America? Did any of that money from the frozen accounts in mainland China come back to any American coffers? Any super PACs? Any politically-oriented organizations? Any candidates? We know from the indictment that Bankman-Fried’s organizations gave to both Democrats and Republicans. Some folks have returned some of that money. A lot of that money is unaccounted for. We don’t exactly know where it went. At this time, I believe the DOJ does know where it went. But this guy’s in a lot of trouble. We’ve talked about fraud, and it’s been a couple years now. When you’re charged in federal court with a fraud, unlike a bank robbery or a narco trafficking case, the amount of time you are subjected to and for incarceration purposes is based on the value of the fraud. If you commit a fraud for like 10,000 bucks, you’re looking at less than a year. The DOJ has charged Bankman with committing a fraud of billions of dollars. It’s so high that it literally doesn’t score on the sentencing guidelines, which means he can face up to life in prison for these charges. Mr. Jekielek: This indictment shines a light on how business is actually done with the Chinese Communist Party. Number one, whatever you invest into China is not something you can pull out very easily at all. The billionaire, Mark Mobius, is recently on record talking about how he can’t get some of his investments out of China. This has happened to all sorts of people. In some cases you never get it out. But it turns out if you allegedly grease the right palms… Mr. Patel: The palms of the CCP. Mr. Jekielek: … you might be able to get it out. It’s a whole different question that they don’t have the money to pay out all of those investments anyway. Let’s jump to the bond. This is something that I was really curious about. It seems like his bond was quite low given the reality of the crimes that are alleged. What happens with that? Mr. Patel: Just to remind our audience, when he was originally arrested on the original indictment, he was found in the Bahamas and had to be brought back to the United States of America. The judge at the bond hearing gave Bankman a bond in New York City. He’s supposedly residing at the multimillion dollar home of his parents in Manhattan. That judge made a determination based on the two factors that matter for bond; Bankman, under the law, poses no flight risk and is not a danger to himself or the community. If you can satisfy those prongs under the law, you’re entitled to a reasonable bail commensurate with your circumstances. I said last time, I don’t think he should have been given one, because this guy was literally caught in some foreign nation on some island and can literally go anywhere in the world because he has the economic means to do so. If his scheme is proven true, he has already destroyed countless lives. To me, he’s a threat in that fashion. By definition, when you have a superseding indictment, there is an automatic change in circumstances. Every time you charge the defendant with another crime, like they did with Bankman here, you have to be brought before the court for arraignment. Bankman has to enter a plea of guilty or not guilty and either take a plea agreement, work towards a plea agreement, or set the case for trial. That change in circumstances is supposed to be taken to the judge. He’s supposed to reevaluate whether or not Bankman should remain out on bond, should the bond increase, or should he be detained and incarcerated in jail pending the outcome of the trial or his sentence. The defense attorneys and prosecutors are scheduled to go before the New York judge on Thursday of this week, which is the day before our show airs, and there will be a decision. It will be interesting to see what the judge or the prosecutors ask for. I’ll remind our audience that he is now charged with committing a fraud on top of everything else, bribing the Chinese Communist Party at a minimum of $40 million plus the tens of millions of dollars that followed. That is a massive fraud in and of itself, aside from the other dozen counts he’s charged with. In my opinion, if that happened to any other individual other than Sam Bankman-Fried, they would be detained. It will be interesting. In all likelihood, I don’t think that he will get detained. We should follow this case closely. My interest is in where the money from mainland China and the CCP went. Did the proceeds of his fraudulent conspiracy and crime flow to politicians? To political action committees? To charities? Did he bribe other officials in the U.S.? Did other financial institutions go along with this scheme? This is a massive, massive, massive, massive-scale fraud that we haven’t seen since the likes of Bernie Madoff. And this guy is like 30-something years old, if that. Mr. Jekielek: Assuming all the allegations in the indictments are true, my bird’s eye view here is that he had an uncanny ability to know who to give money to, in order to avoid scrutiny. Mr. Patel: That’s a fascinating point that we haven’t talked about. It’s not like he called the CCP hotline and said, “Here’s $40 million.” He knew exactly who to send that money to and directed his associates to do so, with the almost immediate effect of having the billions of dollars that were frozen be released. That’s a fascinating point, and I hope the DOJ provides us, the American public, with that information, because I want to know who he was dealing with over there. I want to know who those CCP affiliates are. They’re a part of the crime, and they can be charged in America. That’s an American crime, and the CCP affiliates that were involved should be charged. Is the DOJ going to charge them? Who are they connected to? Mr. Jekielek: Just as a final twist in all of this, the fact that this was revealed might be enough to put whatever officials involved in a very difficult position with the top CCP officials. Mr. Patel: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: The whole thing is just absolutely fascinating. We’ll follow this very closely. Most recently, through some of our work, we found that there’s been a $400 million payment from Moderna to NIH, specifically NIAID, which was Fauci’s agency when he was still running things over there. This is part of this broader approach of people working at the NIH. Last year, OpenThe Books found there are 1,600-plus people that are getting royalty payments for patents they have developed while being employees of the NIH. But $400 million, that’s a sizable chunk of change, and it suddenly came through, according to this contract. What are you seeing here? Mr. Patel: I am seeing my mind light itself on fire because of this kickback conspiracy between government servants and the private sector. Thanks to the great reporting of Steve over at Epoch Times, Epoch requested through the FOIA process, the Freedom of Information Act, directly to the NIH agencies and its organizations. It’s been attributed to Moderna that they, Moderna, were somehow paying royalties to government officials to the tune of $400 million in relation to Moderna’s vaccine for the Covid virus. In and of itself, I was kind of blown away. I was like, “Wait a second. First of all, Moderna made $37 billion on the vaccine for Covid.” Just Moderna. I don’t know what Pfizer’s numbers are, or any other company out there. Now I’m learning that government officials who enter into government service have been on the books with Moderna to get royalties for whatever they invented during a certain stretch of time at the NIH to the tune of $400 million. Even though the FOIA requests were granted in this instance, it was redacted. I don’t know where the money went. Where did the kickbacks— and I will call them kickbacks because that’s what they are—where did they go? Did Fauci get them? Were other people at NIH involved? How much did they get? I don’t agree with the NIH response that they were justified in their redactions because it protects personal information. That’s garbage. These people were made rich by the Covid vaccine through a privately funded organization, Moderna, one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world, while on the government payroll as a government servant. Just put all this stuff aside for a second. When you enter into government service, me or anybody else, it’s an intentional decision. You know you’re going in and you’re going to take a massive financial hit, whatever sector it is; agriculture, law enforcement, medical, or the military. I have never heard of a system in government where employees get a kickback or a royalty scheme because they were part of some novelty or invention. Do people in the Department of Agriculture who work with private sector farmers and come up with some new seed, receive millions of dollars from the farming industry? What about the army guy that comes up with a technology for our next aerial asset with which we enter into a contract with Lockheed Martin or Boeing. Does he make billions of dollars? Is he going to get a royalty from that? Absolutely not. It’s unheard of. I don’t know why we allow this. That’s another conversation, and we need to fully investigate that, and hopefully somebody will. But first, we need to find out how much money was gotten, who got it, why, and then someone needs to go to Congress and ask for subpoenas from congressional committees if the NIH won’t release this information and say, “We want to know, and not just about Moderna and this one specific royalty. ” Here’s the thing that just has my head on fire. NIH has received $2 billion worth of royalties since 1991. Who got all this money? Let’s remind the audience, when you go to work for NIH, you use taxpayer dollars to enter into research. I’m not saying they don’t do amazing work, they do. But they use taxpayer funded dollars to enter into research to create these patents and work with the private sector, big pharma to come up with things that are supposed to be used to save lives, not just in America but around the world. I know of no other sector of government where you are allowed to profit from it. It needs to be seriously looked at, and probably in my opinion, shut down. I don’t understand. There’s no way an FBI agent can work with a gun company and say, “If you would make this adjustment to the barrel and do this on the scope, it’s going to be just great for us.” “Once you’ve done that, since we created a new patent, give me $10 million.” What would your response be to that? Why are these officials at NIH treated any differently than everyone else in government who does similar work in a different sector? The only way it’s allowed is because Congress legislated for it or created a regulation that permits this. But I don’t agree with it at all, and a lot of Americans will probably be just as ticked off as I am upon learning this. Now, we have to figure out the depth of it, how far back it goes, and who it goes to. Mr. Jekielek: I remember about a year ago we had Adam Andrzejewski from Open The Books on the show, and we were talking about a similar theme. This is a very large single lump sum payment. It’s a very strategically important time, which makes it particularly interesting. It’s something to the tune of 1,600-plus individuals that have received royalties of various amounts. Some of them are pretty small, and some of them are quite a lot bigger. But if I recall correctly, all the names were redacted. Mr. Patel: For me, that’s just unacceptable. These people chose to go work at NIH. Nobody forced them to work there. They could have worked in the private sector if they wanted to make money, and there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m not knocking that. But when you choose to go into government service like so many millions of Americans do, you don’t benefit from it financially, because you create something that’s of value to everyday Americans or the rest of the world. It’s unlawful. Literally, we were just talking about bribes with Bankman and kickbacks, and that’s literally what this is. If I received a monetary benefit because I ushered through a program with a private sector industry from the defense industrial complex, and they said, “By the way, we’re going to give you a couple of million dollars,” I would be put in prison, as I should be. I don’t know the legality behind these NIH regulations. My question is why is it permitted? It needs to be looked at in congress. Congress needs to subpoena all of these records involving these royalties, let’s call them; who got them, how much and why, release that to the American people, and then, revisit whether or not that should be the policy going forward for the NIH. You cannot be in government service and make $10 million. Mr. Jekielek: Basically, you think that the money from these patents should go to the government coffers. Mr. Patel: That’s a great point. I’m not saying don’t take the money as the United States government. If we use taxpayer dollars, and that’s what has been reported, taxpayer money was given to these NIH employees. They utilized that money to create something new in partnership with the private industry, and then, they got paid for it. It’s like getting a loan from a bank for free and saying, “Don’t worry, we don’t have to pay that back.” And then, when you profit off of it, someone else pays you even more money. That money should go into the treasury or at the very least, be used to donate medical supplies and equipment to people in need across America, if not the rest of the world, or fund some sort of charitable endeavor like that. It shouldn’t go into the pockets of the American government employees that signed up to serve and are now monetarily benefiting from it to the tune of seven figures. Mr. Jekielek: Just speaking with you right now, you can see a conflict of interest. Actually, it makes me wonder if these structures exist elsewhere. Mr. Patel: I have not ever seen or heard of this. When those structures existed for me as a federal prosecutor, I would prosecute that individual in government for accepting a bribe or a kickback, even if it was masqueraded as some sort of royalty. Even if they agreed to do it while they were in government service, and received the money after they left, it is still a crime. Supposedly, we’ve exempted the NIH and its employees from doing that. Again, I’m not attacking the workers at the NIH or anyone that chooses to enter service there. I want to know why we as a government permit this. If it’s permitted there, why isn’t it permitted everywhere else? In my opinion, it should not happen anywhere in government service. Mr. Jekielek: I’ll ask this one question as we finish up. You’re aware that industry funds these agencies substantially to the tune of many millions of dollars. Mr. Patel: Just add another layer onto the problem. Just because it’s been done for so long doesn’t mean it’s legal. That takes me to the last thing I want to touch upon. I did say Congress should issue subpoenas, but there’s another track that I hope some organization takes up. They need to challenge not just the NIH and NIAID for the unredacted versions of the information on this one, but expand the FOIA to all these other royalty payments that have come in and demand the unredacted versions of that. Then, whoever has standing needs to take them to federal court and sue to say, “Is this law or regulation constitutional?” As we know, just because Congress passes a law and the President signs it, doesn’t automatically always make it constitutional. Our Supreme Court is the final arbiter of that. Not a lot of times, but sometimes they come in and say, “That law that was passed on the books related to X, Y, or Z is actually unconstitutional.” We need to test the constitutionality of whatever regulation or law by which the NIH folks are receiving these royalties. I can’t believe it hasn’t happened. Maybe it has, but I have never heard of it. I’ve never heard of them being taken to court. I’ve never heard of anyone examining this in Congress, and it needs to be reevaluated there. Someone needs to take them to federal court. The subpoenas need to go out from Congress to expose all of this monetary benefit, and more FOIAs need to go out the door immediately. This isn’t just a one-off story. This is something that needs to be investigated thoroughly, if not more thoroughly, than some of the things that the committees in Congress are focusing on right now. Mr. Jekielek: I’ll add one last thing. I’ve heard the argument before that it’s very difficult to attract quality people into the government because of the payment limitations. Mr. Patel: Sure, I know that. Mr. Jekielek: People have said, “We need to make it attractive.” This might have been one way to make it attractive. Mr. Patel: Maybe it is, but you can’t make it attractive for one sector and not for everyone else in government. That’s the whole point. The same rules have to apply for every government employee. Again, it’s a decision to go into government service. No one is forcing you. It’s also a privilege, in my opinion. That’s why it’s so hard to enter into government service. Yes, of course, we’re always underpaid, whether you’re at the DOJ, FBI, or DOD. Certainly our military, more so than any service, in my opinion, is drastically underpaid. That’s not why you engage in that. You can have a career after your lifetime in government service and go on to make some monetary benefit thereafter. But to me, to do so while you’re in government, something innate in me just strikes a friction with this concept or this regulation that’s been allowed at NIH. Maybe I’m totally wrong. Mr. Jekielek: Your point is very good that there is an obvious, significant conflict of interest here, that just becomes more obvious the moment you sit down and really think about it for a moment. Mr. Patel: Yes. It looks like Fauci has gone up to Congress, or is going back to Congress to testify. Maybe someone can just ask him these questions under oath. How much money have you gotten? Where did you get it? Who gave it to you and why? I’m not necessarily, and this might shock a lot of people, I’m not necessarily blaming Fauci if that’s the law and regulation on the books. My focus point is attacking and analyzing what is on the books and whether or not it’s legal. Someone needs to analyze that before we allow more private sector companies to literally pay government employees millions and billions of dollars. Mr. Jekielek: Kash, it’s time for our shout-out. Mr. Patel: It is. This week’s shout-out goes to Michael Kozlowski. Thanks for your kind words on our message board, and thanks for participating in our live chat. Thank you everybody for making our live chat so much fun on Friday nights during the show. We will 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 “Jan” for 20% off.

“The FDA was instructed by a federal judge to revoke the license … because it had never been shown to be safe or effective,” says Dr. Meryl Nass, referring to regulation of the anthrax vaccine in the late 1990s. Nass, a physician of internal medicine, began her research into pandemics 30 years ago, with a focus on anthrax vaccines and biological warfare. From the Rhodesian Civil War to the 2009 swine flu, she says she saw a profit-driven push for mass vaccination. In many cases, the public health establishment bypassed adequate testing, and modified or attempted to bury data, she says. “WHO had changed the pandemic definitions a couple of months before the 2009 swine flu pandemic showed up … so, you didn’t need deaths anymore to trigger these contracts, it could just be a new virus,” says Nass. Today, Nass is one of many doctors whose medical license is threatened for deviating from official COVID-19 guidelines during the pandemic. “If all you’re good for is to give patients the government narrative … there’s not going to be any practice of medicine anymore,” says Dr. Nass. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/dr-meryl-nass-more-vaccine-deaths-reported-to-vaers-in-the-last-20-months-than-all-vaccines-in-the-last-30-years-combined_4832677.html Jan Jekielek: Dr. Meryl Nass, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Dr. Meryl Nass: Thank you for inviting me. Mr. Jekielek: Dr. Nass, you just finished—in fact, we live streamed it on The Epoch Times—a hearing where you were defending your right to keep your medical license, which has been suspended. I want to talk about your background first, which is that you were someone who established many years ago that this anthrax outbreak that we’re all familiar with was actually a biological warfare attack. Dr. Nass: Yes. In Rhodesia, which is now called Zimbabwe, during its civil war. Mr. Jekielek: Why don’t you give me a picture of your career up to present, and then we can build up from that. Dr. Nass: Sure. Sort of by chance, I wound up discovering that there was this very peculiar anthrax epidemic, which occurred from 1978 to 1980 at the end of the Rhodesian Civil War. I had decided to look at a bunch of anthrax epidemics that were happening over a 15 year period. This one was completely different than all the others, so I spent a lot of time studying it. There were 10,000 cases, and there were just a few hundred deaths. No one had ever studied an epidemic and shown that it was actually due to biological warfare. I thought it was important to do that as a preventive to show potential perpetrators, “Hey, we can actually use the science and show that you did it.” Because the advantage of biological warfare is generally that people don’t know it was actually perpetrated. They think it just happened. So anyway, I did that. I published a paper 30 years ago. In the process, in the three years of research I did up to that time, I learned a lot about anthrax and anthrax vaccine. In the middle of it, the Gulf War broke out and suddenly anthrax and anthrax vaccine were a big deal. So, I became a spokesperson for Physicians for Social Responsibility on biological warfare and anthrax. By 1998, the anthrax vaccine was suddenly being mandated on every service member in the military, two and a half million people. I knew that it had been identified as a potential cause of Gulf War syndrome, and that had been talked about in a congressional hearing. It had never been resolved. To just give two-and-a-half million people a vaccine that might be causing Gulf War syndrome, you don’t do that. I wrote this very short paper in an afternoon laying out the evidence, which went to an infectious disease mailing list, and then all of a sudden it went viral. It was linked to the Lancet Journal and I was asked to write a review article on the vaccine. Lancet mentioned it, and all of a sudden loads of people started getting anthrax vaccine and getting sick. Now I hadn’t anticipated they would. I just thought it was possible. Anyway, hundreds and then thousands of people contacted me, including a number of military officers and some lawyers. Eventually, we formed a coalition and fought the anthrax vaccine mandate and the license of the vaccine. We had a total of 13 congressional hearings that discussed the vaccine. This is between 1998 and 2002. The FDA was instructed by a federal judge to revoke the license and redo it, because it’d never been shown to be safe or effective. That was all very good. The Pentagon was probably about to end the whole program. And then, the anthrax letters were sent in September and October of 2001. All of a sudden Tommy Thompson, who was the secretary of HHS, said, “We’re going to relicense this factory. We’re going to get anthrax vaccine for everybody.” And the FDA relicensed the vaccine, and there we are. Soldiers are still getting this vaccine, although it’s been cleaned up a bit. Subsequently, I was asked to testify regarding bioterrorism and Gulf War syndrome to congressional committees. In the meantime, I had learned about other vaccines. In the beginning, I only knew about anthrax vaccine. But having spoken at conventions and meetings, I had also listened to the other speakers and learned, “Oh, there might be problems with other vaccines.” I started studying the other adult vaccines, and then developed some expertise on that. Subsequently, I spoke to many state legislatures on the issue of vaccine mandates. While all that was happening, I watched the CDC go through an unscientific process of attempting to get rid of vaccine exemptions. The CDC began to deny that people could get sick from vaccines, and that there was any reason to not get a vaccine. Over the last five to 10 years it has been tightening up its guidelines on what it takes to get a vaccine exemption, and then over the last few years, encouraging the states to remove the licenses of doctors who give out vaccine exemptions. It has been an interesting process. I did not know this was all happening because COVID was going to be coming. But in hindsight, I realize somebody wanted very solid culture, rules, and regulations that would try to herd everybody into the COVID vaccine corral. And that’s where we are now. Mr. Jekielek: Okay. That’s very interesting what you’re saying, because I’ve heard this said by a number of people that I’ve spoken to, even on this program, that there was this interest in what some people describe as a biosecurity state or biosecurity apparatus, and there’s folks who are just waiting for the opportunity to implement it. Then, COVID presented this opportunity. Dr. Nass: Well, yes. There were laws being passed in the United States regarding bioterrorism. There was a huge industry developed after the anthrax letters worth about, that we know of, about $7 billion a year ever since to develop products for potential bioterrorism. There were new structures instigated. The Emergency Use Authorization was developed as the result of the Bioshield Act of 2004, and the PREP Act of 2005, that would for the first time allow unapproved vaccines and medicines to be used on a mass scale in the United States with minimal testing, and potentially without any human testing. There was also an international plan set up under which countries—this was brought together through the WHO—were basically making all the same contract with vaccine manufacturers, so that in the event of a dangerous flu pandemic, a bird flu pandemic or bioterrorism, the manufacturers would agree to produce vaccines for that purpose. At the time, nobody knew what those vaccines would look like. The countries had agreed they would pay for a certain number of vaccines ahead of time. So, these contracts that I’m aware of began at least around 2004 and were used. One of the reasons there was a lot of controversy about the WHO declaring a pandemic in 2009 was that it triggered these contracts and obligated countries to buy tens of billions of dollars worth of vaccines that had not yet been developed. And in that case, some of them caused narcolepsy. Mr. Jekielek: Just to be clear, which pandemic are we talking about here? Dr. Nass: This was the 2009 swine flu pandemic. These contracts were triggered then. They were preexisting before 2009, and they still are in play. Mr. Jekielek: Were these same contracts triggered with the COVID pandemic as well? Dr. Nass: Probably. Mr. Jekielek: Okay. But we don’t know. Dr. Nass: Right. Exactly. The WHO had changed the pandemic definitions a couple of months before the 2009 swine flu pandemic showed up. The definition had been loosened, and they had taken away deaths. You didn’t need deaths anymore to trigger these contracts. It could just be a new virus, and it could be a cold. As long as it was a new virus that nobody had seen before, if it was declared by the Director General of the WHO, all these countries would be obligated to buy vaccines. So, there was a big investigation after 2009. There was no media about what was going on in that regard with COVID. Mr. Jekielek: I keep thinking about something that Thomas Sowell writes about in Basic Economics is to always look at incentive structures. Before we continue, I also want you to tell me about your training and your background, because you didn’t just randomly become interested in anthrax outbreaks and potential biowarfare attacks. Dr. Nass: I went to MIT and I got a degree in biology. This was during the Vietnam War, and I was very concerned about the war. I dropped out. I hitchhiked with my boyfriend all across Africa and India, and I wanted to know what to do with my life. When I was in Africa, I thought, “Well, these people really do need doctors.” So, I went home, I finished college, and traveled some more. I said, “Okay, time to go to medical school and get this done. And I did, but I always had a goal to help people in underdeveloped countries with their medical problems. But fortunately or unfortunately, I got married in the middle of medical school and had a kid by the time I graduated. I couldn’t go off to Africa at that point. When I was 38, just a few years after I’d finished my residency, I wound up being asked to look at these contracts for anthrax vaccine that were with a professor at UMass and the Biological Defense Program of DOD, as a member of Physicians for Social Responsibility. I knew nothing about anthrax or vaccines, but I was asked to do it, so I did it. I found out that the title of the contract had nothing to do with the body of the contract. The title was “Studies to Develop a Better Anthrax Vaccine.” The actual contract was about a primitive form of genetic engineering of anthrax. I said, “Why is DOD doing this? Why are they hiding it?” I happened to know somebody who was very high up in Quaker movement, and the Quakers were interested in this also. They hired a fellow who had just graduated from Brown University, and he got lots of documents together. I started going through them. At that time, 30-plus years ago, you could read everything that had been published on anthrax. And I did. I went to the Harvard Library and I had crumbling journals from the 1830s describing anthrax cases. When I was done, I knew a lot about anthrax. Mr. Jekielek: Then, you basically smelled a rat in this particular scenario, and you decided to do the definitive research. Fascinating. So now, the COVID pandemic is upon us. What are you doing now? Dr. Nass: I do a lot of things, because now I have a pretty strong background in pandemics and in biological warfare and in the FDA regulation of vaccines. I have been commenting about the public health response to COVID from the very beginning. I pointed out in late March of 2020 that this was likely to be a lab release, rather than a natural epidemic. Subsequent to that I pointed out that it could be a lab release, and it could be a deliberate spread. We don’t know which it is. But now that more information has come out, we know it was definitely made in a lab. There’s really little question about that. Mr. Jekielek: Yes. It would be incredibly unlikely. Yes. Not impossible, but… Dr. Nass: One in a billion. Yes. Mr. Jekielek: Incredibly unlikely. So, the pandemic hits January, February, March, 2020 and you’re in medical practice. Dr. Nass: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: How did you respond to that? Dr. Nass: I believed the public health response, and the government response. I looked to see what can we find out about this agent? How does it spread? What are the concerns? I wrote long articles telling people what to do; wash your fruits and vegetables in a bleach solution. Take your shoes off before you enter the house. All these methods one might call paranoid, because at this point we didn’t know how deadly the virus was. At that point, we were seeing the movies from China with people dropping dead on the street. In the beginning I told people, “Don’t go in elevators. Walk up the stairwell, because you don’t want to be in closed spaces breathing someone else’s air.” However, within a few months, information kept leaking out that things really weren’t that bad. And the virus, although transmitted airborne—which by the way, the government didn’t admit until about August 2021—we didn’t have to be that careful. And then, I started exploring other avenues. I knew of and had even met some of the people who were involved in the coverup of COVID having a lab origin. When papers were published in February and March from who I would now call coverup scientists and doctors, I read them and I immediately recognized them as coverups. I’m referring to something called a correspondence in the Lancet in late February, which was ghost written by Peter Daszak, but a lot of other people had a hand in it. It was signed by 27 people, I think. Then, in March, in Nature Medicine, there was another correspondence by five scientists, which attempted to claim that there was no way COVID could have come from a lab, because of certain reasons. The reasons didn’t make sense. Then, we found out that Tony Fauci actually had that article written. He and Jeremy Farrar from the Wellcome Trust, and Francis Collins, head of NIH, had convened a meeting at which they decided to create this article as a cover up. Anyway, I didn’t know Fauci was involved. I didn’t know who was involved besides the five authors. I wrote in March of 2020 that I don’t understand how these people could have written this. This doesn’t make any sense. These are supposed to be credible scientists. When I was interviewed for Mikki Willis’s Plandemic 2 movie, I said, “I don’t think they wrote it. Somebody made them write it, or it was ghost written.” I turned out to be right about that. Mr. Jekielek: You’ve gotten deeply involved in the actual early treatment of the disease as well. Dr. Nass: Right. I’m a doctor. I had a private practice and my son got sick with COVID in March of 2020. I always try to use what I know, however it may be useful to others. I had a finger in a lot of different pots with respect to COVID, because I had enough background to be able to do that. At the same time I was challenging the origin, I was also looking into treatment. I was aware that the Chinese had told us in February that the chloroquine drugs were their best option. They had about 20 different treatment trials of chloroquine and hydroxychloroquine going very early on. I didn’t know then, but I soon found out that the reason they were using chloroquine is because these articles had been published in Europe and the United States showing that chloroquine had killed SARS-1 in tissue culture, in vitro. Starting in 2004 those articles had been published. SARS-1 had been a huge problem for China. It only affected 8,000 people, but it had a 10 per cent mortality rate, and it seemed to originate in China. They and most other countries were very concerned about this agent SARS-1, the original SARS. It came out of nowhere in 2002, and died out in 2003. But it was considered by all nations to be a potential biological warfare agent. It was put on a list by the CDC called the Select Agents and Toxins List. These microorganisms cannot be sold or transferred without permission from the CDC. It turned out that NIAID and Fauci had spent up to $50 million a year researching SARS. And then, another deadly Coronavirus popped up around 2012 in the Arabian Peninsula, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), a cousin. It had a 30 per cent mortality. DOD money that had gone to Fauci was being used to look at responses to these viruses. In 2004, 2005, and 2014, papers were published by the CDC, by Fauci’s NIAID and by two groups of European scientists showing all sorts of already licensed drugs killed these viruses in vitro, in tissue culture. The 2014 paper by Fauci’s group listed over 60 different drugs that killed MERS or SARS, which included hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine. It didn’t include Ivermectin. The federal agencies were aware before COVID ever appeared that the chloroquine drugs were very likely to be effective. This was reinforced by the Chinese. And what did they do? When Trump got word of it and said it publicly, they suppressed the use of those drugs immediately, and they’re still being suppressed. Mr. Jekielek: Why do you think that happened? Dr. Nass: At the time, I only knew that it happened. I didn’t know why it happened. With hindsight, we can see that the purpose was to prolong the pandemic. It was done, because under the guise of pandemics, under using emergency legislation that only can be brought into play during a designated medical emergency, you can do a lot of things. You can increase surveillance. You can centralize controls that the federal and state governments would not be able to do otherwise. Now, we see things are changing. We see central bank digital currencies coming in. We see food shortages. There was a fertilizer shortage, and the Union Pacific Railroad refused to carry a lot of fertilizer in its trains this past spring. I don’t know the full dimensions of this, but had the pandemic not been designated, had people not been confined to their homes, had we had business as usual, societal changes could not have been implemented nearly as quickly or effectively. I knew that the chloroquine drugs were being used in China. I had used them on my son already. He was my first patient, but the public didn’t know there was a drug that might be useful for COVID. They had been told there is nothing to be done. “Stay home and take Tylenol.” Once Trump started saying it in public, then people wanted it. That was when the suppression became necessary, apparently. Mr. Jekielek: Here we are today, and you’re fighting for your medical license. Please give me the story on that. Dr. Nass: I have been treating people with Ivermectin and hydroxychloroquine and other medications and supplements and vitamins for COVID reasonably effectively. Very few doctors have been willing to do that, because they felt their licenses were threatened, or they felt these drugs couldn’t possibly be effective, because how could it be that the public health establishment would speak so strongly against them? In my case, I had already used hydroxychloroquine a lot in Lyme disease patients, and in some lupus and rheumatoid arthritis patients. I had taken the drug myself. So, I knew that it was safe. I didn’t know that about Ivermectin. And I documented many forms of suppression. I started writing an article in May, June of 2020. I completed it about a year later. I documented over 50 different ways the federal government, state governments, foreign governments, as well as manufacturers, drug store companies, and others were suppressing the use of the chloroquine drugs. Basically, by the middle of 2020, I knew there was a major suppression in play. Others had already identified that in the UK, a clinical trial of hydroxychloroquine used too high a dose, a dangerous dose that could potentially kill people. And I thought, “Wow, if that’s going on in the UK, might it be going on anywhere else?” And I found several other clinical trials where the same thing was happening, including one in over 30 countries that the WHO was running using the same dangerous dose. Mr. Jekielek: You’re telling me that based on historical precedent and papers that were published, the trials that were being run were being run at dosages that were potentially toxic. Dr. Nass: Dosages that had never been clinically used before. Dosages that are not appropriate, using the chloroquine drugs, which can cause dangerous arrhythmias if given at too high a dose. These are old drugs. These are drugs that have been on the market more than 60 years. They’re very well known. In fact, they were over the counter in France until the very beginning of the pandemic. They’re over the counter in most of the developing world, Ivermectin also. Both of these drugs have a very well established safety profile. You just have to look in a textbook to find out what the proper dose is. There was no reason to believe you needed a higher dose for COVID. There were some post hoc justifications why we had to give this high dose, but they don’t hold water. I’ve written about this in my long article on suppression. Again, to see that there were five clinical trials using excess doses, there had to be a reason for that. Doctors don’t come up with this on their own. “Oh, it’s COVID, let’s give a deadly dose.” So, there is something behind this, although I don’t know what it is. I’ve been treating people since early in 2020. Starting in October, November of last year, two strangers who didn’t know me or any of my patients reported to the medical board that they’d seen an interview I did on the internet, and they didn’t like it, and that I was spreading this information. One said I was spreading this information in tweets. So, the board told me to defend myself. I said, “You haven’t told me what I’ve done wrong. Could you specify one thing I said that was incorrect and that was misinformation?” They never did. “Could you define misinformation for me?” They never did, but they decided to open an investigation. Then, I spoke at a pharmacy board meeting in November, probably before the second complaint. They had issued a guidance document that was not really a policy, it wasn’t a rule or regulation. They had told pharmacists to check that Ivermectin prescriptions were being used for legitimate purposes, and implied that they should not be used for COVID. They had earlier initiated a similar document about hydroxychloroquine and chloroquine, which interestingly was taken back in January. So, most of the pharmacies, over 90 per cent, would not fill the Ivermectin or hydroxychloroquine prescriptions for COVID. Well over 90 per cent of the doctors would not write such prescriptions. I wound up having a large number of patients call them for me. And none of them complained, not one, to the board. Then the board found a doctor and a midwife who both complained that with patients that we had jointly cared for, I had given an Ivermectin prescription to one, and a hydroxychloroquine prescription to the other. So, that was two more complaints, not that I’d harmed the patients, just that I had used horse dewormer on them, or I had given them hydroxychloroquine. The midwife didn’t even know it’s approved in pregnancy. And then there was a fifth complaint, which was very interesting. This is the complaint that I made myself. I had emailed the board of medicine last fall and I said, “Look, you people have forced me to lie to a pharmacist. I had to provide misinformation to a pharmacist—because you’ve suppressed the use of hydroxychloroquine, and the pharmacist would not dispense it, even though it’s a legal drug and I’m legally able to prescribe it—because of your whisper campaign, and you need to change that policy.” They said, “Oh great, we finally have a real complaint. Dr. Nass complained that she lied to a pharmacist, and we’re going to get her on that one.” The executive director of the board told me this was a very serious crime I had committed. And so, they wrote all this up, “Misinformation. Ivermectin, hydroxychloroquine, lied to a pharmacist.” They had a meeting of the board, and they decided that this crime was at least equal to rape or murder, and that my license needed to be immediately suspended that same day by the board, because I was a risk to the people of Maine. That’s what happened in January. My hearing just began on Tuesday, and will continue in another couple of weeks on October 25th. Then, the same people who voted unanimously to strip me of my license will vote again on whether they think my license should continue to be suspended. We shall see what happens. Mr. Jekielek: We actually live streamed your hearing, because we see this of interest to society in general, these sorts of activities. What was your impression of their reaction? Dr. Nass: Most of the board members had what we call in medicine, masked faces. They looked angry, they looked unhappy. Two of the board members’ faces became very mobile towards the end, and they looked very upset. I think that their view of COVID medicine was being challenged. I challenged them. I told them that they had participated in a crime against humanity. I told them that they had destroyed my reputation with no grounds, which was true. I told them that there’s no laws against misinformation except for one. It’s called the First Amendment, freedom of speech. A couple of them were shocked to realize that we actually did have a law guaranteeing my freedom of speech. Two weeks before the hearing, the board attorneys dropped most of the charges. They just disappeared, because they realized they couldn’t possibly defend them. All the misinformation charges, and the charges of writing prescriptions off-label. They said, “We don’t want to talk about the vaccine either. Let’s drop the vaccine.” Yet, having dropped all those charges, the board voted unanimously at the start of the hearing that my license should remain suspended. Mr. Jekielek: What have you been doing for those 10 months that you haven’t been able to practice? Dr. Nass: I’m doing more of what I was doing before, which is trying to understand the pandemic, trying to understand what’s behind it, trying to work on finding the best medical treatments, methods of care, and making the public aware of them. I’m on Children’s Health Defense TV every week, and I do a lot of writing and trying to figure out what has happened to society, and what has happened to the world? How do we understand it? How do we get over it? How do we build a better society? I feel that my life has probably never had as much meaning as it has had this past year. Mr. Jekielek: One of the most recent articles you’ve written is about negative vaccine efficacy. Please explain what that is, because it’s still very hard to conceive. We also have industry people confirming that this is a reality now, and this was the subject of a recent paper you wrote. Please tell me about that. Dr. Nass: Let me start that discussion by saying that in the United States, a measles vaccine was licensed in the early 1960s that people received. If they were exposed to measles and had been vaccinated, they developed a much more severe form of illness. It wasn’t measles anymore, it was something worse. So, that vaccine was taken off the market. Then later, there was respiratory syncytial virus (RSV). It’s a disease of young babies, very, very common. There was an experimental RSV vaccine given to babies, and it killed some babies when they got exposed to respiratory syncytial virus. In animals, there have been animal vaccines that we know of that have caused worse illness in the animals if they’ve been vaccinated. There are different mechanisms that can do that. I don’t want to call it just antibody-dependent enhancement or antigenic sin, because we don’t know for sure what the mechanisms are with respect to COVID. With negative efficacy in a vaccinated person, they become either more susceptible to the disease that they were vaccinated against, or they get a worse case of the disease when they’re vaccinated. We actually saw this recently, and this is a kind of a scandal. Dengue. Dengue is a viral illness. A new dengue vaccine from Sanofi was actually licensed in the Philippines, although it hadn’t gone through full trials, and it was given to lots of kids. When kids got dengue, there were many deaths. This was just in the last four years. That vaccine has now been licensed in the United States for kids. We now have a little bit of dengue in Hawaii and Florida, in Puerto Rico, in the Virgin Islands, and a tiny bit in Texas. The restriction on that dengue vaccine, Dengvaxia is the name of the vaccine, is that the child should have already had dengue, so that they’re much less likely to have this life threatening result. There are bad vaccines out there, and the FDA licensed this one in the United States right before the pandemic started, actually. What has happened now with the mRNA vaccines is that when you get vaccinated, for a couple of weeks immediately afterwards, your immune system has been suppressed, and you’re more susceptible to COVID and to other viral infections, including viruses that may already be in your body. And then, after two weeks, you get some enhancement of immunity against COVID for weeks to months. Depending on the age group and depending on the vaccine, a few months later the immunity slowly wears off. Instead of going to zero, which is what you would logically expect, it goes below zero. It becomes negative and you become more susceptible to getting COVID in the United States. CDC data shows this, data from New York State shows this, and now data from Kaiser Permanente shows the same thing. After several months in children, and after about six to seven months in adults, after your last shot, you are more susceptible to getting COVID. There is some very limited data from the UK—most of the data is not being shared with the public—that suggests you are probably more likely to die if you’ve been vaccinated. After a period of six, seven months after vaccination, you’re at higher risk of death from COVID or from everything. But those data are limited. So, I’m not going to stand by that at this point in time. But it’s a huge concern. This is probably one reason why the FDA, CDC and the White House want people to get frequent boosters, because they don’t want them to get to that six to seven month mark where they become more susceptible, and may become more susceptible to mortality. But that’s not going to work either, because the more shots you get, the more other problems develop. I’m not going to go into all that, but you can only boost for a time. Right now everybody’s kicking the can down the road in the U.S. public health system. Mr. Jekielek: Fascinating. Basically, you’re saying there’s this signal that should probably be researched extensively. Dr. Nass: And it has been, but that information is mostly suppressed. Mr. Jekielek: Fascinating. And so is it suppressed, or is the data not available? Dr. Nass: It’s complicated. The CDC collects data from about a dozen different databases, including Medicare, Medicaid, the VA, the Defense Department, and a group of HMOs. The CDC pays the HMOs for their data on 12 million Americans. They have all these different databases. They’re only showing us a small fraction of them. The FDA has a group of different databases that it pays for, which includes data from over 100 million Americans. They’re not showing us that either. What they’re showing us is the VAERS, (Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System), which is a voluntary database where people can report if they choose to, or doctors can report. They’re supposed to report, most of them. This database is being denigrated by the FDA and CDC, because of the issue of voluntary reporting, and not knowing what the reporting rate is. Is one in 10 cases of death being reported, or one in 100? We don’t know. But that database is critically important, because by law it has to be shared with the public. We get to see it, and we get to see the whole thing. It turns out there have been more deaths related to a COVID vaccine in the last two years, they started in December of 2020, than all the deaths for all other the vaccines in the 30-plus years since this database started. I’ll repeat that. All reports of all deaths for all vaccines added together for 30 years are not as high as the number of deaths related to COVID vaccines that have been reported to this system in the last 20 months. Mr. Jekielek: Just to be clear, these aren’t necessarily causal things. Dr. Nass: No. Mr. Jekielek: This is something that a medical professional or a non-medical professional saw that was sufficiently close in proximity, or they believed for some reason might have been related. Dr. Nass: Exactly. What you’re supposed to do is to use that database to figure out what the red flags are, and then use these 20 other databases that the FDA and CDC have, many of which are active surveillance. For example, like the VSD (Vaccine Safety Datalink) with 12 million Americans total medical records on it and the date of every vaccine. Use those databases to find out which of these red flags actually turn out to show a causal effect. This is not what they’re doing. They’re hiding that information from us. Mr. Jekielek: Or maybe they’re doing it, but we don’t know. Dr. Nass: Yes, in the bowels of the FDA and CDC, these are easy things to do searches on. Everything is electronic. The DOD alone can do these studies, and the states can do them. In some cases, the states have their own Medicaid databases, because that is a federal-state program. But so far, the vast majority of the data has not been made public. Mr. Jekielek: There is one state that has been looking at its data pretty carefully. Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo of Florida has released some pretty shocking data, and now has guidance not recommending these genetic vaccines for males below age 39, because of substantially increased myocarditis risk. Dr. Nass: And deaths. Mr. Jekielek: And deaths. Right, exactly. Deaths. Here’s the question I have. Am I to understand that you’re actually an advocate of a radical transparency of all of this data that should all be made available to the public, so that people can kind of sift through it? Dr. Nass: What do you mean by radical transparency? These are not classified documents. What normally happens in medical research is that you anonymize data, you don’t have patients names, addresses, or towns. You don’t provide data that can be identified with individual people. But public health is based on databases of public health records. All that should happen is that the databases that the taxpayers are already paying for—these federal agencies are paying to record this data, and they have loads of scientists who are being paid salaries to analyze the data, and it’s not classified—should all be in the public domain. Mr. Jekielek: Then, amateurs could try their hand at analyzing it, as well as professionals, much like the Surgeon General in Florida did. Dr. Nass: Exactly. That is what is supposed to be done with data that is published in papers in the medical literature. The scientists who do these studies are supposed to make their databases available to other scientists to independently verify that their conclusions are correct. Why should the federal agencies do anything less? Mr. Jekielek: How far away are we from that? Dr. Nass: We’re very far away, because when people like myself and many others who are much more adept at studying these data look into it, we find that the CDC has changed definitions. They have made many adjustments to data, and made it impossible for anyone to follow what they’re doing. I’ve worked on two studies where we’ve requested data from CDC scientists, and they won’t share it. We’ve asked them what their methodology was, and they won’t share it. I have studied how the definitions of a case of COVID have changed. The definition of what a positive PCR test is has varied from time to time. For instance, here’s another good one. On May 1st of 2021, the CDC said, “Okay, we don’t want the states to report breakthrough COVID cases anymore, unless the patient dies or is hospitalized and has had a positive COVID test with a cycle threshold of 28 or below.” To be a breakthrough case, you needed a much, much higher, tighter COVID virus in you, than a case when you could have a cycle threshold of 40 or in some cases 45, which are not normally considered to be accurate numbers for diagnosing any infection. Mr. Jekielek: Just for the benefit of our viewers, the more cycle thresholds there are, the more likelier to see a positive response. Dr. Nass: Right. Exactly. So, with cycle thresholds even above 35 to 37 for COVID, in an interview with Vince Racaniello of Columbia, Tony Fauci said, “You can’t believe those cycle thresholds.” And yet, the CDCs instructed laboratories to use cycle thresholds of 40 to 45. That’s why I say you cannot rely on data the CDC provides us. Independent scientists or improved federal agencies need to start looking at raw data again, and figuring out what they really show. Mr. Jekielek: Presumably, you’ve got a lot of FOIA requests out. Dr. Nass: Yes. I’m working with Children’s Health Defense, and we have been sending a lot of FOIAs. Recently, I’ve also started working with another organization sending FOIAs. Aaron Siri has probably had the best luck sending FOIAs, because once a vaccine or a drug is fully licensed by FDA, all the data package that was used in the licensure process is supposed to be made public. As you know, FDA tried to stop the data on the Pfizer vaccine from being public first for 55 years, and then for 75 years, and he won that court case. So now, that data is being made available to the public, and we need more of that. Mr. Jekielek: What do you make of this new California law that was just signed into law by the governor? Please explain it to me. Dr. Nass: A new law was rapidly passed by both houses of the California legislature and signed into law by Gavin Newsom and goes into effect next month or this month. It criminalizes doctors who say anything about COVID to their patients that is outside of consensus. Of course, a law doesn’t know what consensus is, but everybody really knows what it is. It means you’re not allowed to say anything outside the government narrative on COVID in California if you’re a medical professional, because you can lose your license. That means you can’t criticize the vaccines. You can’t have the discussion I just had about databases being hidden. You cannot recommend drugs for COVID if the government is not recommending them. This also means that you can’t actually tell your patients the truth. You cannot tell a patient what is in the label of a drug or what isn’t in a label. For example, if the government wants me to give somebody monoclonal antibodies, I’m not sure that I’m allowed to tell the patient there’s a black box warning on the label, and that monoclonal antibodies, if given to a hospitalized patient, can cause a worsening of their COVID condition according to the label. But this California law would shut me up. I have to just go with the narrative. It means doctors are being told they can’t practice medicine, but particularly that they cannot provide informed consent to their patients. Mr. Jekielek: Isn’t informed consent a foundational principle of medicine? Dr. Nass: We thought it was. Even the law under which Emergency Use Authorization products are authorized requires that you tell patients the risks and benefits of the EUA product, but this California law is saying you can’t do that. The California law thinks it’s going to supersede federal law. Mr. Jekielek: What do you expect is going to happen? Dr. Nass: Doctors in California are already talking about leaving the state. They’ve been told they can’t practice medicine. They’re supposed to turn into computers. What I’ve said is that the reason you need a doctor is to assess your own individual risks and benefits, and to determine the best treatment for you in consultation, balancing many things. If everybody is going to be told the same thing and be given the same drug, you don’t need a doctor. You just need a computer. Spit your lab test into the computer, and it will release a prescription. If all you are good for is to give patients the government narrative, there’s not going to be any practice of medicine anymore, so say goodbye. Maybe some of them are waking up to that. Mr. Jekielek: Any final thoughts? Dr. Nass: It’s a very dangerous time. The patients should be even more upset than the doctors. The life expectancy in the United States has crashed. It’s gone down three years in the first two years of the pandemic. A Cuban now lives three years longer on average than an American. This is what’s happened to the practice of medicine in the United States. Doctors have to stand up, but there’s only a million doctors. There’s 334 million people in the United States, and they have to say, “No more.” Mr. Jekielek: Dr. Meryl Nass, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Dr. Nass: Thank you for giving me a chance to say what matters to me. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Dr. Meryl Nass and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan 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

“We’ve been lying to ourselves so long, we don’t know the truth when we see it,” says international human rights lawyer David Matas. For nearly two decades now, he has been one of the leading researchers examining the evidence of the Chinese regime harvesting the organs of living Falun Gong practitioners. “The medical profession here in the U.S. needs to start looking at the facts and not simply accept Chinese government statements about how good they are at face value,” Matas says. Up to now, the United States has only passed symbolic resolutions condemning the practice of forced organ harvesting. But just yesterday night, the House passed the first ever U.S. bill with actual means to hold the perpetrators accountable. Dubbed the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2023, H.R. 1154 aims to sanction anyone involved in forced organ trafficking and requires annual government reporting on such activities taking place in each foreign country. Those found to be involved will face a criminal penalty of up to $1 million and 20 years in prison. If its companion bill passes the Senate, the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act may soon make its way to President Biden’s desk. “Obviously, if you kill somebody in the U.S. for their organs, you’re going to be prosecuted. It should be the same if you leave the country and then come back,” Matas says. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/david-matas-on-exposing-chinas-illicit-organ-trade-the-problem-isnt-too-little-evidence-its-too-much_5152996.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: David Matas, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. David Matas: Thanks for inviting me. Mr. Jekielek: David, a long time ago, you once coined the phrase, “A crime yet to be seen on this planet,” if I recall correctly. This is what I want to talk about today, forced organ harvesting, how you came to discover this, and where we are today. Mr. Matas: I’ve been doing international human rights work, more or less all my professional life. There was this woman with a pseudonym, Annie, that made a public statement, actually here in Washington, in March 2006. She said that her ex-husband had been harvesting the corneas of Falun Gong practitioners in Sujiatun Hospital in Shenyang City, Liaoning Province in China. Other doctors in the hospital had been harvesting other organs. The Falun Gong practitioners were killed through organ extraction, and their bodies were cremated. She said he was doing this between 2003 and 2005. Then, an NGO, the Coalition to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong, decided to get an investigation going about what Annie said. They had a list of 20 people they thought could do the investigation. I was one of the 20. By that time I was well used to people coming to me about various human rights violations, and obviously, I can’t do everything. I could say, “You could go to the media, you could go to your member of Parliament, you could go to a human rights NGO, you could just take a court case, and there’s other ways of dealing with this.” But I realized that this issue couldn’t be dealt with in an easy way, and there wasn’t an obvious alternative. What I’m told straight up is, “If this happens, there are no bodies, and everybody is cremated. There are no autopsies, and there’s no witnesses except the perpetrators and victims. Everything happens in a closed environment.” “There are no documents except the Chinese hospital and government prison records, which are not accessible. There’s no crime scene. The operating room is immediately cleaned up afterwards.” Even if it’s true, how do you establish that it’s true? Obviously, when I was asked to do this, I didn’t know if it was true or not, but I also knew that it was going to take a lot of research. It wasn’t going to be a quick and easy fix where I could suggest that someone could do this and do that. I took it not on the basis that I would try to show that what Annie said was true, but simply that I would try to come to some conclusion, one way or the other, rather than just Annie said this, and the Chinese government said that. And who knows? What I started doing with David Kilgour was conducting evidentiary trails, specific elements that would either prove or disprove what Annie said. A lot of my prior work had to do with the Holocaust, and that’s initially what got me involved in human rights. I’m Jewish and all four of my grandparents came to Winnipeg before World War I. I wasn’t personally affected by the Holocaust, but I was well aware that if the Nazis rather than the Allied forces had won WWll, neither I nor any Jewish person would be alive today. I knew what Annie said could be possible. Obviously, I didn’t know whether it was true, but I knew it could be possible. So, I conducted these evidentiary trials, and there were lots of them, dozens, in each direction. I was just talking to somebody recently, or was on a panel with somebody recently, who said it took him a year to go through all my research. The conclusion that Kilgour and I reached was not the result of one particular striking piece of evidence. It was the accumulation of all the evidence that was put together. Every piece of evidence I looked at was archived, not just in translation, but in the original Chinese as well. Anybody who wants to can go through all the evidence themselves, and some people have done that. As I say, it’s a very time-consuming job. But everybody who’s done that has come to the same conclusion that David Kilgour and I did; that this was indeed happening, and that what Annie said was true. But even we went beyond that. We didn’t say, “What Annie said was true between 2003 and 2005 in Sujiatun.” We said, “It was happening throughout China, it was happening since 2001, and it was continuing at the time of our report.” That’s basically how we started, and how we got on board. Mr. Jekielek: You say there isn’t one particular piece of evidence which seals the deal, but were there particular pieces of evidence that took you to the next step to realize that this was real? Mr. Matas: The Chinese government historically flipped on Falun Gong. Initially, when it started in 1992, they were encouraging it because it was beneficial to health and cut down costs in the health system. Falun Gong grew from a standing start to the point where it was more popular than the Communist Party. By the time the party switched on it in 1999, according to government estimates, there were 70 million practitioners, and according to practitioner estimates, a 100 million practitioners. The Communist Party at that time had 60 million members. There were 3000 practice stations in Beijing because a lot of the exercises were being done outdoors, and you could see it everywhere. The party just got worried about its own popularity in the face of the popularity of Falun Gong, which at the time, wasn’t anti-communist, but was non-communist. The beliefs were not communist party beliefs. It wasn’t political, but it was just something else. The party switched, not just switching from for to against, it switched its complete narrative. Instead of saying it’s good for health, they were saying it’s bad for health. They constructed this narrative about how awful it was. There was this repression and this mass detention, and people who were detained. The detention was a reaction to the protest about the initial repression. Initially, within the Falun Gong community, there was complete incomprehension. The party had been encouraging it, and this exercise was good for health. There was this belief that somehow there had been a mistake. There had been a misunderstanding, because most people are not familiar with the inner dynamics of the Communist Party. You got these protests saying Falun Gong was good as if the party had made a mistake and thought it was bad. Whereas, in fact, the Party’s problem with Falun Gong was that it was good. You would get these mass detentions and then people would be asked to recant. If they didn’t recant voluntarily, they’d be tortured. If they recanted after torture, they’d be released. If they didn’t recant after torture, they would disappear. One of the strands of evidence was that I talked to Falun Gong practitioners who got out of detention and got out of China, “What did you see? What happened?” They told me a number of things. At this time, some of them may have heard what Annie said, but most of them had no idea about organ harvesting. One of the things they said is that there were people who self-identified and people who didn’t self-identify. The reason was because the repression in China by the Communist Party went through stages. At first, it was simply a catch and release system. As a policy, the repression was decided in June, and announced in July of 1999. Then, there were some protests, and there was a catch and release saying, “Don’t do it again.” But then the people who were released, their home environment would be victimized for allowing these people to practice Falun Gong. They would protest again, and this time, they wouldn’t say who they were in order to protect their home environment. The people who got out would say, “There were all these people who didn’t self-identify. The jailers didn’t know who they were, and the family didn’t know where they were. That was an extremely vulnerable population. That was one thing. Another thing they said was, “We were blood tested or examined, and other prisoners were not. We don’t know why.” This was actually something they weren’t volunteering. What they wanted to talk about is the torture and the abuse. But I was able to spend enough time with them to find out that this was going on as well. It was just a complete mystery to them why this was going on. It obviously wasn’t for their health, because they were being tortured. But it’s necessary for organ transplants because you need blood type compatibility, and ideally, even tissue type compatibility. I would meet these people in different places around the world. They hadn’t talked to each other, they hadn’t heard of organ harvesting, and they all said the same thing, “Blood tested, organ examined, just us, nobody else, and we don’t know why.” They weren’t eager to tell us about it, and wanted to talk about something else. That was something that was very striking to me, that this was happening. That was one thing. There’s another thing that really struck me. One of the sources of evidence we had was our investigators calling into Chinese hospitals, pretending to be relatives of patients who needed a transplant and saying, “Do you have organs from Falun Gong?” This was on the basis that Falun Gong are healthy and their organs are healthy. Across China we got some admissions, “Yes, come on down, or go somewhere else, or you can find it here, but not with us.” We had all those statements. On the statements themselves, I was prepared to say, “Maybe they’re just trying to make a sale, who knows?” But one of the things that struck me afterwards is that the Chinese government actually made a documentary about our report. It was done for Phoenix TV in Mandarin, in Hong Kong. They interviewed one of the doctors that our investigator had called, and they presented him with a transcript of the interview and they said to him, “Did you receive this call?” He says, “Yes.” “Did you say these things?” He said, “Yes,” except for anything that mentions Falun Gong. Basically, the transcript said, “We used to do this. I actually went to prison myself and picked out these people. We’re a civilian hospital, and now the military hospital down the road is doing it exclusively. Go down there.” That was basically it. Mr. Jekielek: This was in the documentary. Mr. Matas: This was our conversation. They presented him with a transcript of it in the documentary. He says, “Yes, I was interviewed. Yes, I said these things except this stuff about Falun Gong.” Basically, he’s accusing us of fiddling with the transcript. But what they didn’t say in the documentary was that this just wasn’t a transcript, this was also a recording. Playing the recording: [In Mandarin] Mr. Matas: We have a recording, interweaving seamlessly in his own voice, the stuff he denies having said, and the stuff he admits having said. I don’t even know if that would’ve been technologically possible, but I knew very well we didn’t do that. As I said, with every piece of evidence, because the Chinese government just comes out with nonsense, I had to think of not only the arguments for it, but also the arguments against it. I had no doubt the callers made the calls and the people at the other end said what they said. But the answer could have been, “We were just trying to make a sale, and we were making it up to please the customer,” so to speak. But they didn’t say that. They came up with such a farcical explanation, which was obviously not true. They didn’t even have the ingenuity to think up a plausible false answer. That struck me as well. David Kilgour used to say, “In this area, there’s no smoking scalpel.” But this kind of half-admission by the doctor we interviewed was, I would say, pretty striking. Mr. Jekielek: It’s almost unbelievable. Basically, you got independent corroboration from the doctor himself. Mr. Matas: If you look at our data, the Chinese government says, “It’s all coming from Falun Gong.” I know that that’s not the case, because the Falun Gong community learned about this from us, rather than the other way around. Also, most of the material comes from official Chinese sources; hospital data, their statistics, and their fiddling with statistics. This is another very odd thing. There was this Chinese doctor Sheibin Ye, who we quoted just about transplant volumes. He said, “We’ve done 90,000 transplants,” at that particular point in time, and we quoted him. The UN Special Rapporteurs on Torture and Religious Intolerance at the time, Manfred Nowak and Asma Jahangir, asked Chinese government, “What do you say about this?” They said, “Sheibin Ye never said that.” But the actual article where he was quoted as saying it remained on a Chinese official website, right at the time when they sent in this reply to the rapporteurs. They’ve now taken it down. It’s a rolling cover up. Every time I cite one of their sources, it disappears. Of course, I archive everything, or use the Wayback Machine, which is its own website and archives everything. The Chinese government faces a dual problem because they’re trying to do two things at once. They want to boast about their accomplishments and transplantation. They’re selling transplants around the world. They have brokers, and they have advertisements. When we started, they had price lists. The price lists are gone, but the brokers and the advertisements are still there, and you can still see them. They’re trying to promote this business. Mr. Jekielek: Even today? Mr. Matas: Even today, absolutely. You look at the website Love Handy, it’s promoting transplantations in China. I should say that today there’s a big increase in Uyghurs’ organs. They’re trying to promote and boast, and yet, on the other hand, they’re trying to cover up what they’re doing. But it’s very hard to do both at the same time; talk about what they’re doing publicly, promote it publicly, advertise it publicly, and then say it isn’t happening. They leave these evidentiary trails all over the place. It’s only when they see how we’re looking at this and how it shows what they’re doing, that it disappears. Mr. Jekielek: Do you view this as a genocide? Mr. Matas: Yes. I actually wrote an article with Torsten Trey and Maria Cheung about this called, “A Cold Genocide.” It’s one of the reasons amongst many that this genocide hasn’t got the attention that other genocides have, because it’s a slow moving genocide. It’s not everybody being killed all at once or within a short period of time. It’s been stretching out over decades now. It started in 2001, and this is 2023. It’s been going on for 22 years now. There was this China Tribunal and they debated on whether there was an intent to commit genocide. In my view, there is. First of all, genocide can be committed in whole or in part. Secondly, genocide can be committed with knowledge. You have the requisite intent either with knowledge or willful blindness. There was some uncertainty because people would recant, and then they wouldn’t be killed. But my reaction to that is, the perpetrator defines the group. If the perpetrator says the recanter isn’t part of the group, then the fact is, the genocide is still being committed, and the intent to commit genocide is still there against the group. Mr. Jekielek: Hey, everyone, I’ve got a special announcement. We’re launching a Sunday watch party series. Many of you have told us that you want to share some of our best episodes with your friends and family so they can be more informed about what’s going on. So every Sunday at 7:30 PM Eastern, we’ll be re-premiering some of our best American Thought Leaders episodes for subscribers and non-subscribers alike. It’s free to everybody. And if you have a suggestion for the next American Thought Leaders episode that you’d like to see for our Sunday watch party, tag us on Twitter at ATLSundayWatchParty, again, that’s ATLSundayWatchParty, or email us at atl@epochtimes.com. I look forward to seeing you all on the live chat this Sunday. Mr. Jekielek: I’m going to jump in for the benefit of our audience that to call something genocide, there has to be an intent to destroy a group of people. Mr. Matas: Yes, that’s right. It’s not just genocide. With any criminal act, you’ve got to have both the actual act and the intent to commit the act. If you cause somebody’s death, but it’s an accident, that’s not murder. But if you intend to cause somebody’s death, then it becomes murder. Mr. Jekielek: The reason I mentioned this, because I know that part of the debate in the China Tribunal was that there is a strong profit motive, it’s a billion-dollar industry. The argument, as bizarre as it sounds, is that if it’s a profit motive, it’s not necessarily an intent to destroy a group of people. They’re just doing it for the money. Mr. Matas: There’s two things I would say about that. One is, you’ve got to have the requisite intent, but you can have more than one intent. There’s such a thing as a mixed intent. People were making money out of the Holocaust by selling gold in teeth and stealing from the people they killed. That may have been a partial motivation, but there’s no doubt the real motivation, the primary motivation, was not that. Also, with genocide, you’re dealing with a lot of actors, a lot of victims, but also a lot of perpetrators. The perpetrators represent a cross section of humanity with a wide range of motives. Some of them may be doing it because they’re told, some of them may be doing it because of peer pressure, and some of them may be doing it for profit. But what’s driving this is not money. The Communist Party didn’t repress Falun Gong for money. They repressed Falun Gong because it was too popular. In their view, it threatened the hegemony of the Communist Party in China. Mr. Jekielek: Yes. I want to touch on something you mentioned earlier. In the Holocaust, you couldn’t decide not to be Jewish. Basically, you had to live with that. According to the Nazi approach, you needed to be destroyed if you were Jewish. For Falun Gong practitioners, you can decide not to be a Falun Gong practitioner, and you can recant. For this reason, a number of people have told me it’s a completely different situation. Mr. Matas: I would say that’s generally true of each genocide, that it has its unique characteristics. No two genocides are factually completely identical. To a certain extent, that’s what makes it harder to engage people with a new form of genocide, because it’s not like the old one. Sure that was true, but the Nazi definition of who was Jewish really didn’t have very much to do with who in reality was Jewish. One grandparent who was Jewish, and the Nazis would say that’s enough. It’s not objectively who’s part of the group, it’s who the perpetrator sees the group is. Targeting is determined by the targeter, not by an independent outside objective observer. The Nazis were invading foreign countries to kill Jews, and the Chinese aren’t doing that, at least, not yet, to kill Falun Gong. However, one has to be worried about what they would do if they invaded Taiwan, because there are a lot of practitioners there. What I said before is that if you leave the group because you recant, and the Chinese say, “You’re not Falun Gong anymore,” it doesn’t legally change the fact of that genocide. Because the genocide is intent to destroy the group, and if you’re not part of the group, it’s irrelevant to the issue of genocide. Mr. Jekielek: We’ve been talking about the China Tribunal. The China Tribunal took your initial work, and there had been substantially more evidence that had been accumulated since. They looked through all of it and established yet another time that this was real, and that it was happening. You’ve spent quite a bit of time over the years trying to get some sort of government action, and have free countries try to do something about this to make change. What is the most substantial change that you’ve seen? How difficult has it been to make this happen? Mr. Jekielek: I was talking before about evidentiary trails, and one of the evidentiary trails we were looking at was legal and ethical standards. In this field, they didn’t exist, there was nothing anywhere. In China, they actually had laws that said you could extract organs without consent of either the person or the family. There was a 1979 law that said you could do it for research, and there was an 1984 law that said you could do it for prisoners. It was based on finding a corpse. If you found a body and the body was unclaimed, then you could use the organs for research. With the ’79 law and ’84 law, if a prisoner’s body was unclaimed, they could use the organs without the consent of the person or the family. After a report came out, they passed a law saying consent was required, but they didn’t repeal the ’79, ’84 laws. They’re still on the books. With ordinary legal interpretation, the specific prevails over the general. That is still in the books. Everywhere else around the world, in Canada, and in the U.S., if you kill someone for their organs, you can be prosecuted. But if you go to China and kill someone for their organs, the Chinese law doesn’t do anything about it, especially if it’s the government killing them. The government controls the courts, the prosecutors, the investigators, the police, and the prisoners. The government is not going to do anything about it. And if you came back, the Canadian laws and the American laws didn’t have anything to say about it. It’s the same with the ethical standards. The transplant profession and the medical profession never anticipated this. Nowhere did it say, “Don’t give people records, don’t give people prescriptions, and tell people somebody might be killed for their organs if they go to China.” The whole issue was just untouched. David Kilgour and I are both lawyers. One of the things we try to do is advocate for a legal and ethical system that says this shouldn’t happen. Now, there are I think 19 countries which have passed extraterritorial legislation that says, “If you leave your country and go abroad and get involved in the killing of somebody for their organs and you come back, you can be prosecuted. If you’re a broker that’s advertising it, or an advertiser, or if you were actually there and doing it and then come to visit our country, you can be prosecuted.” But this is only 19 countries. There are 194 countries, and there’s still a long way to go. The U.S and Canada just recently passed such a law last December. There’s even now an international treaty on the issue. The Council of Europe Convention against Trafficking in Human Organs, which was open for signature in 2015, has now got enough states parties that it’s enforced. Although it’s the Council of Europe, any country in the world can sign onto it. If you’re an observer state, you don’t need permission. If you’re not an observer state, you need to get approval. Costa Rica, who’s not part of the Council of Europe has signed on to it. Chile is not part of the Council of Europe, and has asked for permission. That’s positive. In terms of ethics, Canada has developed a very good set of professional ethics on this issue now. They say, “If somebody’s going for transplant tourism, don’t try to facilitate it in any way. Don’t give them your hospital records, and don’t give them prescriptions. Advise them that treatment on return is going to be difficult.” You were asking me earlier about striking things that happened. This is another striking thing that happened. Before we came out with our report, people who went to China for transplant tours would get letters from Chinese doctors about what they did, what medication they used, what medication they advised afterwards, a complete medical report. After our report came out, all the letters stopped. Gizalli Aman, who’s a Malaysian doctor, pointed that out to me, and that was a problem for him, because he was dealing with these patients. The patients themselves, they had no idea what was going on. The Canadian ethics said, “When you come back, treatment is going to be very difficult, because we’re not going to know what happened, and people should be advised that somebody may be killed for their organs.” This has happened in Canada, but as far as I know, nowhere else. In 2006, when we started our report, there was nothing. Now there’s something, but definitely not enough. Mr. Jekielek: It’s taken an incredible amount of time and an incredible amount of effort. I myself have experienced this repeatedly even today that when you talk about this issue, some people say, “No, I just can’t accept that this is real.” Mr. Matas: While the Holocaust was happening, there was a lot of evidence that it was happening. Many people didn’t believe it. Some of them, of course, were antisemitic and pro-Nazi, but you also had people in the Jewish community who didn’t believe it. Felix Frankfurter, who was a U.S. Supreme Court judge was presented with evidence from Jan Karski, a Polish underground worker. He met with the fellow and said, “I can’t believe it.” The Polish diplomat who presented him says, “He’s not lying.” Frankfurter said, “I didn’t say he was lying. I just can’t believe it.” Hannah Arendt, a Jewish philosopher on totalitarianism, said at the time that she didn’t believe it. Raymond Aron, the French Jewish philosopher, said the same thing. There were a couple of people that escaped from Auschwitz, Vrba and Wetzler. They wrote this Vrba-Wetzler Report, which is extremely detailed about the plan of Auschwitz, the physical layout of Auschwitz and what was going on. They escaped from Auschwitz while the Holocaust was still happening. There were still Jewish communities that if they’d fled, could be saved. They presented to some of these Jewish communities. Some of the Jewish people in the community read it, believed it, and fled. Some of them read it, did not believe it, stayed, and got killed. It’s just so out of the ordinary. Obviously, when somebody develops a more powerful machine gun, you can believe that it might cause you some danger. But when somebody develops a better technique for transplantation itself, it’s hard to believe that this would be happening, because transplantation is designed for human betterment. The basic ethic of the medical profession is do no harm. It’s just so out of the realm of everyday life. What you’ve got with China is complete denial, cover-up, obfuscation, and counter-narrative of the most implausible sort. Unfortunately, the problem isn’t too little evidence, it’s too much. There was one doctor that I was on a panel with recently. He said, “I myself was skeptical. Then, I went through all the evidence and I was convinced, but it took me a year to do that.” Gloria Steinem said in another context, “We’ve been lying to ourselves so long we don’t know the truth when we see it.” That’s the reality of this situation. It’s so out of what they know that it’s just hard to believe. Mr. Jekielek: To circle back to where we started, it is an evil yet to be seen on this planet. Mr. Matas: Well, indeed. The Chinese example of killing prisoners of conscience for their organs, institutionalized, as a global business, has not been replicated anywhere else. Like anything else, you have to look at the reality in its face. You can’t just function on the basis of preconceived notions. Mr. Jekielek: We’re sitting here right beside the U.S. Capitol. You mentioned that there are no laws on this issue in the U.S., which would seem bizarre. What would be your recommendation to Congress to help deal with this issue? Mr. Matas: Obviously, if you kill somebody in the U.S. for the organs, you’re going to be prosecuted. It should be the same if you leave the country and then come back. If you’re involved in any way, if you’re complicit in any way, the U.S. has extraterritorial legislation in other areas. If you are a war criminal or if you’re a criminal against humanity and you commit the crimes outside of the U.S., you can be prosecuted inside the U.S. The U.S. needs a law that allows for prosecution for this offense, whether it’s committed inside or outside the U.S. That’s one thing. In terms of ethics, there’s two categories or streams of ethics. One is doctor-patient relationship, and the other is country collaboration. Now, there’s a lot of concern within the US about collaboration with China on national security issues, and there’s a lot of focus on that. But there isn’t the same concern about collaboration with China on organ transplantation issues. There’s a lot of doctors in this country who say that China has changed. and China has reformed. It’s basically because they’ve made some cosmetic changes without the underground reality changing. Like I mentioned, they’ve legislated saying there has to be consent, even though they haven’t repealed the law saying no consent is necessary. There wasn’t even a donor system in China for donation of organs when we did our report. They’ve now set one up. The donor system generates tiny numbers and doesn’t explain the transplant volumes. They set up what’s called a transplant registration system where they have a ranking of priority. But the data is not there. You go to the website, and there’s nothing there. You’ve got many doctors in the U.S. saying, “Everything’s fine now,” because of this veneer, which they have refused to go behind. I was actually at a congressional hearing with Chris Smith and Dana Rohrabacher a few years back in Washington, in that building behind me. I was there with Francis Delmonico, former head of the Transplantation Society. Chris Smith said, “China says everything is all right now, but they often say things that are not true. How do you know that what they’re saying now is true?” The answer of Francis Delmonico was, “I don’t investigate. That’s not my job.” Soundbite of Rep. Chris Smith: In 2016, how do you independently verify, when there has been such a backdrop of terrible duplicity, lies, and deception on the part of this government? Trust and verify; how do you do it? Soundbite of Francis Delmonico: I’m not an apologist. I’m not here to tell you not to worry. I’m not here to verify, that’s not my job. … I’m here to say to you that there is a move within the country to change. Mr. Matas: The medical profession here in the U.S. needs to start looking at the facts and not simply accept Chinese government statements about how good they are at face value. Narration: Up until now, the U.S. has only passed symbolic resolutions condemning the practice of forced organ harvesting. But just yesterday night, the House passed the first ever U.S. bill with actual means to hold the perpetrators accountable. Dubbed the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act of 2023, H.R. 1154 aims to sanction anyone involved in forced organ trafficking and requires annual government reporting on such activities taking place in each foreign country. Those found to be involved will face a criminal penalty of up to $1,000,000 and 20 years in prison. If its companion bill passes the Senate, the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act may soon make its way to President Biden’s desk. Mr. Jekielek: Any final thoughts as we finish? Mr. Matas: When you’re dealing with human rights violations, as I have been over the decades, I’ve come to realize it’s a never ending business, because what you’re basically dealing with is human nature. You can change technology, but human nature doesn’t change that much. And it’s not just with organ transplantation. What happens is as technology develops human nature stays the same, but the capacity both for doing harm and for doing good increases. We see that with a myriad of technologies. Very often, people who develop the technologies don’t anticipate the harm that could be generated by the technologies they have developed. What I would say about China and Falun Gong and organ harvesting, I would hope and expect that someday it would end, and the perpetrators would be brought to justice. But I don’t expect that human rights violations everywhere around the world will end, because the willingness and the capacity to do harm continues to exist. The details of it or the mechanics of it are going to shift with each new innovation. When we’re concerned about human rights violations, and trying to combat them, we’re not engaged in an effort of ending them completely forever around the world for all time, but we’re engaged in an effort of mitigation, making things maybe not as bad as they otherwise would have been. That’s maybe not a happy conclusion where we can all walk together hand in hand off into the sunset, but that’s the reality of the world that we face. Mr. Jekielek: David Matas, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Matas: Thank you again for inviting me. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining David Matas 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