Search Results

“We are in the midst of the greatest border crisis in U.S. history, by every metric,” says Todd Bensman. “When Title 42 goes away, this will spur 18,000 a day crossing. We’re at about 7,500 a day now.” Todd Bensman is an award-winning field journalist and a national security fellow with the Center for Immigration Studies. He’s the author of “America’s Covert Border War” and the forthcoming book “Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History.” “A school district in Texas … has been overwhelmed with 50,000 to 75,000 illegal immigrant families that have absolutely swamped the school district,” says Bensman. We speak about current abuses of U.S. asylum law, Mexican ant operations, the migrant terror threat, and what Bensman calls the “migrant advocacy industrial complex.” “Mayorkas is telling us all along: We are going to create legal pathways to cross the southern border. That’s unprecedented,” says Bensman. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/from-asylum-fraud-to-mexican-ant-operations-todd-bensman-on-bidens-migrant-advocacy-industrial-complex_4902259.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Todd Bensman, such a pleasure to have you on American thought leaders. Todd Bensman: Thank you. I very much appreciate being here. Mr. Jekielek: I’ve just been reading your book, Overrun: How Joe Biden Unleashed the Greatest Border Crisis in U.S. History, which is forthcoming. It hasn’t been published yet. Wow. I understood from the reporting of Charlotte Cuthbertson, our border reporter and many others, that there is a dire situation at the border, with all sorts of related issues. I had not realized the depth and breadth of it until I read your book, so thank you for this. You approach it from so many different angles. I want to start with this. Why don’t you give us an overall picture of what is happening? Mr. Bensman: We are in the midst of the greatest border crisis in U.S. history, by every metric. This is a crisis that goes beyond anything in the American experience. Even dating back to Ellis Island, this is something that the generations down the line will remember and study. The book has a lot of numbers in it, but it’s not just a story of numbers. But the numbers are nonpartisan, and those numbers tell us that we are at millions of apprehensions. We are in hundreds of thousands a month. Whereas in decades past, we are in tens of thousands a month. We were in 400,000 a year territory in the past. We are now in 2.3 million in a single fiscal year, another 1.7 million in the first year of the Biden administration, and 4.4 million apprehensions at the border in a 24-month span. That does not even include the got aways, the number of people that we didn’t catch that are logged in the books at another 1 million at least. And a presumed additional million. These numbers are just beyond anything that we have ever seen before, and I don’t think that the American public has yet appreciated it, because media coverage has been very episodic and spotty, and frankly, partisan.The purpose of the book is to frame this in not just numbers, but in the human story of what’s happening here. Because these are real people that are coming. This is an impact that will transform America. Mr. Jekielek: One way or another you’re saying in the book, that impact is happening no matter what happens. Even tomorrow. Mr. Bensman: It’s too late. We are in this now. The book is a marker of up to a certain point, because this is still very much an ongoing crisis as you and I sit here talking about it, and as the book publishes. But we have to understand how it started and how it got to this point in order to change the trajectory of it, if we want to continue as a country. Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned some very large numbers moments ago. But the bottom line in terms of how many illegal immigrants are in the country at this point, within the last let’s say couple of years, what is that number? Mr. Bensman: It does get a little bit complicated, because there is a Trump era expulsion policy. Title 42 is a pandemic era measure that was put in place by Donald Trump that allowed the Border Patrol to immediately expel all people that they apprehended at the border back into Mexico, where they can turn around and come back again. But there was this constant pushback. The Biden administration maintained Title 42 and still does even to this day that we’re talking, but has dramatically reduced the number of people that push back. So the four-plus million that have been apprehended were not all let in. The Biden administration let in about 40% of those in the first year, and now they’re letting in about 70% of those. But there’s still a good 30% that are being pushed back. But the number that have actually been admitted legally is somewhere in the neighborhood of 1.7 million. And then you can add to that another million who got away that are in. Not legally, but they’re in. They’re presumed to be in. The number is pushing toward 3 million that are actually in. Title 42 is under attack in the courts. The Biden administration has tried everything it could to eliminate Title 42 so that 100 per cent of everybody who comes to the border can get in. The intelligence community is estimating as of now that when Title 42 goes away, this will spur an 18,000 per day crossing. We’re at about 7,500 a day now. 18,000 per day will do something to the country that we’ve never seen before. It will be a tidal wave, an unbelievable tidal wave. And they’re trying to prepare for that, to process that into the country. When I say that by the end of the Biden administration, depending on what happens with 42, we should have 6 million people actually enter the country and maybe more, depending on how close to accurate the intelligence community is. Mr. Jekielek: Shocking is the only word that comes to my mind. Mr. Bensman: They’re huge numbers. Mr. Jekielek: They’re huge numbers. And of course, these are all people out looking for a better life. Maybe I can just get you to tell me the trajectory of your career. Because you’ve actually approached this whole issue from a whole bunch of different vantage points over the years. And I think it’s important for people to know. Mr. Bensman: First of all, I’m a classically trained journalist, a reporter with 23 years in the field for big newspapers like the Dallas Morning News, and 10 years at Hearst and CBS. Both of my undergraduate degrees are in journalism and my master’s degree is in journalism from University of Missouri. And I’ve got 23 years on the ground all over the world doing this, including in Mexico and all along the Texas border. And after my journalism career, I was recruited to join the Texas Department of Public Safety Intelligence and Counter-Terrorism Division here in Texas, where I sort of disappeared, and went anonymous, and was an intelligence practitioner that worked primarily on counter-terrorism issues at the Texas Fusion Center with federal partners. But I was substantially targeting border issues and illegal immigrants crossing the border who are coming from Middle Eastern countries and places where terrorist activity is pretty prevalent. That was an intelligence project and program that I did for all nine-plus years that I worked for the agency. More recently in 2018, I was recruited to join the Center for Immigration Studies, which is a think tank out of Washington DC. I took that job, and have kind of come full circle back to reporting, and writing, and communicating above board, overtly about the border. I come at this from a perspective of a homeland security practitioner. I look at this as a national security threat. I can’t help it. It’s a homeland security issue. But I also come at it from the perspective of a journalist who’s classically trained in balancing information and presenting stories in the most honest, possible way that I can, even though it’s such a partisan issue. That’s kind of where I come at it as a storyteller with journalism background. But also, I’m a law enforcement guy. I’m a little bit blue in the law enforcement arena. I can’t help that. I know too much. Mr. Jekielek: What is the threat of national security threat of 6 million people being in the country? Mr. Bensman: The major problem with having a border that is this out of control at this level of utter pandemonium is that people arrive at the border often without identification. We have no idea who any of them are. They can tell us, “My name is Mickey Mouse and I’m from X country,” and we let them in without any idea of whether their word is true, and sound, and verifiable. And that’s really the problem. It’s a stranger danger issue from my vantage point. You have people coming from 150 different countries, from all over Africa where there are war torn tribal militias committing atrocities against the civilian population, or you have people coming from Syria, and Iraq, and from China, and from places that are adversarial to the United States. You have spies, espionage problems, war criminals, and terrorists. And when 900,000 or a million, or a million-and-a-half people cross without even being detected, you can’t even run their fingerprints. That is by definition, a major national security threat to America. Mr. Jekielek: Previously, you wrote a book which focused a bit on immigration, especially from the Middle East and some of the issues associated with that. Very briefly, because I want to focus on this new work, but what did you find? Mr. Bensman: America’s Covert Border War encompasses almost everything that I know about the terror threat of people crossing the southern border, trying to infiltrate our external guarded perimeter from countries of national security concern, like Syria. There’s 40-plus countries where we know there are terrorist operatives and organizations. The issue with people coming over the border from those places was addressed after 9/11. The question of it, the threat of it was addressed after 9/11 in the form of counter-terrorism programs that are elaborate and expansive, and are all along our border and beyond all the way to the tip of South America that the American people have never been told about. The book is an expose of those programs—what we did, what we’re still doing, and what we’re supposed to do, and how those programs so far have protected the American public from an attack from that southern flank. The book is still relevant in the context of the current crisis. Because now, we know that the greatest number of people on the FBI terror watch list that have crossed the border have been apprehended that we know are already on the watch list. As of the time we’re talking here, it’s probably about 125 who are already on the watch list in a 24 month span. When I was working in intelligence, this was what I did. I worked on this project. I put everything that I know into the book that would not get me put in prison. This is really the most information about that threat issue that is available out there. Because remember that the American media establishment denies that it’s a problem, and that it’s even happening. When Donald Trump came out a few years ago and said, “Hey, there are terrorists crossing the border. I know it.” They laughed him out of town, they ridiculed him, and they did fact checks. But now the Biden administration puts it up on their .gov website, how many terrorists cross the border every month. So, they can’t say that anymore. In the context of the border crisis that we have now, these programs that I write about in America’s Covert Border War are off the rails. They are absolutely degraded and not happening now, and I believe that the country is at a greater elevated threat from that than it has ever been since 9/11. Mr. Jekielek: You dedicated a chapter to talking about how the U.S. asylum system essentially incentivizes lying, and incentivizes people to misrepresent their reality, so that they can get in if they know how to do that. Everything you just told me right now troubles me even more so knowing this. Mr. Bensman: That’s right. The key to border security in this country is the way our asylum law is written, and used, and abused on a massive scale. It’s set up so that regular economic migrants who just want to work can use this to get past Border Patrol, and to bypass congressional statutes that require their deportation. There are NGOs, there are non-governmental organizations and American lawyers who are down there all day long teaching them what to say, what not to say, so that they can pass the initial screening that gets them into the country to stay forever. That’s really the problem with the southern border—the U.S. asylum system. It has to be eliminated completely and rebuilt from scratch in order to prevent these mass migration crises. We’ll never get past this until we utterly reform the U.S. asylum system from top to bottom, and the law behind it. People who are crossing the border in this crisis understand, and the people that want them to cross understand the vitality, the crucial function that asylum plays in enabling this mass migration. You just have to say, “I want asylum,” and you’re in. Mr. Jekielek: But to eliminate the asylum law together, that seems extreme and cold. Mr. Bensman: Right. I’m not saying eliminate it permanently. I’m saying put this thing on ice and rebuild it so that it can’t be abused in the way it’s being abused. I’ll give you an example. One of the highest nationality volumes that come into the country are from Guatemala, from the Central Highlands of Guatemala. The central Highlands of Guatemala is a poor area. It’s an indigenous people’s subsistence, kind of hand to mouth. They have had small farms for generations before them. But they are crossing and saying that they are suffering political persecution. I went to the Guatemala Highlands to see what was going on there, and what I found were that the people that are crossing the U.S. and claiming government persecution are actually going for the sole purpose of building huge houses in their home villages, so that they could return to these and live in them. People who plan to return to your home village are not asylum seekers. They are asylum fraudsters abusing our system. And also, people who are genuinely seeking asylum from political persecution, which is what the asylum law is for, don’t reinvest their American earnings back in the terrible town that they’re fleeing and can’t go back to, where their relatives are building the houses for them to return. I was there. I interviewed many people who are building these houses. And they make no pretense that there is any problem in their villages. They’re just poor people. That is not what the asylum system is built for. The asylum law was put in place for people who are fleeing North Korean gulags, or Jews fleeing a Nazi situation, or you could even argue people that are being imprisoned in China who could manage to find their way here. The other thing that people forget is that we have a lot of people coming from Africa right now, from war torn places, terrible places. I grant you that. Nobody wants to live in Haiti, nobody wants to live in some of these war torn countries. But if you are crossing 10 other perfectly safe countries first to get here, your argument that you’re coming for asylum is deeply undermined. Because when you are truly drowning, you don’t decide which of the 10 life rafts were thrown at you to grab is the best one. You grab the first one. That’s not what’s happening. These journeys are planned. They are rational choices that are being made for economic reasons, because the United States is the best place in the world to live. It’s certainly understandable that people would want to improve their economic fortunes, and live in a country that kind of works, has a court system, and has police that actually do protect and serve. But, our asylum system is not the way to do that. There’s a legal way to do it. And it is a crime to lie to government officials about the persecution that you suffered and that you’re coming here for, to escape certain death. Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned Haiti. And you cover Haiti in the book quite a bit, and especially this program where the Biden administration actually had to send people back to Haiti. Mr. Bensman: Let me just start by saying that the majority of Haitians, I would say not just the majority, but the super majority of Haitians that have crossed our southern border to claim asylum already had asylum in two countries, Brazil and Chile. Those governments gave Haitians full residency, and full work authorization. And there actually was work. They were making money, and they were secure. They enjoyed those countries. I’ve interviewed many, many dozens, I would say hundreds of Haitians. When they get to our border, they tell the media and they tell our asylum officers that they’re coming directly from Haiti, when they’ve been living in these other places for years, three, four, five years with asylum already. So the foundation of their claims for coming here are already compromised. It’s a lie. Mr. Jekielek: How are you so sure that all these people have asylum already? Mr. Bensman: Because they throw their identification on the ground just before they enter, and we can find them. They’re everywhere. You can fill grocery bags with them. These are Chilean residency cards that have Haitian faces on them. They try to destroy them. This one’s burned. These are evidence of asylum fraud. Because when Haitians get caught with one of these, they’re not going to be admitted into the United States. So, they try to burn them. They throw them in the river. And the ones that get thrown in the river wash up on the ground, or they just throw them on the ground on the Mexican side and anybody can go down there and scoop these up. That being said, so many started coming into the United States all at once, because they told me the Biden administration made it possible for them to be admitted legally when they showed up. So they pulled up stakes in Chile and Brazil and took advantage of it. Of course, they’re rational people and they’re making economic decisions based on pure logic. If you know that you’re finally going to get in, they’re going to let you in, you’re going to upgrade. I had one Haitian explain to me in Costa Rica as he was moving through, I said, “How did you compare life in Chile to life in Haiti?” And he says, “It was 1,000 times better.” “So then why would you give up a lifestyle that was 1,000 times better than Haiti to come to the United States?” And he says, “Because the United States is a million times better.” Now they came in such huge numbers in such a quick time that it caused a political crisis for the Biden administration. They had a political problem with a massive encampment that formed 15,000 Haitians under the Del Rio Texas Bridge in September. And it wasn’t going away. They kept piling in from Mexico through there. I was there for the entire period of that inside the camp, and in Mexico, and interviewing them all around. I interviewed the U.S. Ambassador to Haiti who was appointed by the Biden administration just two months earlier. And he told me on the record that the Biden administration decided that it had to close that camp, because a year later we would have the American midterms. They couldn’t still have that camp around on the banks looking like that. So, they decided to shut it down. The primary way that they decided to shut it down was by using a Trump era tactic that has been roundly criticized by liberal progressives. And it’s air deportation, to Haiti of all places. Remember these people were not living in Haiti for years. The worst nightmare for those particular Haitians was to be returned to Haiti. The problem is that they had to have the government agree to take them in Haiti. And Haiti’s president had just been assassinated. So, there was nobody there. But they were about to have democratic elections the first time in years. And it was scheduled for November 7th. Just a couple months later, everything was set. The Biden administration decided to scuttle those elections, to scuttle that democracy, and to anoint a dictator, Dr. Ariel Henry. And they installed him because he agreed to take the Haitians from that camp. In order to get rid of a potential political problem for the administration, Haiti ended up with a dictator and the loss of their promised elections. So we deported by ICE Air, thousands of those Haitians back to Haiti. Not to Chile who wouldn’t take them, or Brazil, but to Haiti. So naturally the camp collapsed under that. Because the Haitians that weren’t being deported, fled. When the first ones hit the tarmac, the cell phone selfies got going. And those Haitians fled by the thousands south back into Mexico to escape even the possibility of ending up back in Haiti. Dr. Ariel Henry is still the de facto leader of Haiti. The ambassador resigned in protest over the scuttling of the elections, and is talking about it to anybody who might ask. Mr. Jekielek: You have a chapter called The New Theologians in the book. This actually brings in a huge area of interest that I have beyond the border. Why The New Theologians? Mr. Bensman: For one thing, in a book like this, you have to give the big why, the big W. And when I speak to media or audiences, I’m constantly asked, “Why are they doing this?” People really need to understand the why of mass migration of this epic size. The answer is that that there is an ideology that has been around for 50 years that holds that traditional national borders are an anachronism, that they are obsolete. It’s an ideology. And it’s so profound now, that it’s almost like a religion. This people adhere to this idea that the world should be borderless, that people have an inalienable right to migrate wherever they want, when they want, outside of any regard for what the nations that they’re entering want. The Democratic mainstream has always rejected this. The Democratic Party has never believed in elimination of immigration law, elimination of deportation, the elimination of detention, or to abolish the ICE. This is a faction, it’s an ideological faction that is an extreme fringe part of the Democratic Party coalition, that has always been sidelined. Their ideas have never been able to gain traction. But what happened was Donald Trump. He came in and he energized that faction to such an extent that they were empowered. Think Bernie Sanders. Once he was finished with them, he endorsed Joe Biden, and asked his faction to vote for Joe Biden. And when they did, he was obliged to give them authority and power. When it came time for the presidential primary debates, the things that they were all saying universally were deportation and detention do not abide by current immigration law. It’s inhumane. Let’s put a red welcome carpet out for people crossing the southern border. We’re going to be humane, orderly, and were going to make it legal. And that is exactly what they did as soon as they entered the White House. They had a problem because of Title 42, but they had been eroding and eroding it as fast as they can to get people access to the asylum system that I keep talking about. That’s their key. So those people, the liberal progressives, gained control of the immigration and the border portfolio. Those people come from an immigrant advocacy industry, an industrial complex if you will, of non-governmental organizations. Alejandro Mayorkas is from that world. Most of the top advisors at the State Department, at DHS, and in the White House all come from the migrant advocacy industrial complex. And they have a financial interest in mass migration. They gain government contracts that are worth hundreds of millions of dollars. And when they don’t have government contracts, they are fundraising based on this emergency that is created. “We must have funds to help us resettle these people to help them get their footing, etc.” So, there’s the always a financial bottom line in this, but it’s never pitched like that. You’ll never hear it like that. What you’ll hear is that there is an inalienable right for all people of the world to go wherever they want, and it is inhumane to stop them. Immigration enforcement is cruel and punishing. Deportation is even more so. And they will tell you, they say in their writings that when we deport them to places like Haiti, those are death flights, that our detention centers are concentration camps, and that ICE agents are concentration camp guards. We saw this throughout the riots of 2020, in the placards and the graffiti—Abolish ICE, ICE and Detention Center are Nazis, the embodiment of Nazis. Of the presidential candidates who were mainstream, most of them were kind of mainstream on the Left. But Kamala Harris and all the rest of them incorporated those street placards and the graffiti right into their immigration platforms. Mr. Jekielek: Something that you have recently exposed is there are actually people being let into the country that are illegal immigrants that have been pre-approved for entry, prior to hitting the border. I can’t even believe I’m saying those words, but explain to me what’s going on. Mr. Bensman: Alejandro Mayorkas, he is a new theologian. This is his religion. He comes from that segment of the coalition. From the beginning, he has parroted their demands, which is to create a safe, orderly, humane, legal pathway into the United States over the border. And they have talked about systematically creating those pathways. There are two things that they did. One is that the administration sent emissaries to Columbia, Panama, and Costa Rica, bottleneck places on the migration trail that are very dangerous and deterring on their own. It has cut deals privately, secretly, confidentially with those governments, to allow immigrants to bypass the danger parts, and to reduce the time through the jungle on the pathways from a week, to 10 days, to 48 hours. With the ascent of the Panamanian government, they have agreed to pull their patrol boats off the rivers and out of the way of the ocean route, to allow these migrant boats to pass further up and avoid the most dangerous parts. That is creating a safe pathway, just like they said. But it also will invite far more people to do it, because it’s less dangerous. So, those are in place now as we speak. I’ve written about that. The Darien Gap, which is a notorious passage, is no longer the notorious passage that you thought it was, that people thought it was. They’ve cut it short now. The other thing that they are doing is to create legal pathways. They said they would do it, and they’re doing it, which is to say that immigrants who were planning to cross illegally can now get in a queue all along the border on the Mexican side. And then, the Mexican government will, in coordination with the American government, provide legal permission to cross at a port of entry. And once they do that, they are then given permission to work and to go anywhere in the country that they want, until one day they might apply for asylum. The asylum that I’ve been talking about all along, which just enables them to stay forever. Many of them won’t even bother applying for asylum. It will be, “Come and get me.” That legal pathway has been developing all through 2022 very secretively. There is no advertising going on. But it is happening now at ports of entry from the Pacific Coast, Tijuana, all the way to Brownsville at the Gulf of Mexico, probably at seven or eight different ports of entry so far. Thousands upon thousands a day are being crossed in legally through the ports of entry. And it shouldn’t be a surprise. Mayorkas was telling us all along, “We are going to create legal pathways to cross the southern border.” That’s unprecedented. Nothing like that has ever happened in the annals of either party. That is not Democratic mainstream thought or policy. That is something truly extreme, and also legally questionable. Because the authority that they’re citing for allowing these people in in large numbers is called humanitarian parole. Humanitarian parole is in the INA. It’s an allowable authority, but on a one-off basis. A guy is sick, struggling up the river bank. We’re not going to deport a guy with a missing a leg or whatever the situation may be. And in that one case, we’ll issue a humanitarian parole. This administration is using humanitarian parole for massive categories of people all at once. There is litigation about this that probably will end up before the Supreme Court. But in the meantime, they’re issuing this as the main legal document that has allowed probably a million-and-a-half, 2 million people that have been brought into the country over the borders into the country. What this does is it makes it safer. Because now they don’t have to pay cartels to cross. They just enter a sheltered system, and the Mexicans escort them to the Americans. I was allowed exclusive access into a Mexican shelter where they’re doing it. I interviewed them. I interviewed the Mexicans that are in charge of the operation, three different shelter managers in Tijuana and Mexicali who said, “We can’t keep up with the demand now. We keep having to expand our shelters, and add new shelters. Because selfies are going back to the village by cell phone. ‘Hey, they’re letting us in and we don’t have to pay the cartels. It’s cheap. Everybody come now while the getting is good.'” I expect that the remaining couple of years of the Biden administration will feature a significant percentage of border entries that come in this way. But you can’t put a news drone overhead. You can’t see it. And so, the American people would not know about this. And you certainly don’t see them on the other end when they board buses and head to cities across the United States, right from the ports of entry. They’re very excited about this. Mr. Jekielek: When you’re talking about people being put on these buses across, I’m reminded of something we talked about off camera, which are these Ant operations, as you described them. So how does that work? Mr. Bensman: Okay. Remember, most presidents have some kind of a surge or something happens, but they don’t want it to happen. So they work hard to reverse it. Under this administration, it was the opposite. For the first time, an American president encouraged it, and said he didn’t want to stop it, and wasn’t going to stop it. Mr. Jekielek: But by that do you mean what’s called la invitation? Is that what you’re talking about here? Mr. Bensman: Yes. La invitation came to me from a smuggler that I interviewed in Ojinaga, Mexico who worked for the La Linea cartel. Just a couple of months into the administration, business was booming in an area where it had never boomed before. And I asked him, “To what do you owe your incredible prosperity?” And he said, “La invitation.” I said, “What do you mean by that?” He says, “Joe Biden issued an invitation to the whole world to come, and they have not stopped coming. We’ve never seen anything like this.” So, that’s where I came up with la invitation, because it really was an invitation. The specific policy that he was talking about was an early one that the Biden administration did, which was to suspend all interior deportations. Something that has never been done. No Democrat had ever done anything like that. And then, the word went out to the world that if you could get past Border Patrol, which is a 100-mile zone of jurisdiction for Border Patrol, you would never be deported. You would never have to worry about deportation. That was the specific thing that he was talking about. He said that when Biden ended deportations, business boomed. It was la invitation. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s go back to these Ant operations then. Mr. Bensman: Right. When Trump was in office, he had to put together a multilayered ad hoc bunch of policies, because he couldn’t get anything passed in Congress, he just had to do it himself. One of the key ones was that he persuaded the Mexican government under threat of tariffs to deploy their national guard at their southern border with Guatemala. That is a choke point on the immigration trail that almost all immigrants pass through to get to the U.S. border. Prior to that, they would just cross through and get a bus or hire somebody to get them up to the border. Donald Trump asked the Mexicans to put their military down there and stop them. And by doing that, they would not want to be coming through Mexico. They would just stay home. And it worked while Trump was in office. Because Trump said, “If you don’t do this, we are going to put a tariff, progressive trade tariffs all the way up to 28 per cent. We’ll start small. And if you don’t comply, it’ll get bigger and bigger until your economy is destroyed.” And they believed him. So, they put those troops down there, and they started to muck up the immigration through there by requiring that they apply for Mexican asylum. If they didn’t apply for Mexican asylum, they’d be deported back to Honduras or wherever they’re from, kicked back into Guatemala. When Biden came into office, he asked the Mexicans to maintain that. But he pulled the threat of tariffs. “We’re not like that. We don’t do that. We’ll give you money instead, carrots instead of stick.” So the Mexicans responded by pretending to do it still. But when the numbers reached a critical mass, 40, 50,000 in this city of Tapachula, they started to riot and say, “Let us go.” And the Mexicans devised some very creative ways to make that happen. One of the ways that they did it was to wheel up 3 or 400 buses, load them up, and bring them to different cities, dispersed across Northern Mexico, so that nobody could see a big politically problematic clump of people coming in a caravan, or a Haiti migrant camp under the bridge sort of thing. They call that an Ant operation. It comes from Mexican cartel drug smuggling. Which is to say that we send onesies and twosies in a long line with drugs in a lot of long lines, so that nobody really notices that it’s happening. Or if you block one of the lines, they’re still coming in these other lines. And the Mexican government adopted that tactic to move people out of Tapachula, and then still pretend like they’re abiding by the agreement with the Biden administration. This is an extremely duplicitous, tricky, backstabbing, diplomatically-problematic move by the Mexicans that they were able to get away with, and still are to this day, because the Biden administration doesn’t care as long as it’s not visible. When it gets visible, they care. They do deportations to Haiti. They get tough when they need to, when it serves their short-term political interests. Ant operations are great for the Mexicans. They relieve the pressure. And it’s great for the administration, because they get to allow everybody in and nobody’s the wiser. Mr. Jekielek: How do you get people to talk to you, to tell you that they’re involved in these things? I would imagine people would not want to talk to you and expose these types of things happening. Mr. Bensman: By just being on the ground. You have to go to the places and interview the people that are managing these problems. On the Ant operation, the first time that I really realized it was on a trip to Tapachula. I interviewed the city’s main newspaper publisher who described the whole thing to me, laid the whole thing out. He says, “Yes, here’s what they did. They handed out these special visas, QR code visas to everybody, and gave them a few days. And we wheeled up buses. And you had to show your QR code to get on a certain bus that went to a certain city.” And he explained the whole thing. And then later then you could find these QR code visas on the ground in Texas discarded. So it wasn’t very hard to put it together. And then you could interview the immigrants who had these QR codes about what happened. The first time that I really saw this happen was the Haitian migrant camp crisis. Because when I asked the immigrants themselves, “Why did you guys all show up at once?” Which seems like an obvious question. And I spent a couple of days interviewing dozens of Haitians. They all had the same story. “We were stuck in Tapachula. They wouldn’t let us go. And we rioted. We had riots day, after day, after day. And there was a big national Mexican holiday coming called El Grito. It’s a week long celebration that goes on all over Mexico. And they were coming up the next week. And the Tapachula authorities and the federal authorities felt like this was going to interrupt the celebrations. So they wheeled up buses and said, ‘Whatever applications you had, don’t worry about it. You’re clear to go all at once.'” The buses went to Del Rio, because Del Rio happened to be a spot where the cartels are not charging to cross. It’s one of the few spots along the border where you can get over free. You could cross yourself and nobody will kill you for it. They all knew about this on social media. The Mexicans let them all go to make a national holiday happen in Tapachula. If Donald Trump had been president at that time, there would have been repercussions. But there were not repercussions. And so the Mexican government kept doing it. They did it again, and again, and again, in different ways. They used the QR codes the next time because they didn’t want a clump showing up. They made a mistake with the Haitians, because they showed up in a big clump under the bridge. So, the next time they did it with the QR codes. They showed up and scattered all along the border. Mr. Jekielek: This is an incredible body of knowledge that you’re sharing here. And I encourage everyone to actually pick up your book and read it. Because we’ve only just really scraped the surface here with some unbelievable stories. On the one hand, you’re saying that things have been changed irrevocably. On the other hand, you’re saying that there is hope. What do you see there, and what do you think needs to happen at this point given the body of knowledge that you’ve just exposed? Mr. Bensman: Well for one thing, immigration, especially illegal immigration, the factors that shape it are not well understood. The American people don’t understand how it works, why it works, and why what happens is happening. And until they do, they won’t really be able to weigh in that something wrong is happening or something that you like is happening. But the mass migration crisis is going to be felt eventually by everybody in the country. Their school districts, their health systems, and tax rates, and everything. They’re going to feel this. They’ll have a choice at the ballot box in 2024 after two more years of this, and millions of more people. Lawmakers will need to make choices and draft laws that will hopefully meet the demands of their voters, one way or another. My feeling is that the Democratic Party, which is responsible for allowing its progressives to do this, really does not want this. The Democratic Party has never been for any of this. Barack Obama, they used to call him the Deporter-in-Chief. Recently he was quoted saying, “This is not sustainable. We can’t have a country that just lets everybody in.” And Bill Clinton recently said the same thing in an interview he said, “This is wrong. We can’t do this.” If the Democrats maintain power at the ballot box, the pragmatic rebels that I write about in White House Rebellion, the chapter on White House Rebellion, will be given the power that they need to overcome the progressives and reverse this. They may do it voluntarily without even having to get voted out. But it may be that they’re just going to have to get voted out, in which case the book will provide the comprehension and the historical documentation about how this happened to be able to back out, to reverse engineer, and to actually be able to affect change and shut this down. Mass illegal immigration is not an inevitable thing. It does not have to happen. The laws that Congress passed over the years, bipartisan laws with votes, are more than sufficient to take care of this sort of thing. They just have to be enforced. We don’t need immigration reform. We need the asylum law to be rebuilt. And there’s a couple of legal loopholes. The Flores Loophole, which we didn’t talk about. There’s a couple quick fixes here that any bipartisan Congress should be able to easily put together. With the outcome of the midterm elections, it looks like we’re going into another two years like this. By the end of the next two years, the country will be feeling it. I just saw a story in an Omaha, Nebraska newspaper yesterday about, “Oh my God, we’re being flooded with these illegal immigrants. What’s happening? Why is this happening? All of our shelters are overwhelmed.” This is Nebraska. That is going to be happening all over the country. My last chapter is concerned with a school district in Texas, Liberty County, Texas, where I spent most of a week, that has been overwhelmed with 50 to 75,000 illegal immigrant families that have absolutely swamped the school district, and caused irrevocable change throughout this little rural Texas county. That is maybe an extreme version of what’s happening, what the rest of America should see. But it is a good way to see what’s in store for your school district and for your community after another couple years of this, and certainly after another four years beyond that. So, I’m hoping that the book, and my last chapter will open some eyes as well as to what this really looks like, this kind of transformational impact from this crisis. Mr. Jekielek: Todd Bensman, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Bensman: Thank you. I’m honored to have been here. Thank you. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Todd Bensman 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

“There’s a loophole that they’ve slipped through in the regulatory process, because most drugs require pharmacokinetic studies … And that has not been done with the COVID-19 vaccines,” says Dr. Tess Lawrie, co-founder of the World Council for Health. Pharmacokinetics is the study of how a drug behaves in a patient’s body, how it distributes, and how long it takes to be cleared from the body. “Because they’ve been called vaccines … all these manufacturers have been required to do is to show that the product they inject gives an immune reaction, gets an immune response. They have not been required to show how it distributes around the body,” says Lawrie. She argues that the COVID-19 injections are not actually vaccines, but are instead gene therapies. And they must be halted immediately, she says. Myocarditis is just the tip of the iceberg. Inflammation is actually occurring not just in the heart, but “in every organ and tissue of the body,” Lawrie says. In this episode, she breaks down the alarming signals that independent researchers have found, and what people can do if they are worried about their own health or the health of their loved ones. Dr. Lawrie is also the director of The Evidence-Based Medicine Consultancy Ltd. Her Substack is called “A Better Way to Health.” Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/dr-tess-lawrie-covid-19-vaccines-cause-inflammation-in-every-organ-and-tissue-of-the-body_4902588.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Tess Lawrie, such a pleasure to have you on American thought leaders. Dr. Tess Lawrie: Thank you so much for having me. Mr. Jekielek: Tess, you have been one of the people on the forefront of advocating for early treatment of COVID. For starters, why don’t you just tell me about who you are, where do you come from, and why this is so important to you? Dr. Lawrie: Jan, I’m a medical doctor and scientist and I’ve been working as a guideline methodologist, which is actually a long word for someone who evaluates research, and then presents it in a recognized format, basically an evidence to decision framework to a panel of experts and other stakeholders to help them make a recommendation on whether to adopt an intervention or not, or a treatment or not, for a condition. I’ve been doing this as an external consultant to the World Health Organization for the better part of 10 years as an external consultant. I and my company would be hired to do this work. We have no conflicts of interest. We had never worked for Big Pharma, and when COVID came along, it was clear that there was no evidence base to the strategies that were being promoted by the authorities, by the World Health Organization, and by governments. I became interested in seeing how I could help and assist to promote evidence-based strategies. My opportunity came when I saw Dr. Pierre Kory’s testimony in front of the U.S. Senate asking that Ivermectin be used. I was fairly intrigued as to why a doctor should have to plead with politicians to use a safe old medicine. It’s been around for ages. So, I did a rapid review of the available evidence and it was clear that it really should be used, and there wasn’t much to lose by giving it a try. Mr. Jekielek: You’re also involved in a global organization and effort. Maybe you can tell me about that. Dr. Lawrie: After we’d done the review, the systematic review on Ivermectin, we also did what’s called the evidence to decision framework, and we presented this to the authorities, including your NIH and FDA via email, and we were totally ignored. The evidence was totally ignored, and then they came out with this nonsense about Ivermectin being a horse medicine and not being safe for humans. There was this huge social media campaign against Ivermectin and the notion of early treatment for COVID. As we progressed through 2020, it was clear that the COVID vaccines were not safe, and they were not ready for mass rollout. There was clear evidence to me and my colleagues that lockdowns were not necessary, that masks were not necessary, that there was early treatment for COVID, and that the COVID injections were harmful and not ready for widespread use. We had to get those messages to the public. So, we needed another platform. The World Council for Health is actually a grassroots organization. We are independent and ethical, doctors, scientists and lawyers, members of the public, activists, and now patients, who are informing the information that is shared. It’s not a World Health Organization type of centralized imposition of health guidance to anybody. It’s really facilitating discussion, conversation about what works, what doesn’t, how to get healthy, and not only that. We are empowering people to look at issues around freedom and sovereignty as well. Mr. Jekielek: When it comes to the COVID-19 genetic vaccines, what is the state of the evidence at this moment in terms of their efficacy, and also in terms of their safety? Dr. Lawrie: I’ve been monitoring the World Health Organization’s database since January 2021 in terms of the COVID vaccines. In fact, I started looking at it because of Ivermectin. I wanted to see how safe Ivermectin was historically. In the UK, they have what’s called the Yellow Card Scheme, and they are databases that record adverse events. They didn’t have a denominator. So, you can’t say, “10 per cent of people have an adverse reaction,” but they are a measure and they provide a safety signal, especially in the numbers that we are seeing. It’s actually required by these authorities to do safety audits at least every two years, but in an emergency like we have with experimental injections being rolled out, you would hope that it would be more frequent. Currently, on the World Health Organization VigiAccess database, there are over four-and-a-half million reports of adverse reactions. On our UK database, they have actually stopped updating it, but when we last looked in July, there were about 450,000 adverse reactions, aside from just those reports, which suggests that a safety signal is present. If you just look at the number of adverse reactions, for example, and the number of deaths, we have in the region of 40,000 deaths reported in association with the vaccines, while one recognizes that it’s not causal, and you can’t determine a causal relationship. The sheer numbers demand some evaluation, and a pause at the very least, or attention by the authorities. With the swine flu vaccination in the 1970s, it took 50 deaths for them to recall that product. We have a pharmacovigilance report, I’ll just hold it up, which can be found on the website. It was done in June, so, it’s not the latest and up to date, but in that, based on the breadth of the data across the different databases, it looks at the VigiAccess World Health Organization database and the UK database. There’s really plenty of evidence to show that they should be recalled. We have at least 40,000 deaths reported across the different databases. Mr. Jekielek: There are a number of countries and states, at least one in the U.S. where the recommendation for young people and especially younger men, even up to age 39 in the case of Florida, where the genetic vaccination is not recommended anymore. This is directionally correct, but not the whole story. Dr. Lawrie: As with Florida, we see no vaccinations for the younger men between the age of 18 and 39. But in actual fact, it’s really not enough, because we are seeing harms across the age spectrum. All age groups are experiencing harms. It’s really not enough to say that the vaccines are safe for one group and not another. They are not fundamentally safe in their essence, and in the way they are designed. If you look at how they are meant to work, they are not vaccines, and the reason why they have been approved so quickly is because they’ve been called vaccines. That means that they haven’t needed to go through or apparently they haven’t needed to go through approval. They’ve slipped through. There’s a loophole that they’ve slipped through in the regulatory process, because most drugs require pharmacokinetic studies, and the pharmacokinetic studies for vaccines include immunological studies. Pharmacokinetics is how a drug behaves in the body, how it moves throughout the body, how long it takes to be cleared from the body, how it’s excreted from the body, and how it distributes in the body. That has not been done with the COVID-19 vaccines, because they’ve been called vaccines. If they had been called gene therapies, which is what they are, they would have required the biodistribution pharmacokinetics, as I’ve explained, and immunological studies. What all these manufacturers have been required to do is to show that the product they inject gives an immune reaction. It gets an immune response. They have not been required to show how it distributes around the body. We know from a FOIA request from Japan by Dr. Byram Bridle, in Canada, that these injections accumulate in certain tissues in rats. All we have is a little rat study to go on from 2020 that shows that the contents of these COVID-19 injections accumulate in the ovaries and in the liver and so on, but in high concentrations in the ovaries. We don’t actually know to what extent, because the animals were terminated after 48 hours. So, we have studies done in rats that were done for only 48 hours that showed alarming accumulation of COVID vaccines in ovaries and other sensitive tissues like bone marrow and liver and spleen and testes. Of course, and we’ve had nothing done further, and nothing done in human beings. Mr. Jekielek: You seem very definitive about saying these vaccines need to be paused for further research. This is essentially Dr. Aseem Malhotra’s position. Please explain to me the evidence that you’re seeing. Dr. Lawrie: It’s easy to explain the evidence that one is not seeing, because there never was evidence before they were rolled out to support their use. We didn’t have adequate animal studies. The phase one studies were rolled into the phase two studies without publishing results, and without sharing them both. The phase two studies were rolled into the phase three studies. The phase three studies, the control group was eliminated, and after a couple of months, the control group was given the active experimental treatment, and then it was just rolled out to millions and billions of people around the world. We did an analysis of the UK database in May last year and we broke the data down by symptom and pathology group. We looked at bleeding and clotting. We looked at neurological adverse events. We looked at pain. We looked at reproductive issues. We looked at sensory, visual, nasal, taste, and all those sorts because these were the things that we were hearing anecdotally. And when we looked at that, there was a huge preponderance of neurological disease. The other thing we looked at was immune system disease, autoimmunity infection, and inflammation. Those are the broad categories. When one looked at it like that, it became so clear that most of the deaths were due to bleeding, clotting, and ischemic, which is when a blood vessel gets blocked, and you don’t have perfusion to the tissue. We are having diseases or conditions picked out and examined. For example, myocarditis has become something that’s very widely discussed, but the broader picture is that myocarditis is inflammation. That inflammation is happening in every organ and tissue of the body. It’s not just in the heart. In some people, it’s manifesting in the heart, but in others, it’s manifesting as vasculitis. The blood vessels are inflamed. The gut’s inflamed. The liver’s inflamed. The lung’s inflamed, as well as the brain. We are seeing the same pathology throughout, but obviously, if it happens in the heart, it’s very easy to detect. Joints as well. We’re seeing lots of arthritis and joint issues. It’s more when you’re looking at the side effects. When you break it down like that, you can see the pattern. It’s inflammation. It’s clotting. What struck us when we looked at the UK data was that there was clotting in all sorts of vessels. It’s not just in brain, because there had been some discussion early on about blood clots in the brain and we were assured that it was very rare. But in actual fact, blood clots were happening all over. When you looked at the database, there were blood clots in large vessels like the aorta, which is fairly rare, and the spleen and the liver and right down to the peripheries. So, the pathology is systemic. It’s affecting the whole body, because it’s the spike protein has been made in all and any cells, certainly not just in the arm. I just wanted to say this about the autoimmune stuff we’re seeing. It’s not just the inflammation we’re seeing, because we’re also seeing a lot of autoimmune disease. That just makes sense because your cells are making a spike protein, and then your body is making the antibodies to attack your own cells. Then, the other thing is, because the immune system is so busy fighting this foreign spike protein, you also have a lot of latent infections, herpes, Epstein-Barr, and shingles popping up, because the immune system is suppressed, not boosted. So, these are the patterns of disease that one is seeing. It’s very important for pregnant women and women who wishing to become pregnant also to realize that there were no studies done on pregnant animals, let alone pregnant woman, to determine whether the COVID vaccines are safe. There are many mechanisms of action to support what we are seeing on the databases, which is a lot of miscarriages, fetal morbidity, a lot of deaths, and a lot of fertility issues. One of the reasons for this is that the spike protein is similar to a placental protein. If your body is making antibodies to the spike protein, your body could be making antibodies to the placental protein. It might make it difficult to maintain a pregnancy. If you are wanting to become pregnant, it would be best not to take the COVID vaccine, because you don’t want to have antibodies to your placenta, to the placenta that you make. The other thing is to remember that in the rat studies that were done by Pfizer and that the FOIA request revealed in from Japan, there’s a concentration of these vaccine product in the ovaries and the testes. You only have a given number of eggs when you’re born as a woman. If you are going to have antibodies being made too, and you’re going to have vaccine contents in the ovaries, is that going to lead to scarring? Is it going to affect fertility? We don’t know. If we don’t know, we shouldn’t take the product. Mr. Jekielek: A lot of this comes down to it being a risk-benefit calculation. What you’re outlining to me here is that there is a lot of risk that is in many cases is still yet untested, and the benefit, especially to younger people, is minimal, as I understand it. Dr. Lawrie: Yes. It doesn’t seem to really be a risk-benefit relationship. It seems to be a risk-risk relationship. It doesn’t seem to be a benefit to these injections. Why on earth if this COVID injection is so effective do we have to take them so frequently? They don’t work. The benefit is not there. The risks are tremendous and are being revealed every day. What we really need now is to focus on alerting the public to not taking any more jabs and helping those people who have been harmed, and also examining these databases to see what we can expect, because we have no long-term data. We’ve only been giving these shots for two years. What can we expect to see in 3, 4, 5, 10 years time? This is what we need to be looking at. Mr. Jekielek: You’re saying that there is a global coordinated effort in terms of the rollout, or in terms of the policies or guidelines. Can you expand on that and explain what you’re seeing? Dr. Lawrie: When I started on this journey, the last two years, like many, I didn’t have the big picture. I would say there have been a lot of pieces. It’s almost like a puzzle coming together. Because obviously, originally, the questions were on what basis was COVID a pandemic? It didn’t seem like it had the basis to declare it a pandemic in the first place, with the lockdowns and these draconian measures, the masking, and all of that. Nothing really made sense, and many people are probably still struggling with that sense-making thing. Things started to fall into place for me when I became aware of the coordinated corruption behind the suppression of Ivermectin, and the power the pharmaceutical companies had over the journals. Because we obviously tried in the early part of 2021 to get publications out on Ivermectin. We saw the publications being suppressed, and authors being discredited. Whereas if you had a negative study on Ivermectin, it would get published in a top journal like JAMA. But then, the World Health Organization came out with this pandemic treaty, and then things started to fall into place. In the background, one had the World Economic Forum speaking about its plans for humanity in terms of being chipped and surveilled and all of that. The big picture basically is that the World Health Organization is a controlled organization. It’s controlled by corporate influence and interest, Chinese Communist Party influence, and Bill Gates and Klaus Schwab. This pandemic treaty, which they’ve drafted and they’re planning to or trying to get countries to sign on to involves the World Health Organization declaring and determining what constitutes a pandemic. They have in mind we’re going to have a number of pandemics. Even though pandemics are generally terribly rare, and they’ve changed the definition to accommodate a series of pandemics that they anticipate. Then, once they’ve declared the pandemic, they get to decide how it gets managed. They get to decide how the quarantine measures look, how many of these 100-day vaccines people need to take, who gets those contracts to develop the vaccines, and then how the measures are enforced. This treaty is being prepared alongside amendments to the international health regulations. Now, the amendments to the International Health Regulations were first drafted in 2005. In May 2022, there was a U.S. initiative to change 13 of the amendments to the International Health Regulations of 2005. One of those amendments is to give the Director General of the World Health Organization the power to declare an actual or potential health emergency. So, you can imagine that the enormous power that has that gives a single man. Once this health emergency potentially would be declared, governments would have 48 hours to decide or accept the offer of collaboration by the World Health Organization. If they did not wish to collaborate with the World Health Organization, they would have to explain their reasons why. They’d have to give a rationale as to why they didn’t want to accept this collaboration. Those are just a couple of the things. The other thing is these documents facilitate proactive surveillance of potential actual health emergencies. You can see, there would be a system that is set up with surveillance, not only of external threats, but of genetic data—this is a new phrase that’s been added— and also the digital passports. It is digital data that would be with or in all of us. It very much seems that the World Health Organization is one of many tools that is being used by the globalists to formalize their control and this aim to have a one world government and a one health system. People say that they can’t get their head around it. They think, “This must be a conspiracy.” But it is a conspiracy certainly, and most people seem to be unaware. Mr. Jekielek: This is one of the themes I’ve noticed over the last few years. There have been all sorts of terms that have been redefined. You also mentioned the term vaccine has been redefined. What other terms have been redefined? Dr. Lawrie: Pandemic used to be an infection that caused a lot of deaths. Now, it’s just an infection, a new bug going around. You can imagine the implication of that. “There’s a new bug going around. Everybody go home, stay home, lock yourselves away, and wear a mask until we say it’s safe to come out.” Herd immunity has been redefined. It used to be that herd immunity was something that could occur naturally. Now, it’s being associated with vaccination only. I promise that earlier I would tell you a bit more about how these vaccines work and why they are not vaccines as we know them. This is because a traditional vaccine uses a protein or antigen and it’s injected into the arm muscle. Your body responds to it with antibodies and T-cells, and then you have immunity. But with these new types of vaccines, if we’re going to call them vaccines, they are actually gene therapies. They used to be investigated for cancer. That was how they were originally intended. It contains a gene. A gene is like a recipe, and once in the body, it uses the body’s materials and mechanisms to make the product. This injection or substance goes into the arm muscle, but it circulates within the bloodstream very quickly within hours and days. Then, this gene gets into the cells of the body, the lining of the blood vessels and the tissues. Then, it uses the cell’s mechanisms or machinery to make spike protein. The theory is that your body then makes antibodies to the spike protein, but the antibodies are in your cells. Your body makes antibodies to your own cells that are containing the spike protein, and this sets up an inflammatory reaction. It’s like COVID in a way, in the sense that the spike protein is a product from COVID. We know that with COVID, you can get multisystem inflammation and clotting if you don’t treat it early, but these vaccines give you trillions of copies of this recipe. You’re making much more spike protein, or you may be making much more than you would make with getting COVID. Also, it keeps making it. We don’t know how long it takes. Obviously, it’s going to differ from person to person, but the drug companies have not done the studies and said the contents of these injections and their products are cleared within X number of days, months, or years. All of these questions are unanswered, and it seems as if it’s been left up to independent scientists to have to explore them and reveal them. In actual fact, we have this weird situation where the drug companies are saying, “Here’s our product.” The regulatory authorities are saying, “Thank you very much,” and signing off on the thing, and it’s up to the independent doctors and scientists and the public to prove that the drug’s not safe, instead of the other way around. The pharmaceutical companies should be proving that their product is safe, and they are not. Mr. Jekielek: What is the World Council for Health? How big is the organization? Dr. Lawrie: We have 170 or more organizations in 45 countries. Some of them are really small organizations with a lot of output. Some of them are large organizations and with international groups. We don’t charge groups to be members with us. It’s a coalition, so, everybody’s autonomous. It’s not as if there’s a central imposition. What we do ask though is that the groups subscribe to a better way of doing things and that is our mission. Really, our mission is to empower them in their countries with the resources they need to inform their leaders, and to inform the public. Ultimately, our aim is to decentralize responsibility for health to our country partners, to countries, to communities, and to the individual. Our goal is really for everyone to be their own council for health, so they don’t need to outsource their decision making to corrupt authorities. Mr. Jekielek: How did you come up with your positions in this umbrella or meta-organization? Dr. Lawrie: We have expert committees. We have a science and medical committee. We have a law and activism committee. We have an ethics committee. We have a youth committee and we have a mind health committee and these committees meet weekly. They discuss current affairs, and their feedback to us. One of our key, mission documents is called the 7 Principles of a Better Way, or the Better Way Charter, and this document was formulated. It was a key output of our meeting. In May, we had an in-person conference in Bath called the Better Way Conference. Actually, I’ve got a little leaflet here that we share. It’s really very simple. The route out of the current predicament is really changing the way we show up in the world. Number one is we act in honor and we do no harm. Now, that’s usually the reserve of what we demand of doctors, but everybody else has to act in honor and do no harm. Everybody needs to try their best to do no harm, to do no harm to others and to themselves. We are free and we have free will. We take responsibility for our lives and our health and our choices. We are part of nature. We tend to forget that, especially when we live in cities, which are concretized, and we have all this tech around us. Spirituality is absolutely integral to our wellbeing, and many people, they disregard that idea, but we actually thrive when our lives have conscious meaning and purpose. If you haven’t got a good reason to wake up, you tend to feel very disconnected and isolated. So, we thrive together. We actually like diversity and we don’t need to name it and categorize it and break it down. We value different perspectives. We’re being conditioned that you have to take a position. You have to choose one or the other. You have to be pro-vax or anti-vax. It just seems all the time we’re forced to take a position, when in actual fact, you don’t have to take a position. We actually like each other. We like having discussions and conversations, and that’s how we refine our knowledge and our wisdom. Number seven, the last one, is that we use technology with discernment. Tech is great, but we need to use it for the benefit of people in the planet. There is a footnote and that is we don’t tolerate the violation of our inalienable rights and freedoms, and our freedom of speech and travel. Mr. Jekielek: What has been the response to the work of you and your organization countries and these multilateral health authorities? Dr. Lawrie: We never anticipated it would be quite so successful, but people are just so appreciative and grateful for some positivity and for an alternative route, because we are being faced with dystopia like we’ve never seen before. There seems to be the sort of degrading of who we are as human beings, the degrading of our moral fiber, and this apparent consensus that everybody’s good with it. But in actual fact, when you do hold up the picture and the memory of who we are and how people remember who they are, courageous and spirited and kind and loving and compassionate, people can step into it. They can step away from the fear. Mr. Jekielek: What about the response of the UK health system or the WHO or some of these multilateral organizations? Dr. Lawrie: I have to say the reason we started the World Council for Health is for the people. It’s we are grassroots organization, and our intention is to inform and help and support initiatives at grassroots level, because the authorities were not listening. They’re still not listening, but they can’t ignore us, because when we do write an open letter to the WHO and demand participation that there’s more public participation in their decision making, they do step up and say, “Okay, we’ll have a public participation.” And then, it’s a two-hour paltry affair, but nevertheless, it is a response to the work that we are doing. Certainly, we are being noticed and I’m sure that we will continue to be noticed. As I’ve said previously, the corporate powers that be are very much working with these authorities. We’ve been censored on Twitter. We’ve been censored on YouTube, Vimeo, Facebook, and others. So, yes, we are being noticed for sure. Mr. Jekielek: Why don’t we start here? What about your career? Have you been personally censored? Have you encountered other reactions career-wise? Dr. Lawrie: Doctors who are speaking out and adhering to their Hippocratic oath and the principles are being persecuted all over the world. My experience seems quite mild compared to what others have experienced, but I will just speak briefly to that. I was never on social media. Early on in January 2021, I posted a video. I think it had about 2000 views and was then taken down. It was a video to our prime minister saying that there is safe effective treatment for COVID, and please, could we have a meeting? This is a letter for Mr. Johnson. “Dear Prime Minister, my name is Dr. Tess Lawrie and I’m the director of the Evidence-Based Medicine Consultancy in Bath. My business conducts industry independent medical evidence synthesis to support international clinical practice guidelines. My biggest clients are the National Health Service and the World Health Organization.” “I have recently authored a report called Ivermectin for Preventing and Treating COVID-19, a rapid review to validate the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance’s conclusions. In connection with its findings, I sent an urgent correspondence to Mr. Hancock and other members of Parliament on Monday, the 3rd of January.” Then, it just snowballed off of that, and basically was sent on. People couldn’t interview me on YouTube, because YouTube would cancel them and it would demonetize them. I gave a lecture at an academic institution on the state of COVID and the state of evidence-based medicine, and there was a complaint put into the General Medical Council about what I said about vaccine adverse events. That’s my story, but there are doctors facing much worse. I’m not practicing clinically, so I’m not worried about losing my license to practice. But there are doctors who are practicing clinically who’ve been saving thousands of lives during COVID. I’m thinking particularly of Dr. Jackie Stone who’s in Zimbabwe, and she currently faces imprisonment unjustly for treating people with Ivermectin and colloidal silver and managing to keep people out of the hospital and alive and well. Also Dr. Peter McCullough has just lost his license. Also Dr. Paul Marik. They are doctors in Asia, in the Philippines, and Malaysia who are also facing threats. Mr. Jekielek: And just to be clear, with Peter McCullough, it was his board certifications that were basically pulled, but I think he still may have his license. The general theme here is that people are facing repercussions for pursuing early treatment and criticizing the rollout of vaccines and maintaining their presence in the market. Dr. Lawrie: Yes. Just for wanting to have the conversation about the safety of the vaccines seems to be sufficient to be hauled before your regulatory body. Mr. Jekielek: I’ve seen some of the resources that you’ve developed as part of the World Council for Health and maybe you can tell me about them. We’ll link to them on our streaming platform as well, so people can access them, but this is actually quite useful information for folks. Dr. Lawrie: Yes, thanks, Jan. Most people in the UK certainly know there’s something up with these COVID injections. We’ve never had so many of them. Even for flu, you don’t have to get so many. Many people know of friends who’ve not been feeling well, and family members who’ve not been feeling that well. Many people who are aware that they are harmful don’t know how to communicate that message, and have people put two and two together. So, we have a number of resources. Here is this. If you’ve been feeling unwell since your COVID-19 vaccine, you’re not alone, and then there’s a list. Some people are experiencing unexplained symptoms that include headache and vision problems, brain fog, and heart issues, and then it refers them to support groups. We have a number of patient groups that are part of our coalition, and these include Real Not Rare, React19, and UK CV Family. These are support groups, usually mostly run by vaccine-injured people. This is a leaflet that really helps people navigate their way to support groups. We’ve got this one here, which is if you’re worried about the COVID vaccine or spike protein, don’t worry. There are solutions and because many health experts have been working on solutions for well over a year now and are coming forward with their experiences. This links to our website where there’s a detox protocol that people can follow, but also on that, it has links to other resources and other people’s websites like the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance. They have an excellent protocol on their website, which I’m sure you’re aware of, for people who are suffering from vaccine injury or long COVID. We have this, also just a brief. It’s a summary guide basically of the detox summary, easy to access and share. These are great resources for sharing with neighbors, or if you’re a health practitioner, just keeping it in your surgery and offering to others. We have this document we launched with in September last year, which is our at-home COVID, or any COVID treatment guidelines, and it’s been downloaded I think a million times at least. We also have a leaflet, which I don’t seem to have with me here, on at-home COVID Care and it’s literally just two pages. It’s got a little shopping list of things that you can get over the counter if you have COVID. An actual fact, especially for you guys and us in the Northern Hemisphere, we are expecting a really tough winter. You can see COVID rates are actually going up, not down. If you watch the news, you’d think COVID was over. Well, there’s more COVID now than there ever was. In the UK, we are seeing an uptick not only in COVID, but also in excess deaths, which many of us believe are due to the COVID-19 injections. We are waiting for the government to put two and two together on that too. But we’ve had a 20 per cent increase in excess deaths recently, week on week, which in the UK, we’re a small country. It’s the equivalent to the excess deaths caused by a 737 crashing every day of the week. And then, we have this leaflet, and this is more general, because many people are feeling that things are spiraling out of control. This takes a little tip from Elvis Presley actually. When things go wrong, don’t go with them. On the back, it basically has a little list. This is a resource called Source. It’s a new website. It’s in the testing phase, but there are a number of resources up there already to do with sustenance, and to do with medical stuff you need to keep at home in case of emergency. Up and go essentials if you’ve got to pack your bag and leave. And resources, what do you do about money and trading and that sort of thing in the event of a financial crash. Community. What are the skill sets in your community and how can you harness those and contribute? Getting to know your neighborhood and your community and also issues around power. What to do if the power goes out? That’s Source, by World Council for Health, and it’s called our Thrive Guide. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about this excess mortality. We’ve talked about this on the show. This is not just a UK phenomenon. This is a phenomenon we’re seeing in other countries as well. Clearly, it’s a multifaceted phenomenon. There’s the impact of various types of treatments or even checkups that weren’t done during these shelter-in-place lockdown policies. You believe that the vaccine harms play into that, but it’s actually a broader thing, isn’t it? Dr. Lawrie: Yes, certainly. There could be many factors. There’s the fallout from lockdowns, which could affect mental health. We could have suicides and mental health issues contributing to that. Obviously, the vaccine harms. There’s the fact that in the UK, we have one in five people or between five and 10 people on a waiting list for some kind of procedure or others. If you’ve got cancer and you’re waiting to have your tumor cut out and it takes you a year to get you in and you die in the meantime, well, that’s another fact, and that’s also partly to do with the lockdowns. We always have had a long waiting list, but now it’s much worse. People are not getting the treatments that they have needed. Yes, it is a multifactorial thing, and we might never know what the cause is, especially when it comes to something like cancer. Because doctors are seeing an increase in cancers, and one can call it anecdotal, but it’s the only evidence we have. Yesterday, I spoke with Dr. Tina Peers. She runs a clinic, MCAS, a long COVID clinic near London. She was saying that she used to see one woman with breast cancer in, and she runs a menopause clinic as well, in a couple of years. Now, she said she’s seen 11 since April. So, doctors are seeing far more cancers and far quicker as well, people who’ve been in remission, and then they’re having a recurrence and rapidly fulminating, rapidly malignant cancers. This all makes sense from a mechanism of action point of view of these COVID injections, because they suppress the immune system. Cancer flourishes because of suppressed immunity. You might have someone say, “Oh, well, it’s because I haven’t been looked after.” We are not going to know, but the COVID injections could very well be contributing to the cancers that we are seeing now. Mr. Jekielek: Where can people find you? Dr. Lawrie: We have a World Council for Health website, which has many resources. We also have a live streamed general assembly meeting on Monday. Every Monday, you can find us online through our newsroom on the website. It’s usually a two-and-a-half hour meeting and we have loads of experts and fun discussions, conversations around what’s going on, and how you can improve your health. Finally, I also have a Substack. I don’t do scientific writing much anymore. I mainly just write in conversation about my perspective on things. It’s called A Better Way to Health with Dr Tess Lawrie, and I hope people will subscribe to that. Thanks, Jan. Mr. Jekielek: Dr. Tess Lawrie, such a pleasure to have you on American thought leaders. Dr. Lawrie: Thank you very much, Jan. It’s a pleasure to be here. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Dr. Tess Lawrie 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 - BUY "The Shadow State" DVD: https://www.epochtv.shop/product-page/the-shadow-state-dvd The Real Story of January 6 | Documentary BUY Jan 6 DVD: https://www.epochtv.shop/product-page/dvd-the-real-story-of-january-6, Promo Code “Jan” for 20% off. - Follow American Thought Leaders on social media: Twitter: https://twitter.com/AmThoughtLeader Truth Social: https://truthsocial.com/@AmThoughtLeader Gettr: https://gettr.com/user/amthoughtleader Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AmericanThoughtLeaders Gab: https://gab.com/AmThoughtLeader Telegram: https://t.me/AmThoughtLeader

“There are a lot of secrets that a lot of powerful people don’t want told about exactly how our story was suppressed—how Joe Biden was protected from that information before the election…it’s very high stakes.” Today I sit down with New York Post journalist Miranda Devine, author of the 2021 book, “Laptop from Hell: Hunter Biden, Big Tech, and the Dirty Secrets the President Tried to Hide.” Devine and I explore what we’ve learned since the New York Post first broke the story of Hunter Biden’s laptop in October of 2020. “I think the Biden family is a sort of model for how China plays the long game to infiltrate into the highest reaches of American power elites,” says Devine. “And Joe Biden was targeted very early on.” Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/miranda-devine-the-concerted-cover-up-of-biden-family-scandals-from-the-laptop-to-china_4912212.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Miranda Devine, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Miranda Devine: Thanks for having me, Jan. Mr. Jekielek: It’s a very interesting time for you, I’m sure, and certainly for me. Elon Musk has said he’s going to release the Twitter censorship files. We’ll find out what’s in there sometime soon, maybe even today as we’re recording. At the same time, Yoel Roth is on record having said that, “Censoring the Hunter Biden laptop story,” which you’ve written about extensively back in October of 2020, “was a mistake.” And he’s even said that the FBI visited Twitter much as they visited Facebook, as Mark Zuckerberg has said. What’s your reaction to all this? Ms. Devine: I would guess the chickens are coming home to roost. Finally, people are starting to understand that the censorship operation around the New York Post’s revelations to do with Joe Biden and Hunter Biden’s laptop was so egregious, that it really amounted to interference in the 2020 election. There are a lot of secrets that a lot of powerful people don’t want told about exactly how our story was suppressed, and how Joe Biden was protected from that information before the election. There are very high stakes for Elon Musk to say that he’s going to reveal all the details of the deliberation around that censorship operation. And in fact, he’s gone further and said he’s going to reveal the whole massive censorship operation that Twitter was running against all sorts of dissenting voices, whether it be on the botched Afghanistan withdrawal, or around COVID-19 vaccines and lockdowns. There was a lot of information that Big Tech was suppressing on behalf of the federal government. And we know in particular, with this story, with the Hunter Biden laptop story, that the FBI was involved. We know that from FBI whistleblowers, who have said that that there was suppression of detrimental information to Joe Biden within the agency, and we know that the FBI had the laptop from 2019 on. We also know that one of Hunter Biden’s former business partners, a guy named Tony Bobulinski, went to the FBI before the 2020 election, handed over three of his devices, and gave them a long five-hour interview about what he knew about Joe Biden’s involvement in his son Hunter’s overseas business deals. None of that saw the light of day. Tony Bobulinski was never called to testify at the grand jury in Delaware that was looking into Hunter’s business dealings, and the FBI never followed up with him. FBI whistleblowers have told us that was deliberate, and that it was a deliberate strategy to bury that information. We also know, and this is quite a sinister development that we’ve only discovered in the last few months, that the FBI went to Twitter and Facebook and warned them about what they said would be a dump of Russian misinformation or disinformation before the 2020 election. Now, our story came out three weeks before that election. Obviously, whatever the FBI had warned Twitter and Facebook about was so similar to our story that they censored it within hours of publication. In fact, Twitter locked the New York Post account for two weeks up until just before the election. And then another sinister twist, which we’ve only just found out, is that the FBI had been spying on Rudy Giuliani, President Trump’s then personal attorney, for two years, starting a month after he took that job as Trump’s attorney. They had this covert surveillance warrant on Rudy Giuliani’s cloud during the period when John Paul Mac Isaac, who was the laptop repair shop guy from Delaware, had the laptop. The FBI would’ve seen the email that he sent to Rudy Giuliani saying, “Look, I’m worried about this. I’ve tried to get the FBI to look at it. This is what’s in it. It’s very frightening. It’s dangerous for our national security, can you tell President Trump?” They would’ve seen all of that. They also would’ve been able to see my text messages with Rudy Giuliani, so they would’ve known or had access to that information telling them when the New York Post was going to publish. Mr. Jekielek: Absolutely fascinating and completely disturbing. What I’m thinking right now is, let’s go back in time. Let’s go back to those days in early October, 2020. What was it like when that story hit, and you realized that something wasn’t going as planned? Please tell me about that. Ms. Devine: We knew this was a big story, and it was a big courageous move by the New York Post editors to publish it, because it was so close to the election. It was going to have an impact, and it was detrimental to one of the two candidates for president. So, very high stakes. We expected that there would be pushback because of that. What we didn’t expect was that Big Tech would weigh in, would unsheathe its claws, show the world its power, and step in and censor the oldest newspaper in the country, the fourth largest by circulation. And not only do that, but be supported by the rest of the media. And then, shortly after the censorship happened, four days after our story was published, there was an open letter published by 51 former intelligence officials, high ranking people, four or five directors of the CIA or acting directors of the CIA, people like Leon Panetta, Michael Hayden, John Brennan, and James Clapper. These were people who had had very high ranking jobs and they were putting the authority of their former office into a letter that lied about our story, and said that our story had all the earmarks of what they said was a Russian information operation. And those were weasel words—what the world heard was that this was a Russian disinformation operation. And of course, that just justified the Big Tech censorship and justified the rest of the media not touching the story. Joe Biden used that letter and that lie about Russian disinformation in his last debate against Donald Trump. He said, “This is garbage. This is just a Russian plant.” It worked for him, and it got Joe Biden off the hook. Mr. Jekielek: When did you first realize that this censorship was happening, and what was happening in the newsroom? Ms. Devine: Within hours of the story going live, we had kept the story until 6:00 AM, and I think by 11:00 AM, Facebook announced, on Twitter actually, that they were basically throttling the story, pending fact-checking. And by the way, that fact-checking never happened as far as we can ascertain. Because the most obvious way you would do it is you would contact the other recipients of the emails that we were publishing and ask them, “Did you get this email?” And I know, having talked to recipients, that none of them got any question or phone call from Facebook. That basic fact-checking was never done, and we’re talking about almost two years later or more than two years later. And then, Twitter followed suit immediately. It was more chagrin and shock that this was happening, and that people were accepting it, and that there was just silence in the face of really egregious censorship. But also, we were busy publishing more stories that were coming out of the laptop. It was a very frenetic time in politics right before the election. Mr. Jekielek: The New York Post Twitter account was basically halted, so to speak, from publishing. Ms. Devine: Yes, for two weeks. Mr. Jekielek: So, what was the impact of that? Ms. Devine: Financially, it had a big impact. Those platforms are very big dissemination avenues for newspapers and media outlets. Kayleigh McEnany, for instance, who was then President Trump’s press secretary tried to share our story on Twitter, and she was locked out of her account and suspended for that. So, they were really serious about stopping that story being published. And of course, then we couldn’t disseminate any of our other stories. It was a financial penalty, as well as a slap in the face and a frightening overreach. Remember that just shortly after that, these social media platforms also deplatformed the sitting president of the United States, and that had reverberations around the world. Even Emmanuel Macron, who frowned on a lot of aspects of President Trump was horrified, and he spoke out about that. Because these leaders know that if these unaccountable oligopolies; Facebook, Twitter, Google, if they have the power to ban, censor, and deplatform a sitting president, that’s way too much power. Mr. Jekielek: By the way, I read Laptop from Hell. I had never sat down and read the whole thing through, and I just did so recently. My goodness, the amount of information you have in that book, it’s difficult to ingest the volume. One of the things that happened recently is that Jiang Zemin, the former Chinese dictator passed away. I see all these headlines, like in the New York Times, saying he oversaw the meteoric growth of the Chinese economy. I don’t know if that’s the exact headline, but something along those lines. My sense of this situation is that he oversaw the compromising, by the Chinese Communist Party, of the global financial system, which means the U.S. financial system. I was reading about the Bohai Harvest affair and CEFC China Energy. These are some of the key tools of the Chinese Communist Party has used to infiltrate the global system. It creates a picture of how this is actually done, and how they do things. That’s what I thought was most interesting, looking at it from that perspective. Ms. Devine: Yes, the Biden family is a model for how China plays the long game to infiltrate into the highest reaches of American power elites. Joe Biden was targeted very early on by Zemin, actually, when he was the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He went on a trip to China organized by Zemin at that time, and he met with the Chinese Communist Party top dogs, and they took him to an island, I can’t pronounce the name, but it’s the equivalent of Martha’s Vineyard, in China. There they plied him with information about how wonderful China was, and how China was a rising democracy, and was embracing freedom and just wanted to become wealthy, and that China was no threat. And of course, Joe Biden swallowed all of that. It’s a great tragedy for America that a man like Joe Biden, who is, I would say, a hollow man without any real values, easily bought, and not too bright, should have been targeted so early on by the Chinese Communist Party and have been such a useful tool to them for his entire career. And now he’s president, of course. In 1979, when Joe Biden came back to America, he was waxing lyrical about China, and what a wonderful place it was and how it was going to be our friend. One of his most famous lines was, “Nothing to fear here. They’re not going to eat our lunch.” That’s a joke. He was so gushing in his praise for China that he was actually mocked by The Weekly Standard at the time for his extreme gullibility. And that love affair with China continued for Joe Biden. In 2001, he was an influential senator, still chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, and he was instrumental in allowing China into the World Trade Organization. Most of the negativity was coming from his own party, from the Democrats. This was during Clinton’s presidency, and he managed to overcome that resistance. And so, that marked the end of the manufacturing middle-class of middle America. Ever since then, Joe Biden has had this delusion that he has somehow has some special insight into China. He was duchessed early on by now President Xi when President Xi was vice president, Barack Obama was president of the U.S. and Joe Biden was his vice president. Biden and Xi met several times. You hear Joe Biden often boasting about the number of hours that he spent with President Xi, who is a chemical engineer. Whatever else you say about Xi, he is an intelligent man. For him to spend hours and hours talking to Joe Biden—and Joe Biden, we know how he speaks, he talks malarkey, he tells tall tales, he big-notes himself—President Xi has obviously made a study of Joe Biden by spending so much time with him over the years. And for one reason—to explore the weaknesses in America, and to satisfy himself of his own intellectual and moral superiority to America. Therefore, Joe Biden has not been a good representative for America to earn any respect from China, and certainly not from President Xi. Mr. Jekielek: Something you mentioned, back in 2001, you said most of the opposition came from the Democratic Party. I think that’s correct. As you’re describing all this, this is very much a bipartisan love affair with the Chinese Communist Party. The Chinese Communist Party was an equal opportunity influence peddler. Ms. Devine: And still is. [CLIP] Miranda Devine: The Concerted Cover-Up of Biden Family Scandals—From the Laptop to China Mr. Jekielek: And still is. But what you describe in Laptop from Hell, which curiously captures this in some more intricate detail, it’s more the rule than the exception that this kind of activity happens. What do you think? That’s what I think. Ms. Devine: Absolutely. Influence peddling is a Washington disease and it’s bipartisan. I do think Joe Biden is a master at it. Because of the laptop and because of Hunter Biden’s former business partners, who I’ve had the opportunity to talk to, and also because of the work of the Republican senators, Chuck Grassley and Ron Johnson, and they’re tracing the money trail from China, Russia, Ukraine, and other countries into the bank accounts in America of the Biden family and their various associates, I have a very good picture of exactly how Joe Biden was targeted and influenced by, and used by, the Chinese Communist Party through his family. Mr. Jekielek: The coverup of this whole situation has become the big scandal, even as much as what exists on the laptop and what we know from there. What do you think? Ms. Devine: Absolutely. The laptop may end up being bigger than the corruption story itself, because it involves the FBI, and because how we learned the laptop itself was buried by the FBI. And then, the FBI, and we only have circumstantial evidence really, and we’ll know more when Elon Musk reveals all, but certainly, it seems as if the FBI colluded with Big Tech to suppress the laptop before the election. And then, you have the 51 former intelligence officials, these top CIA directors, acting directors, whether or not they colluded with the Biden campaign and Democratic operatives, I don’t know, but they certainly interjected themselves into the election campaign to dishonestly traduce the New York Post reporting and say the Hunter Biden laptop was Russian disinformation. That was a concerted effort by the security apparatus to crush this story that was damaging to one of the two candidates for president. It’s really important to remember with this story that people talk about the Hunter Biden laptop, but it’s not about Hunter Biden. He is this 52 year old, I think he says, former drug addict, crack addict, who had a terrible period during most of the laptop’s coverage, of being a raging crackhead, addicted to prostitutes, living this dissolute life, spending vast sums of money and ricocheting around the world, and hanging out with the worst oligarchs and the inner sanctum of the Chinese Communist Party, and the inner sanctum of Vladimir Putin’s court. It’s just the most bizarre and interesting story, and a tale of great tragedy, because he had his own personal demons. But it’s not about Hunter Biden, it’s about Joe Biden. Joe Biden, he always talks about being the poorest man in Congress, but actually, he lived a very lavish lifestyle. He lives in a beautiful mansion, has always bought and sold houses well above his purported salary, dresses well, his entire family benefited from grace and favor jobs, government sinecures, scholarships, and judge clerkships. Hunter Biden’s role in that was to be the bagman, to be the guy who would, in his own words, “Give half his salary to his father,” who had to, in his own words, from the laptop, “Support the entire family.” And he became quite resentful of that. So, the coverup is a big story, but also, you can’t lose sight of the fact that this is a story about Joe Biden, and that is why the coverup was so concerted. People who probably would have preferred to remain in the shadows and not have the world know how powerful they were, they decided that the stakes were so high at the 2020 election, that they revealed themselves. Mr. Jekielek: The other part that’s very interesting and is exposed by this, the CEFC collapses. Chairman Ye, who heads it, gets rolled up in one of Xi Jinping’s anti-corruption campaign, because Ye was a Jiang Zemin loyalist. Basically, Hunter Biden gets caught up in the internal political struggles of the Chinese Communist Party, probably not realizing what is going on. It was fascinating to see that manifest, and as that whole thing is being rolled up, you have this play-by-play in the book. It’s really interesting to see how that plays out. Ms. Devine: Yes. CEFC, as you say, was the capitalist arm of President Xi’s Belt and Road Initiative. During the last two years of Joe Biden’s vice presidency, the Biden family and their various American associates were working for CEFC all around the world, in the Middle East, in Europe, in places like Romania, to help China buy infrastructure, and to buy energy assets. A lot of these countries by then were a bit loathe to allow themselves to be taken over by China, effectively. And so, what the Biden family name gave them was invaluable. It reassured these countries that they wouldn’t be just swallowed up in debt traps, as China had been doing around the world, that this was the vice president of the United States who was in partnership with this company, so it had to be good. That opened a lot of doors. Mr. Jekielek: This is what the family name implied, because Biden himself was not out there making these guarantees, right? Ms. Devine: Yes, that’s the interesting thing. The Republicans in the House are now having investigations into this whole affair, and they’ve been at pains to point out that they’re investigating Joe Biden’s involvement in his family’s influence peddling scheme. Joe Biden told the American people during the campaign and ever since that he knew nothing about his son Hunter’s overseas business dealings. But there is just copious evidence on the laptop that he met with at least a dozen of Hunter Biden’s overseas business partners, from China, from Kazakhstan, from Russia, and from Ukraine. He met them in Beijing, and invited them into his vice presidential residence in Washington, DC. He had at least one dinner at Cafe Milano in Georgetown. Hunter organized one in April of 2015, for his father to meet his business partners from Kazakhstan, and Russia, and Ukraine. The Biden campaign denied that when we published news of that meeting, at least with the Ukrainian, before the election campaign. Since then, the White House has admitted that, yes, Joe Biden did attend that dinner, but they said he only was there briefly, and not for any nefarious purpose. You can’t be a little bit pregnant. He was there. So, Joe Biden did meet with these people, and therefore, was participating in that demonstration that is important to influence-peddling partners, to the people who are buying influence, that yes, the important person is involved. You’re able to get him to come to a dinner, and you are able to get him on the phone. We’ve never heard from anybody, including Tony Bobulinski, Hunter’s former business partner, that Joe Biden ever specifically addressed any favors that he was going to give to anyone. He always spoke at a “high level.” Still, he was meeting these people. Still, he was demonstrating his availability. That’s the way the Chinese, and in fact, all influence peddling operations operate. But particularly in China, it was very obvious to Chinese eyes what was going on when Joe Biden, as vice president, flew into Beijing on Air Force Two with his son Hunter Biden in tow. This was American power come to do private business. Hunter Biden was what Chinese refer to as a princeling. You’re not stupid enough to give the bribe straight to the powerful person, you give it to their family members. That’s what happens in China. And so, that was how the Chinese saw Hunter Biden’s appearance. To American eyes, there were a few questions about it, but Joe Biden just dismissed those questions. Everyone said, “Well, he’s a good family man. He’s very close to his family. He likes to bring family members along on his overseas trips.” That’s a convenient cover story for the pattern of Hunter Biden’s involvement and access to the powerful people overseas that his father was meeting. It’s a pattern of corruption that’s unmistakable. Mr. Jekielek: What do you think Elon Musk’s revelation of the Twitter censorship files, which I keep calling them that in my head, what do you think will come out of that? What do you expect? Ms. Devine: What I would like to see is what we can’t get out of Facebook. I’ve asked them, “Exactly what did the FBI tell you to look out for when they warned of a dump of Russian disinformation before the 2020 election?” I have actually asked Facebook a few questions. I said, “Did they mention Joe Biden? Did they mention Hunter Biden? Did they mention a laptop?” The answer I got back was, “They did not mention Hunter Biden.” That implied to me, well, they mentioned Joe Biden. They didn’t say they didn’t, they mentioned a laptop, that’s the question. I’m hoping Elon Musk will tell us on what date before our story was published, did the FBI go and warn Twitter? And what exactly did they warn them to look out for? My suspicion is that they were quite specific, because Twitter and Facebook were able to censor our story so quickly, and recognize it as the information that they’d been warned about. I’m interested to know if that information was so specific. It could only have come from their surveillance of Rudy Giuliani. Mr. Jekielek: Do you think there’s any possibility that the FBI was had by someone, that they were misdirected about this information? Ms. Devine: How so? Mr. Jekielek: That someone is coming and saying there’s going to be this Russian disinformation. Someone came to them and showed them information, said, “Yes, there’s going to be this Russian disinformation operation.” Ms. Devine: If there was a misdirection, it would’ve been internal to the FBI, because of what FBI whistleblowers have told us, who have also come forward to Senate Republicans and House Republicans and told their stories. What they’ve told us is that internally there was at least one analyst and one agent, who has now left, Timothy Thibault, who was telling other agents not to look at the Bobulinski material and put that information and perhaps other information into a black box where it couldn’t be accessed. They effectively buried it, and told other agents who might have investigated it that it was disinformation. I’m not sure exactly what happened with the laptop, because that was given to the FBI by John Paul Mac Isaac, the laptop repair shop owner, in December of 2019. He had a really difficult time with the FBI. At first, they wouldn’t accept it. His father was threatened when he went to the FBI telling them about it, saying that his son wanted to pass this information on, was concerned from a national security standpoint, and was concerned about the Ukraine material. His father felt that he was being threatened when he went to an FBI office. The person he spoke to said, “Well, effectively, your son shouldn’t have this information.” Whereas, his son had the laptop perfectly legally, because Hunter Biden had not paid his $85 bill, and had signed a receipt saying that if he didn’t pick it up in 90 days, it became the property of the laptop shop. So, that was a bit off-putting. And then, what was really off-putting for John Paul Mac Isaac is that, when two FBI agents finally came to his shop to pick up the laptop and a copy of the hard drive and left behind a subpoena for it, one of them turned and said to him, “In our experience, nothing happens to people who basically keep their mouths shut.” He wasn’t quite sure whether that was a warning, but he was discomforted by it. When he initially told me about it, I thought, “You’re a little bit paranoid.” And I understand why, there’s a lot of pressure on whistleblowers. In my experience, they do get a bit paranoid quite often. So, I dismissed his concerns. But now, two years later, as we’ve seen more and more information about the coverup, the internal misdirection from the FBI, the suppression of the laptop and the Bobulinski material, and what the whistleblowers have been telling us about really the politicization of the Washington Field Office, I’m now more inclined to believe John Paul Mac Isaac’s instinct, which was that he was being warned to keep his mouth shut. Mr. Jekielek: Are you still in touch with him? Ms. Devine: Yes, a lot. In fact, he’s just published a terrific book called American Injustice, and it’s his story of his involvement. He went from being a quietly successful small businessman in a nice part of Delaware, who had a five star reviews on Apple for his computer repair shop, to becoming a pariah in that area. As he said, and as he was told, the Bidens control Delaware. And so, he could no longer work there. He had to flee to Colorado, and shut up his shop. He hasn’t had a shop since then, and he’s been in financial doldrums. So, I do hope his book does well. Mr. Jekielek: You’re probably in touch with some of these other characters that are in the Laptop from Hell. Do they believe that this whole situation, especially this coverup, will be exposed? Do they think there will be some justice? Ms. Devine: There are varying opinions. If you talk to Tony Bobulinski, who really is a hero, along with John Paul Mac Isaac. He put himself out there before the election to tell the American people what he knew about Joe Biden’s involvement in this scheme. He’s a patriot, he’s a naval veteran, and he was concerned particularly about China and about what he saw as the potential for the President, Joe Biden, being compromised by China. He was very exercised by that. He had everything to lose. He’s a successful businessman with a young family. He didn’t want to become public. And since then he hasn’t been very public, being as little in the public eye as he can be. But he feels honor bound to make sure that the American people and the congressional investigators have all the information they need to at least expose China’s role in trying to influence the top echelons of American politics. Others of Hunter’s former business partners are adopting a wait and see attitude. They understand the power of the Bidens. He is president of the United States, and they are probably a little afraid of that. To a man they feel betrayed and let down. Their involvement with Hunter has been nothing but trouble for them. In one case, Devon Archer was Hunter Biden’s best friend in business. He’s now facing a jail term and an enormous loss of everything that he’s worked for; his houses, and his entire family wealth. He has a $40 million judgment against him. So, he’s on appeal at the moment. But for someone who was told by Hunter Biden that, “You are an honorary Biden, you’re part of the family, we’ll never let you down,” he’s been let down by the Biden family. Perhaps, not that I’ve been told this, but perhaps he felt that he could be pardoned by Joe Biden, but Hunter Biden refuses to take his calls. He’s just been cast adrift. That’s the way a lot of these people feel, that the Bidens will look after their own, but everyone else who was loyal to them and helped them make money is thrown to the wolves. Mr. Jekielek: What are you working on these days? Ms. Devine: I must say I’m very interested in the goings on in the FBI, particularly the politicization of the Washington Field Office. Every day there’s a new revelation there. I talk to various whistleblowers including one I can name because he came public, an agent called Steve Friend, who blew the whistle on really nefarious activities and abusive authority within the FBI, and some very questionable case practices when it came to the pursuit of January 6th people. He felt that this was really untoward, a violation of people’s constitutional rights, and he didn’t want to be involved in it. And so, he raised concerns with his superiors. From then on, he was punished. Now, he’s on suspension without pay and he’s gone public. He also was able to put me in touch with people and tell me a little about the politicization of the Washington Field Office, which was involved in the suppression of the Hunter Biden material. The Hunter Biden story has brought me into a wider story about the internal, what you have to call, corruption of the FBI politicization. That’s something I’m interested in. I’m also interested in Big Tech, and the power of Big Tech. Elon Musk is a never ending source of interest and news. Mr. Jekielek: After all of this, we have CBS admitting two years later, “Yes, we verified it, finally.” I think that’s maybe what the story was. There was that story with the 51 intelligence officials, including five leaders of the intelligence agencies who said it had all the hallmarks or earmarks of Russian disinformation. But the headlines didn’t say that. The headlines were a little more direct. I haven’t seen any retractions yet, have you? Ms. Devine: No. It’s just like with the Russia collusion stories that the New York Times and the Washington Post won Pulitzer Prizes for that turned out to be completely bogus, and they never retract or go back. There might be a bit of stealth editing, but they will never admit that they were wrong. There was some excuse before the election for media organizations to be a bit wary if they didn’t have the laptop, and hadn’t had the time that we had had, and the advanced notice of being able to do the due diligence on the material that we were publishing. But there was no excuse for the New York Times. The New York Times was the first out of the box. Then, they waited 19 months before they wrote a very minor admission that the laptop was real, and that the information was true. And that was buried in the 19th paragraph of a story, which really was just about rehearsing Hunter Biden’s defenses, in this case, in Delaware, where he’s being investigated by the U.S. attorney for alleged offenses, such as money laundering, and tax evasion, and FARA violations. From what we understand, he has paid back the IRS $2.8 million in back taxes that, by the way, was lent to him by an entertainment attorney he’s become friendly with called Kevin Morris in Los Angeles. But I just feel that it’s too little, too late. And in all of these stories, it’s more like they’re just covering themselves, because they know that at some point, Hunter is either going to be indicted or enter into a plea deal with the U.S. attorney in Delaware. And so, they will have to explain to their readers why they’ve been kept in the dark all this time. So, they did a limited hangout, just enough information about Hunter Biden’s troubles and his legal issues to say that they’ve covered the story. But there’s always a paragraph buried in each story that’s almost identical across the different media organizations, which absolves Joe Biden. It says, ” There’s no evidence that Joe Biden had anything to do with this.” And that’s so ridiculous, because there’s so much evidence. That’s what it’s all about. That’s what my book was all about, not about Hunter Biden and his travails. It was about Joe Biden and his influence in the family’s influence peddling scheme around the world when he was vice president, abusing his authority, and putting America’s national security at risk. Mr. Jekielek: We have this kind of tribalism or hyper-partisanship in the U.S., to the point where if you’re on the wrong team, even if you’re wrong, you’re still supported. I know we’ve talked about this before, and neither of us feel particularly partisan in what we’re doing, but a lot of people might say we are. What do you make of this whole phenomenon, and how do we deal with it as a country? Ms. Devine: It’s a function of a uniparty that has grown up in cozy Washington, and corruption is a big part of that. “You don’t rock the boat, I won’t rock the boat, we’ll all have a cozy little deals, we won’t tell on each other, and it’ll all be fine.” The only losers are the American people. On both sides, you have politicians who enter Congress without much money and leave multimillionaires, whether it be through insider trading, influence peddling, or whatever other little schemes they have going. The grift is very strong in Washington DC, and that leads to policy blurring between the parties. And into that scene, in 2016, stomped Donald Trump. And he wasn’t part of the swamp. For all his personal flaws, for all his clumsiness and mistakes in office, he really did expose that uniparty corruption, the deep state bureaucracy which operated regardless of which party was in power, and which operated to its own agenda. And that was not necessarily in America’s best interests, because it’s a globalist agenda. Americans who saw their standard of living and their culture being eroded over the years had become disillusioned with the establishment Republican party. That was why they went for a barbarian, Donald Trump, who was going to go in there and break it all up. That just reflected a real failing on the part of the Republican Party and should have been a wake up call to them. I’m not sure if it has been, but that’s the polarization. It’s not just a polarization between Democrats and Republicans, it’s between the globalist elites and regular middle class or formerly middle class Americans who feel that their country is being sold out from under them and feel really desperate and angry about it. The polarization comes from their anger, their mistrust of the institutions and the elites’ condescension, and patronizing attitude towards them. When Hillary Clinton talked about deplorables, she wasn’t just reflecting a Democrat sensibility, she was reflecting the sensibility of the bipartisan bicoastal elites. Mr. Jekielek: Best case scenario, in coming years, what would you like to see happen to try to shift this reality? Ms. Devine: Two things have to happen. One is that Washington has to clean up the corruption as much as possible. It’s an incredibly corrupt town. I’m shocked at the corruption. I hope that the Republicans are resolute and have integrity and do pursue this investigation of Joe Biden. Because even if it doesn’t result in any criminal charges, and I certainly don’t expect that that would happen, at least it would expose, and let’s hope create some safeguards against this kind of influence peddling operation continuing in Washington, and protecting Americans from the malign influence of our greatest adversary, China. That’s one thing, cleaning up Washington. Secondly, I would hope that the one benefit of the Trump reign was that it really opened people’s eyes up to the detrimental influence of the bipartisan elite, malign, globalist elite in America. Trump was the titular leader of the populist nationalist movement, but that existed before him, and it will continue after him. I would hope that there would be a Republican leader who will carry that movement forward, but in a much less polarizing way, in a much clever way, not allowing himself to be taken down and destroyed in the way that Trump naively did. His administration was really crippled from the beginning by the FBI spying on him and intervening and attacking the various people in his orbit. I’m not choosing anyone who it might be, but I think that there will be younger Republican leaders that come up in that vein who will learn from the lessons of Trump and be able to lead the country and possibly unite the country. Joe Biden’s election was mainly driven by a desire by the great swath of Americans in the middle who just wanted to be unified again, and to have peace and calm and tranquility. America is a very sociable and good natured country. Joe Biden promised to be a unifying president. Unfortunately, he’s been the opposite. He’s been a very divisive and malignant force, demonizing Republicans, demonizing the opposition by talking about semi-fascists and ultra-MAGA, locking up his political opponents, sicking the DOJ onto parents at school board meetings or any kind of dissenters, politicizing the FBI and the DOJ, and weaponizing social media against his political adversaries. That has been really destructive. I do believe that Americans have within them the ability to turn back that hatred and polarization and unite around a real statesman or stateswoman, who can perhaps move forward and unify the country. Mr. Jekielek: What’s to prevent the megaphone from deciding that the next Republican leader is evil and basically intensifying the polarization that we see today. Ms. Devine: You’re spot on, because you can see it already with the demonization of Ron DeSantis, the governor of Florida, who is spoken about as the presumptive heir to Trump. He is much smarter than Trump, though, and he’s learned from Trump. He punches back just as hard, but he also is on top of the details. From that point of view, he won’t allow the narrative to catch on and catch him out and damage him as much. Also during the Trump era, a lot of people became disillusioned with the media. Trust in the media has plummeted to an all-time low, so there is less influence there, also including social media. I hate to put a lot of faith in Elon Musk. He’s a mere mortal. He’s a billionaire with lots of his own personal foibles and agendas. Mr. Jekielek: And exposure to China. Ms. Devine: And exposure to China, absolutely, with Tesla. Yes. So, he’s certainly not the Messiah, but at least he’s given us an idea of what freedom of speech in social media can do. It allows the truth to be told. It allows real-time fact-checking of lies and these dishonest narratives that are unfortunately created and propagated by the establishment elite media; the New York Times, the Washington Post, CBS, and NBC. It’s disgraceful. And it’s also in conjunction and collusion with the security apparatus. That’s what we saw with the Russia collusion hoax that was seeded by deep state intelligence officials. It’s frightening that the media just gullibly swallowed that without doing any of their own checking. It was all a lie. The Steele dossier was a lie, and they won Pulitzer surprises for it. The faith in that is plummeting. If the Republicans can get hold of social media and break up its power and somehow prevent one side of politics from being able to control it, then that could be good. But it depends on the Republican Party getting its act together. And I think that’s a very big if at the moment. Mr. Jekielek: Miranda Devine, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Ms. Devine: Thank you, Jan. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Miranda Devine 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

“Once I had spent time critically analyzing the data on the COVID-19 vaccines, it became very clear to me that the efficacy of this particular novel technology … was very, very poor, certainly in comparison to traditional vaccines. And the harms were unprecedented,” says Dr. Aseem Malhotra, a highly-published cardiologist and one of the most well-known doctors in Britain. He was an outspoken proponent of the COVID-19 genetic vaccines until July 2021, when the tragic and sudden death of his 73-year-old father caused him to take a deeper look into the data. “We know now that the original trials—the gold standard randomized control trials—that led to the approval by the regulators of the vaccine in the first place revealed you were more likely to suffer a serious adverse event from the vaccine than you were to be hospitalized with COVID,” says Malhotra. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/dr-aseem-malhotra-from-vaccine-pusher-to-vaccine-debunker-how-i-changed-my-mind-about-the-covid-19-jab_4915606.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Dr. Aseem Malhotra, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Dr. Aseem Malhotra: Jan, it’s a pleasure to be here. Mr. Jekielek: It’s been a couple of months since we interviewed right after you had basically come out with this groundbreaking paper looking at COVID-19 misinformation. And I’ve learned a lot over the last few months by speaking with you. But you weren’t always someone who was committed to exposing COVID-19 misinformation, or perhaps you were committed, but in a very different way. Please tell me about that. Dr. Malhotra: Yes, Jan. What I would say is I come back to the basics of being a good doctor to understand where I went with the Covid situation. Throughout my whole career, I want to improve my patient outcomes, which means I have to be the best possible doctor I can be. But essential or crucial to doing that is to use the best available evidence on any intervention to make a clinical decision, and to incorporate individual patient preferences and values. In other words, informed consent. To do that properly, one needs to be able to give patients information in a way they can understand in terms of benefits and harms of anything that you do, whether it’s a prescription of a drug or even whether it’s adopting a particular diet or a lifestyle. That’s my background in terms of what I am a very strong advocate for. We call it ethical evidence-based medical practice. It should be the default and the norm for most doctors, but because of system failures, it is not. That’s something we can discuss in more detail. Once I had spent time critically analyzing the data on the COVID-19 vaccines, it became very clear to me that the efficacy of this particular novel technology, the mRNA products, was very, very poor, certainly in comparison to traditional vaccines. And the harms were unprecedented. I was able in my paper to break that down in ways that people could understand in terms of benefit and harm. The conclusions were quite clear that it needed to be withdrawn, completely suspended for everybody, young, old, vulnerable, non-vulnerable, until an inquiry was launched to understand properly why we got it wrong, how we got it wrong and what we need to do moving forward, which I also elaborated on in my piece. Mr. Jekielek: You’re an incredibly well cited doctor in the scientific literature. That’s one thing I’ve learned. You’ve written, you’ve published a lot and people have used what you’ve published a lot. When it came to the COVID-19 vaccination approach, at the beginning, at least you seem to approach it non-critically. I want to dig into that a little bit, because you had a transformation. Why is it, do you think, given your general open mindedness, at the beginning you didn’t have that open mind, but instead you gained it along the way? Dr. Malhotra: To elaborate more on your question, I was one of the early adopters of the vaccine, the COVID-19 vaccine, the Pfizer vaccine in particular. I had two doses of that at the beginning of 2021, because I helped out at a vaccine center. Then, I went on Good Morning Britain about a month later to try and help tackle vaccine hesitancy. But it was based upon the information I had at the time, which was this—traditional vaccines are some of the safest pharmacological interventions in the history of medicine. My arm is covered scars from vaccines that I’ve had. So, I could not conceive of the possibility of any significant harm with the information that was available at the time. But the evidence changed, and this is crucial, certainly in medicine, and I’ve seen this throughout my career. I am somebody that will talk about it, going from being a big prescriber of statin drugs to then understanding the data better and realizing statins weren’t so great. As the evidence changed, I then had to change my view and my opinion. Does that mean if I go back in time, would I have done exactly the same thing again, given the information I had then? Yes, I would. I have no regrets taking the Pfizer vaccine and even promoting it with the information I had available at the time. That’s really important to understand. Now, of course, there were people who were hesitant at the beginning and a lot of those people, I remember having discussions with them, were going more on their intuition rather than any good evidence. “Okay, it’s new. We’re not quite sure, we’re low risk.” My situation was a little bit different to many people because I’m a practicing doctor. So for me, taking the vaccine was never for protecting myself. It was only under clearly at that time a false belief, that I was going to protect my patients. That’s where we were at the time. Things obviously changed massively as the information came in about the harms of the vaccine, and a personal circumstance with my dad dying unexpectedly. Mr. Jekielek: Tell me more about that please. Dr. Malhotra: Yes. My father, on July the 26th, 2021, 5:00 PM, I remember it very clearly, called me and said he had chest discomfort, chest pain. I’m a cardiologist first and foremost. What he was describing, the history sounded typical of something that sounded like it’s likely to be coming from the heart—angina, a symptom representative of reduction of blood supply in one of the arteries of the heart or one or more of the arteries of the heart muscle. I asked him to call an ambulance. He wasn’t in a lot of distress, so I didn’t think it sounded like a full blown heart attack, but it needed investigating. Long story short, he called some neighbors over who were doctors. I went in the shower to change, because I live in London. He’s in Manchester about 200 miles away, so I get on a train to come up and see him. In that time he had a cardiac arrest. The ambulance didn’t turn up for 30 minutes and he tragically died. It was extremely shocking for everybody that knew him, because my dad was super fit and healthy. He was 73, and he walked 10,000 steps during lockdown. I knew his cardiac history. He’s one of the healthiest guys in his community for his age. It didn’t make sense what happened. Then, the post-mortem findings revealed two very severe narrowing in his corona arteries. Out of the three major arteries, two were severely narrowed. That was the first flashpoint, on reflection, that made me realize that my father likely was a victim of the mRNA vaccines, as in a side effect. That’s what killed him. I didn’t know that at the time, even with the postmortem findings. It was only a few months later when bits of data started to emerge that clearly showed that the mRNA vaccines increase coronary inflammation. In other words, they accelerate one of the mechanisms of harm, not the only one. But one of them is that it most likely causes acceleration of coronary artery disease. You may have a bit of mild narrowing. It’s not going to cause you a problem for 10, 20 years, but suddenly it becomes severe, and you have a heart attack in a year. That’s what we’re talking about. Mr. Jekielek: I want to jump back a bit. One of the things that struck me was this revelation that there was no actual data that Pfizer specifically had about reducing transmission. This was just a mantra that was repeated again and again by people who either thought they knew, or perhaps they did it cynically. I don’t know. But you mentioned you were looking at the beginning at the available data and you mentioned that you got the vaccine, because you believed it would prevent transmission of the disease to your patients potentially. But as we’ve learned, there was actually no data on this. How is it that you came to believe that? Dr. Malhotra: Yes, I’m glad you’ve asked that question. It’s a great question. This discussion has been slightly distorted recently about they didn’t test for transmission. There is an indirect effect of it affecting transmission potentially. If it prevents infection, then you’re not going to transmit it. That was the mechanism that was most likely thought to be the case. The problem arose, because very quickly within a few months we knew it wasn’t really preventing infection either. Now it could be either one of two reasons. The original data, which suggested that one in 119 people in the rundown mass control trial was prevented from getting infected. One in 119, which is a lot less than what people were led to believe in terms of the absolute reduction of risk of infection. Either that was false, and it wasn’t even 119, and it was just not there. Or an equally, maybe more plausible explanation is the original vaccine that was created was designed to do something not brilliant, but something against the original ancestral strain of the virus, which mutated quite quickly within a few months of the administration to people and populations. Therefore, what we were then dealing with a few months later was a new strain of the virus, which was never going to give you any protection from the vaccine from infection anyway. There’s a number of possibilities. But either way, people weren’t told the information in a truthful way at the time, and it did not evolve with time. You end up getting this whole perception of extreme benefit, no evidence of any significant harms, and it’s going to prevent transmission. You must take it to protect others. Jan, probably even when the evidence was available to the FDA, and to the MHRA in the UK, Pfizer knew that it was never going to have any significant effect on preventing transmission anyway. And that’s the lie that was perpetuated. The evidence to overcome that was available well before they started to slowly phase out mandates. Mr. Jekielek: One of the things that came out reading Dr. Joseph Ladapo’s recently published book is that the way that budding doctors in medical school are taught about vaccines is something in the realm of what you said earlier. They’re a panacea. They are the safest thing ever. They work, and the harms are negligible. For some reason, this particular drug is treated very, very differently and put on a pedestal compared to everything else, because of the history and the education that all of them went through. I thought that was really fascinating. I wonder if you think that, because remember there’s still a lot of doctors out there that believe the story that you no longer believe. Dr. Malhotra: Yes, absolutely. There’s an indoctrination, based upon legitimate reasons, that traditional vaccines are very effective, and are estimated to save four to five million lives a year globally. Therefore, anything with the name vaccine attached to it is something pure and good and should never be questioned. You’re absolutely right. But unfortunately, and we’ve seen in this particular instance, nothing could be further from the truth. We’re talking about one of the most poorly efficacious pharmacological interventions in the history of medicine with the worst side effect profile, but also being the most lucrative and profitable. When you try and join those dots together, the picture that it paints is extremely ugly. It’s a real indictment of our whole healthcare system. Mr. Jekielek: You did a very comprehensive review of risk-benefit, which somehow we completely forgot about and the whole medical system forgot about at the beginning of the pandemic. Why don’t you just lay it out for me quickly. Dr. Malhotra: Yes. When you look at the absolute benefits of the Covid vaccine and looking at what good it’s doing for people, the only real evidence we have around that is on preventing people dying from covid or hospitalizations. I was able to look at that real world data in the UK, which you could probably apply to many other parts of the world, looking at vaccinated versus unvaccinated in Covid deaths during a wave to see what benefit the vaccine was having in preventing Covid death. During the Delta wave, and by the way, this information is not corrected for what we call confounding factors. What that means is the information I’m about to tell you is still likely an exaggeration. Because if you look at people in the real world over 80 that took the vaccine versus the ones that didn’t, the ones that didn’t tended to be more vulnerable or less healthy, which meant they were already more predisposed to having a poor outcome from Covid. But if you don’t correct for those factors, and just look at the age during the Delta wave, you had to vaccinate 230 people over the age of 80 to prevent one covid death. If you’re between 70 and 80, it’s 520 people. If you’re under 70, you’re starting having to vaccinate thousands of people to prevent one covid death. What does that mean? In a consultation in keeping with the principles of ethical evidence-based medical practice and informed consent, if you had come to me and you’re in your 50s and you say, “Dr. Malhotra, tell me, I’m not sure about whether to take this drug or this vaccine.” I wouldn’t be black and white. I would say, “Okay, the data tells us that the benefit for you taking it and preventing you dying from Covid is one in 2000.” You’d say, “What are the harms?” “Based upon the best quality evidence, Pfizer and Moderna’s own randomized control trial data, the risk of a serious adverse event from the vaccine, meaning disability or life-changing hospitalization, is at least one in 800.” Now Jan, if I gave you that information in that way, is that something you’re going to be very keen to take, that vaccine? Mr. Jekielek: You know the answer, absolutely not. Dr. Malhotra: Absolutely, yes. This information was never conveyed to the public, even though we have that information now. That’s what I attempted to do with the paper is to actually break it down for people—not saying the vaccines don’t work or the vaccines are great, but what is the actual benefit of the vaccine and what are the known harms based upon the best quality data? Not speculation. And it became a no-brainer for me. The conclusion ultimately is that when you also look at Omicron, and you bring the more recent, the less lethal strain of Covid for the over eight-year-olds, you need to vaccinate 7,300 people to prevent one Covid death. The harm of the vaccine remains constant, but the risk of Covid goes down. So, it’s very clear, unequivocal. In normal circumstances, Jan, we wouldn’t even be debating this, and the vaccine would have been pulled a long time ago. It probably should never have been approved in the first place, because we know now that the original trials, the gold standard randomized control trials that led to the approval by the regulators of the vaccine in the first place revealed you were more like to suffer a serious adverse event from the vaccine, than you were to be hospitalized with Covid. It’s extraordinary. How does one explain this? One has to first and foremost understand the various interests involved in influencing information that doctors, patients, members of the public receive on a daily basis when it comes to their health. In this case, let’s look at the pharmaceutical industry. They have a legal responsibility to produce profit for their shareholders. They do not have any legal requirement whatsoever to give you the best treatment, although most people would think that to be the case. The real scandal is that regulators such as the FDA fail to prevent misconduct by industry. I’m going to come back to that in a second. Doctors, academic institutions and medical journals collude with industry for financial gain. Most of the top 10 drug companies have committed major fraud, hiding data on harms, illegally marketing drugs, totaling at least $13 to $14 billion between 2009 and 2014, mostly in the United States. But when all of those crimes, let’s just call them out for what they are, when those crimes were committed by these companies, they still end up making more profit from the marketing and sales of those drugs, than they did when you minus out the fines that they had to pay. Nobody got fired, no one went to prison. You’re talking about damage and harm up to tens of thousands of deaths. One of the most egregious examples is the Vioxx scandal. Drug company Merck launched a drug in 1999 which was supposed to be better than ibuprofen as an anti-inflammatory, because it was marketed as being less of an issue to the stomach, less likely to cause stomach problems or stomach ulcers, for example. It later emerged that it doubled the risk of heart attacks, and it probably caused the death of around 60,000 Americans from heart attacks. But it wasn’t a mistake. It emerged later on during the litigation process that the chief scientist of Merck knew this not long after the drug was rolled out in an internal email. “It’s a shame about the cardiovascular effect of this drug, but we will do well and the drug will do well.” I now present that information at conferences, I put it up and there are gasps from the audience. I ask people, “How do you explain that?” And there are all sorts of shouts from the audience, “Criminal,” that kind of thing. Yes, you can call it criminal if you like. My hypothesis is something different based upon evidence is that the legal entity that is the big corporation, these multinational corporations, in this instance Big Pharma, very often because they puts the financial need ahead of the human need, it will deceive others for profit. We have a word for that. It’s called fraud. They actually function like a psychopathic entity. This isn’t my definition. This is the definition from Dr. Robert Hare, forensic psychologist, preeminent expert in his field on the original international psychiatric definition of a psychopath. It says that these companies often behave like that; conning others for profit, being unconcerned for the safety of others, and having the inability to experience guilt. These are all the different criteria that one applies to the definition of a psychopath. If one understands that over the last 20 or 30 years, probably rooted in well-intentioned, but misguided neoliberal economic policies started by Margaret Thatcher in the UK and Ronald Reagan here, you’ve had increasingly unchecked power from these sorts of entities over our lives. Most of the funding for the regulator in this country comes from the pharmaceutical industry. Universities are supposed to be guardians of the truth and represent the moral conscience of society. Most of university research, medical research now comes funding from the drug industry. If you just think conceptually about an entity controlling our lives, that has more and more control over our lives, and that over a period of time functions like a psychopath. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out what impact that’s going to have on society’s mental and physical health and how it’s going to undermine democracy, because they deliberately suppress information that people want to know about for those purposes. Therefore, we’ve got anti-democratic institutions that are really controlling or influencing our lives. The reason we’ve not combated it, Jan, is because most doctors and the public are not aware of this problem. They don’t even know that they don’t know. Mr. Jekielek: How can one expect doctors, medical practitioners or society at large, who tends to more often than not trust the system, to open their minds on this sort of thing? Even for you, it was difficult with all your knowledge and all your work. Dr. Malhotra: What we are dealing with now, the psychological phenomenon to get this information into the minds of most members of the public and doctors and policy makers with the cold hard facts is understanding that there is going to be two elements and barriers to that process. Part of being a good doctor is being a good communicator and being a good communicator is being able to give information to different patients in ways that they can understand. We have to challenge ourselves to make sure that when we have conversations with people, we are doing our very utmost in that communication to be able to get through to them, whoever they are. That’s something that we need to keep doing, as opposed to just polarizing the whole discussion and saying, “I’m right. You are wrong. This guy’s an idiot.” This is not very productive. In fact, that’s actually how this has played out in America. I’ve noticed this debate in the last year-and-a-half. It’s been very polarized. It’s become politicized. There are different camps. Those camps need to start talking to each other. But before we communicate or try and get through to somebody with a different perspective than us who’s not aware of what we know, is thinking about two psychological phenomenons. One is the background of fear. Fear clouds critical thinking. Most of us to some degree are still afflicted with this PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder, from the beginning of the pandemic where this novel virus, and these pictures coming from Wuhan, and of intensive care units in Italy with people dying, scared people beyond their imagination. What that means is then your ability to engage in critical thinking to try and understand things is definitely impaired. Then the other aspect is this phenomenon called willful blindness. We see this in historical events, and I’ll give you a few examples in a second. We’re all capable of this in different circumstances, and we probably already have done this in our lives in different circumstances. This can apply to individuals and families or spouses turning a blind eye to the fact their partners are cheating on them; to institutions, whether it’s the likes of what happened in Hollywood with Harvey Weinstein or with Jeffrey Epstein; or even to countries like what happened in Nazi Germany. This is when people turn a blind eye to the truth in order to feel safe, avoid conflict, reduce anxiety and protect prestige. Changing one’s mind is one of the most psychologically terrifying experiences anyone can go through. To quote the Canadian American economist, John Kenneth Galbraith, “Faced with changing one’s mind, and proving there’s no reason to do so, almost everybody gets busy on the proof.” This is what we’re up against, but it doesn’t mean it’s a barrier that we can’t overcome by persistence, by empathy, and by stating the cold hard facts. When I came out with this paper, I also wanted to create a safe space for doctors who are still in a situation that I was in when I took the vaccine and in effect promoted it or reassured people. It’s okay to change your mind, it’s okay to say the information has changed, and it’s okay to talk about it. That’s the challenge we have right now, Jan, to be honest. A cousin of mine pointed this out in the states a year ago. He said, “If people really knew what happened, that their uncle or their kid died unnecessarily from a vaccine that should never have been approved, you can see how that can go very, very badly wrong in terms of people getting violent.” It would be understandable for people to have those emotions, but that is not going to take us further forward as society, and we have to all say, “Okay, this happened. It was a mistake.” These were the structures in place that have been building up for years that we all have not collectively addressed properly, that allowed this to happen. The only way we’re going to overcome it and move forward constructively is if we all work together and go back to the very basics about honesty and transparency. What about basic human values that we seem to have forgotten around the sense of the importance of speaking the truth? Mr. Jekielek: There’s another complicating factor, though. This is around the work that Laura Dodsworth has done in the UK exposing the so-called nudge units in the UK government that actively tried to make people more afraid to elicit behavioral responses, i.e. vaccine uptake. And then, there were similar such operations with other governments that aren’t nearly as exposed. What we do know is that there was a lot of government and industry and Big Tech collaboration, especially in the media around these censorship regimes. They also they spent $1 billion in advertising in the U.S. promoting vaccine uptake. One of the biggest lessons for me in the last few years is that some portion of society is profoundly influenced by this seeming consensus across these large megaphones in society. To me that explains why the level of fear was so high. Dr. Malhotra: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: But it almost seems like that same system can spring into motion again. Dr. Malhotra: Absolutely. I’m a numbers person and again, I like to empower my patients and make them more health-literate, which means giving them information that allows them to think about how they can live the best possible life they can live mentally and physically. One way of doing that is to help people understand the numbers. For example, around the fear that was imposed by Covid, it was very interesting. One Gallup poll revealed that 50 per cent of American voters thought that their risk of being hospitalized with Covid was 50 per cent, one in two, when it actually was far less than 1 per cent. It’s extraordinary to think about how that influenced their behavior. Whereas, if we had reassured people and said, “Listen, your risk is so and so, then psychologically they would’ve been less fearful, and in a better state mentally as well. Without understanding the numbers involved, the public is vulnerable to exploitation of their hopes and anxieties by political and commercial interests. There absolutely was an exploitation of the population through this fear narrative that was completely and totally unnecessary. But I think some of it, Jan wasn’t malicious as well. I think it was incompetence. I have been in touch with two people who are quite senior in terms of their access to information at government level and know what’s going on in China. One of them is Chinese, I won’t name her, but she’s a Chinese broadcast journalist. Another one is a friend who has very close ties to the Chinese Communist Party. One of the interesting things I discovered is that, and this is something we saw reflected in the British government, in health policy makers and I’m sure in the states as well, is that they also had an exaggerated fear themselves of what Covid was going to do. Up until recently, we have seen Omicron, which we now know is no more worse than a bad cold. We see pictures a few months ago from China of police officers or security personnel wearing hazmat suits in a military style operation controlling the population. And I said to this journalist, “What’s going on here? This is Omnicron. What are they doing? Whose response was this?” He said, “Aseem, you’ve got to understand most of the Chinese populations still think Covid is like Ebola, touch it and you will die.” When you look at the pandemic response in terms of lockdowns, the WHO already had a contingency plan that if such a virus was to affect the world, are lockdowns a way forward, is this the right way to go? And the answer was no. It was no. They changed their mind because of China. China convinced the world that strict, stringent lockdowns in Wuhan contained the virus when it never did that. It spread throughout the whole of China. So, there were mistakes that were made. I don’t think they were malicious. I think they were rooted in incompetence, and then it was exploited by those commercial interests. Then, you create this situation where ultimately what seems to have happened during the pandemic, certainly from a financial point of view, is you have an elite rich who have gotten richer, whether it’s the likes of Bill Gates or Mark Zuckerberg who’ve added billions to their fortunes, while the rest of the public actually has suffered in a way that is just unprecedented in terms of their mental and physical health. That in itself really needs to be scrutinized properly to try and understand what we did wrong and what we need to do to change systems so this never happens again. Mr. Jekielek: It’s obvious that the CCP is a psychopathic entity, but I’d never quite thought of it in the context that you described. Dr. Malhotra: The solution to that from a conceptual point of view is, “What’s the opposite of psychopathy?” It’s compassion and altruism. The problem we’ve got and social media makes us worse as well, is that people are increasingly losing access to the truth and a capacity to act in an empathetic way. And that combination together is devastating for society. Guess who Facebook partnered with early on in the pandemic to decide and control vaccine misinformation on their platform? Merck. Merck and Facebook, you can look this up. They committed $20 million each to control vaccine misinformation. Merck, all right? It’s beggar belief. A year ago when I went on GB News after my dad’s death, there were bits of data that came together that suggested the vaccine was causing coronary events. I went on GB News and I posted it on LinkedIn. I’ve been on LinkedIn for a while. Without any appeal I was removed. I’m permanently banned from LinkedIn now, so I thought this was interesting. I went and looked it up, LinkedIn is owned by Microsoft and Bill Gates. Say no more. Mr. Jekielek: What is the connection? Dr. Malhotra: First of all, during the pandemic, we didn’t talk enough about obesity, and that didn’t get enough of an airing. It didn’t get enough of an airing in terms of giving people actual tools through their diet of how they can rapidly reduce their risk of having poor outcomes from Covid within weeks. Right. Very powerful. Who’s controlling the narrative or who’s influencing the narrative? Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is heavily invested in stocks in McDonalds, Coca-Cola and the pharmaceutical industry. Bill Gates was not interested in discussing anything about chronic disease management through lifestyle. He certainly has been a big proponent of the vaccine and mandating vaccines and influencing the WHO and funding media organizations to ultimately suppress information that the public need to know about when it comes to the vaccines. Now, I don’t know Bill Gates, I’ve never met him. If I was to give him the benefit of the doubt, I think that he’s very misguided probably in his understanding of medicine. It’s not engineering, it’s not an exact science, and I’m pretty sure he doesn’t have a basic understanding of this particular technology and the harm that it’s done. If he does and he’s still promoting or perpetuating this misinformation around it, then obviously that doesn’t reflect very well on him as a human being. Mr. Jekielek: Briefly, please tell me about exactly what you mean by lifestyle choices leading to better outcomes? I’ll just mention one that I became aware of and I was just kind of shocked. It’s obvious once you think about it. It’s just simply like that people that had decent vitamin D levels, irrespective of the level intrinsic risk based on that age gradient, had much better outcomes. Dr. Malhotra: Yes, absolutely. Mr. Jekielek: Orders of magnitude greater outcomes, if you had just popped your vitamin D. It feels to me like it’s kind of criminal that we didn’t know that. Dr. Malhotra: Completely criminal. I wrote papers on it, I published in newspapers, I was on TV, and I wrote a book about it. I advised the head secretary for health, because I was the guy in the UK that came out and said, “Boris Johnson likely got sick and got hospitalized with Covid because of his weight,” once he was out, of course. So, this is something I know very, very well. But coming back to the lifestyle, I’m glad you’ve asked that question, Jan, because it probably brings us onto the statin discussion as well. As a researcher and a cardiologist, my primary interest was always in combating heart disease. Why have we not managed to eradicate heart disease, despite all the so-called amazing scientific evidence we have in terms of what we should be doing? It’s still the biggest killer in the western world. A lot of my root cause analysis was to look back at the theories around cholesterol and the use of statin drugs, then break all of that down. I published so much on that over the years, so I know a lot about this area. 80 per cent of heart disease, about 80 per cent is influenced by lifestyle, but more importantly it is environment that encourages certain behaviors. Maybe up to 20 per cent is going to be because of genetics, but you can have a massive impact on heart disease purely from a lifestyle approach, both in prevention and even potential reversal. What does that mean? The root pathophysiological underlying factor behind heart disease is something called insulin resistance and chronic inflammation, and they overlap. Insulin resistance basically means your body becomes resistant to the hormone insulin over time, to the effects of the hormone insulin. That in itself is the number one driving factor behind heart disease, and it’s responsible for about half people developing high blood pressure, and it is a precursor to type 2 diabetes. These are really the biggest conditions around the world, and also linked to cancer and dementia. If we combat insulin resistance, genuinely combat it, we would probably reverse heart disease. We would reverse the obesity epidemic, we would reduce cancers, and we would reduce dementia. That’s significantly clear. So, the question is how can you do it and what do we do about it? Through my individual work with patients and the data that’s available, the good news, and I’ll come onto to that, Jan, is your markers related to resistance in your blood or the risk factors associated with it can be improved or reversed within just four weeks of changing lifestyle. Four weeks. What does that mean? The most important of those lifestyle factors is diet. The big problem, as you know with obesity in UK and the U.S., and when I looked into the whole understanding and the misguided approach to heart disease, certainly since the 1970s, has been this over obsession with focusing on lowering cholesterol. In fact, one of the former editors of the American Journal of Cardiology, William Roberts, in 2011 wrote, which I countered in my book A Statin Free Life, he wrote, “It’s the cholesterol, stupid.” In that paper, he says, “You can be an obese, smoking, type 2 diabetic, sedentary, and as long as your cholesterol is low enough, you will never develop heart disease.” Nothing could be further from truth. It’s absolute nonsense. There has been this focus in cardiology that the main way of combating heart disease is to lower cholesterol through diet and drugs. So, I broke down all of that data and basically showed through peer-reviewed research in high-impact journals with other cardiologists that first of all, there is no relationship at all or very little relationship between lowering LDL, so-called bad cholesterol, and reducing heart attacks and strokes. Statins are probably one of the most prescribed drugs in the history of the world, and the most lucrative. It’s a $3 trillion industry prescribed to 1 billion people globally. The overwhelming majority of those people prescribed that statin drug will not be told or be aware that it’s not going to prolong their life by one day, based upon industry-sponsored research. And a best case scenario for them is preventing a non-fatal heart attack or stroke, one in 101 per cent. And a link to that has been this low fat food approach exploited by the food industry. It was flawed science at the beginning; lower the fat, lower cholesterol, then prevent heart disease. We increased our consumption of refined carbohydrates and sugar and low-fat marketed foods, which are going to have the opposite effect on your health, because they’re full of sugar and refined carbs, which exacerbates insulin resistance. It’s a mess. So, I spent a lot of time before on all of this. This is what I’ve worked on for many, many years, trying to shift that paradigm to the things that you should be focusing on which is eating real food, and minimizing consumption of low quality carbohydrates; your breads, your pastas, and your rice. Moderate exercise. You don’t have to overdo it, a brisk walk 30 minutes a day. Pretty powerful. And last but not least, and one that’s probably the most neglected, but the most challenging in modern society is chronic psychological stress. If you look now at chronic psychological stress as a risk factor for development of heart disease, it is equivalent to having either high blood pressure or type 2 diabetes or being a smoker. The chronic psychological stress works as an adverse effect synergistically with all the other factors, because if you’re more stressed, you’re more like to hit the junk food and be more sedentary. It is just a vicious cycle. The most fascinating bit of research that I discovered, which I then implement with my patients when I advise them is that heart disease reversal, which is unheard of still in most cardiology circles, means the narrowing of the arteries. Okay, actually having those narrowings reverse. The only good data we have, it’s not the highest quality level of evidence, but it’s still interesting, is from India, which showed that in patients who had moderate to severe coronary artery disease who went underwent a healthy lifestyle program, the only intervention by far that was likely responsible for reversing heart disease was doing 40 minutes of meditation a day. Listen, modern medicine has done a lot of great things, not as much as what most people are led to believe. If you look at increase in life expectancy in the last 150 years, we’ve added 40 years to our life expectancy since 1850 to now on average. You can attribute about three-and-a-half to five of those 40 years to modern medicine. Most of it has happened through public health interventions, safe drinking, seat belts in cars, and smoke-free buildings. The single biggest intervention on reducing death rates from heart attacks in the last three, four decades is from reduction in smoking. Taxing cigarettes was the single most important intervention in the last several decades in reducing death rates from heart disease. Now, where am I going with this? It links back to our discussion about Covid and the vaccines and the drug industry. We need to improve people’s mental and physical health, which is something that most people want. If you ask people in international surveys what’s most important to them, they say that the most important thing is their health, followed by a happy family life. Health is still the most important issue for people. If we’re going to improve people’s health, it’s not going to happen without changes in the law. On a population level, it’s going to be very difficult, because we currently have laws that allow industries to in effect kill for profit. When it comes to even the foods that we eat, it’s just like what tobacco did. With the food industry, there’s increasing evidence that the food industry is deliberately putting ingredients together in certain packaged foods that most of the American population are taking on a regular basis that are designed to encourage overconsumption, and that is addictive. We know that the sugar industry suppressed information on the harms of sugar for a very long time, just like tobacco did with their cigarettes. It’s the same problems again and again and again. We need to address the root cause of the problem, which is the legal entity that is the corporation, and that really is the major problem. Corporate power, addressing corporate power needs to be a public health priority. It’s just that we’ve normalized certain aspects of our lifestyle that has stopped people really thinking about this in a way that’s going to help them. Ultra-processed food is now more than 50 per cent of the calories in the British diet, probably close to 60 per cent of the calories consumed in the American diet. Ultra-processed food is essentially high-glycemic index carbohydrates that increase glucose in insulin, which are responsible for driving heart disease, but also are another major risk factor, after age, for Covid outcomes being bad. Mr. Jekielek: Obesity, right? Dr. Malhotra: It’s beyond obesity. Obesity is actually a marker of a much bigger problem. I was taught it is the tip of the iceberg in terms of diet-related disease. Poor diet is responsible for more disease and death globally than physical inactivity, smoking, and alcohol combined. In terms of a lifestyle aspect, the most important thing you can do first and foremost is change your diet. Just from changing a diet alone, within four weeks, you can reverse these risk factors. What’s the problem with the diet? Ultra-processed foods. In very simple terms, if it comes out of a packet, any packaged food, and it has five or more ingredients, and it’s ultra-processed, don’t eat it. If you go to the supermarket, the shopping mall, and you pick up a loaf of bread and you can count five or more ingredients, it’s ultra-processed. Don’t eat it. It’s toxic to your body. It’s going to encourage over consumption, and it’s not nutritious. That’s it. Just eliminate those and the low quality carbs and drinks, the sugary drinks, juices, that kind of stuff. I asked my patients, and they say, “Hold on. We’re used to all this stuff, blah, blah, blah. I’m going to be miserable.” “No, just do it for a month. Can you do it for a month for me?” And people are staggered when they come back, not just in terms of their health markers getting better, they also feel better. I believe in the best of what life has to offer in terms of quality of life. If you are trying to help a patient, but you’re not going to improve the quality of their life, there’s no point from my perspective, and it’s not going to be sustainable. It’s a win-win when I’m improving their heart disease risk factors. They come back and they say, “Listen, doc, I’m sleeping better. I’ve got more energy. I feel better. I can carry on doing this.” That’s what I would advise people to do. The challenge we have, Jan, is even though we tell people to do this, if the food environment is working against us, people are going to relapse. This is predominantly an environmental problem. Yes, empower patients, which is what I do. But we’re not going to achieve very much on our population level until we actually get governments working for the health of the people, not working for the health of those very industries that are getting you hooked and addicted to sugar and ultra-processed foods. Mr. Jekielek: You’re on the second point that I wanted to touch on, which is what some people describe as regulatory capture by industry. And there are other ways of describing this public-private partnership. Dr. Malhotra: Yes. As a qualified doctor for over 20 years, my primary responsibility is to seek the truth, and to help my patients to look at evidence. Markets in healthcare do not work for the interests of the patient. Let’s give you the example of the United States. You have some of the highest spending in the world on healthcare, $3.5 trillion. 18 per cent of your GDP is spent on healthcare, with some of the worst outcomes in the world. I can show you a graph across different states in the U.S., where is an inverse correlation with the amount of spending in the state and the healthcare outcomes. The more the spending and costs go up, the more the quality goes down. Financial incentives should never become part of the doctor-patient discussion, because there is an asymmetry of information. The doctor can wittingly or unwittingly exploit their knowledge to make sure that patients get tests they don’t need, get treatments they don’t need, and that causes harm. Commercialized healthcare systems are actually damaging to both rich and poor. The rich people suffer because they have overtreatment. I’ve worked both in the private and the public sector. I see patients that come to me privately and I see the kind of stuff that they’ve spent money on, ridiculous tests they didn’t need, and drugs they didn’t need because they had money. It damages the rich, and they get exploited. Then, poor people don’t get access to necessary care. We just need to go back to the basics. I believe there is a lot to be learned from ancient wisdom. Look at people like, for example, Socrates and the Buddha who were around 2,500 years ago. They seem to have it sussed out quite well in terms of how we should be living our lives for the goodness of our mental and physical health. Even though we’ve advanced technologically in the last 2,500 years, Jan, we haven’t progressed psychologically. In recent years, I would say we’re regressing psychologically. If we go back to the very basics of being honest and truthful and having true dialogue with people and being empathetic, then society will be much better off. Mr. Jekielek: Dr. Aseem Malhotra, such a pleasure to have you on the show. Dr. Malhotra: Thank you, Jan. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Dr. Aseem Malhotra 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 - BUY "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

Sixteen years ago, the first whistleblowers emerged from China with a story few could believe: the Chinese communist regime was killing Falun Gong practitioners for their organs. What have we learned since then? I sit down with Dr. Torsten Trey, co-founder and executive director of the nonprofit Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting, which just released the special report “Forced Organ Harvesting From Living People in China.” “Living people are killed for their organs … Executions were shifted from the courtroom to the operation room,” says Trey. What evidence is there of forced organ harvesting in China? Is it still happening today? And if it is really happening at an industrial scale, why aren’t more people talking about it? “China tries everything … to use bribery, to use other influence to stop newspapers from reporting about this issue,” Trey says. The regime also exerts pressure at the highest levels of medical organizations, he says. “If you think about it, if the Chinese government is willing to kill people, not only a few, but on an industrial level … think of what mindset [that is]. And if they do this to their own people, what do you think the Chinese government [would] do to foreigners?” says Trey. “We didn’t react to it in time, probably because we thought China is so far away. Why should we care? … And a few years later, you are hit by a pandemic that is spread from China.” Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/how-chinas-operation-rooms-became-execution-grounds-dr-torsten-trey-on-the-ccps-lucrative-organ-trade_4919082.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Dr. Torsten Trey, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Dr. Torsten Trey: Thank you for having me. Mr. Jekielek: Dr. Trey, this has been a long time coming. I remember back in 2006 when I first realized that this murder for organs industry in China was real and I started reporting on it. There was a small nonprofit that began in the same year called Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting, and you were one of the co-founders. We’ve interacted in various ways over the years. Before we go any further, just lay it out for me: what is forced organ harvesting? Dr. Trey: Forced organ harvesting is a practice that in 2006, nobody actually would think it could happen. We created this name, and it was our NGO that came up with this term. It is the forceful extraction of organs used for transplantation. The typical way of giving consent before you donate an organ has been bypassed. People are actually killed. Living people are killed for their organs. It’s fair to say that it only happens in China, because on a large scale it can only occur when the state is promoting this crime and it has reached industrial levels. This is arguably the biggest violation of medical ethics in history. Mr. Jekielek: It’s unbelievable when you frame it that way. Let’s go back a little bit. Why don’t you just tell me where this came from, where this idea to start this nonprofit came from, why it was needed, and why in 2006? Dr. Trey: In 2006, I learned from a newspaper, The Epoch Times, that witnesses from China came forward. They witnessed in a hospital in Sujiatun, organs or tissues were harvested from Falun Gong practitioners. That was so outrageous that it caught my attention. In just that month, March of 2006, there were actually three people coming forward. A reporter, the wife of a surgeon who took corneas from Falun Gong practitioners, and an anonymous veteran military doctor who added even more details. It was beyond my imagination. I could hardly believe it, and I followed this case. Then, two months later I saw that the vice president of the European Parliament, Edward McMillan-Scott had followed that case too. He went to China. He met with two Falun Gong practitioners who told him that they saw a friend who died in detention who had holes in their body. That was another piece of evidence that came together. Two months later, I heard about the report from David Kilgour and David Matas, who conducted phone interviews with hospitals in China, and they indeed recorded that doctors in the Chinese hospitals said they take organs from Falun Gong practitioners, because those are fresh organs. At that time this was very shocking, and I decided to go in July 2006 to attend the World Transplant Congress in Boston. I was thinking maybe I would find some more hints. There were, of course, doctors also from China, and I talked to two of them. One of them was from the Tianjin Hospital. He said last year they performed 2000 liver transplantations, and that was an astronomical number. I asked other doctors from other countries. In Argentina, they performed 200 liver transplants per year. In Germany there were, I believe it was 700 transplants per year. And here we are just from one hospital in Tianjin, they performed 2000 liver transplants. That was adding another factor to the scope of transplantation that took place in China. At last, I talked to a doctor who was invited back to China to open a transplant department. But at that time he was actually just working in a university in Germany and he only conducted transplants on animals. I was wondering how he was invited back to China to open a transplant department. He said there was just this demand to open transplant departments. And I said, “Where do all those organs come from?” Because transplantation depends on organs from donors. And he said, “Those organs are coming from Falun Gong practitioners.” That took place within half-a-year, all these aspects, hints, and pieces of evidence. What was really striking was none of these witnesses were Falun Gong practitioners, and they were all hinting that organs were harvested from Falun Gong practitioners. So, if you want some objectivity, here you have it. At that point I decided there must be more investigation and yes, awareness. I decided that just my voice would not be big enough. If I really wanted attention, I would need to start an NGO. That’s how the idea of founding Doctors Against Forced Organ Harvesting came about. Mr. Jekielek: It might be amazing to people that are listening that a doctor from China admitted to you that these organs were coming from Falun Gong practitioners. To put this in context, this was a group that had been demonized and targeted for eradication, in the words of Jiang Zemin, who had been the dictator at the time and issued the order. Is it possible for someone to say something like that with a straight face and just not realize how utterly barbaric it might sound? How did you react to that? Dr. Trey: It’s definitely barbaric. It is unfathomable. And I would think that because of this practice being beyond our imagination, that was the best way to hide the practice. When I was discussing this topic with other doctors at medical conferences, they were listening and they were also seeing what data we produce and show, but at the end they still said they can hardly believe this is happening. Because it is beyond what we in the West would think is possible. It’s just beyond our thinking. Mr. Jekielek: Why don’t you give me a broad picture of the lines of evidence that exist? It has developed substantially since 2006, the documented reality of this. Dr. Trey: On this question of evidence, “What evidence do you have?” This question comes up very often. Here’s a short summary. There’s evidence related to the transplant numbers, evidence related to the organ sources, where the organs come from, how they’re donated, and then witnesses coming forth. Over the time we followed the number of transplants, and the transplant numbers in China are just out of proportion. If you follow the course of annual transplant numbers and compare them with other countries, then you see China, it’s almost like a rollercoaster. It goes up, it goes down, it stays on the level for 10 years, then it goes up again. You do not find this type of development in other countries that are based on ethical organ donation. In other countries you find a steady gradual increase of organ donors and then also transplants. But in China, this seems to be decoupled. Just recently in 2020, you see this example that Dr. Chen Jingyu wanted to perform a double lung transplant on a Covid patient, and then within just one day they said they got the matching lung and performed the transplant. This is unthinkable in the Western transplant environment. It seems like organs are coming on demand to facilitate transplants on demand. The wait time in China is usually just considered to be between two days and 14 days. It’s very typical. There was a camera team from South Korea that went with a hidden camera to one of these hospitals and they filmed a nurse who was accommodating patients from Korea. The nurse was saying, “Yes, it usually takes two weeks to get a kidney, but if you pay $10,000 extra, you can get it within two days”. This is unheard of, that just because of extra money and an extra fee, you can accelerate the wait time and accelerate it to two days. Nothing in terms of transplantation numbers is reflecting anything that you see in all the other countries in the world. This is one part; the transplant numbers and the wait times. But then there are also the donor numbers. We monitored a website where the numbers of organ donations were displayed, and we monitored this for over 18 months. What we saw is that there was a gradual, very slow increase of registered organ donors, and then all of a sudden, at the end of 2015, within one day it increased by 25,000, exactly 25,000, which is unheard of. It seems to be like an artificial number where it’s said “Oh, we just add exactly 25,000, ending with three zeros. Yes, these are registered organ donors and real people.” Just the fact that all of a sudden there are exactly thousands of registered donors is unheard of. We saw this again in the following year when 88,000 people were added to the so-called registered organ donor pool. All of this you don’t find in other countries. With other research you saw that these numbers are more manufactured. There were no real organ donors, but the numbers were following a mathematical equation. Mr. Jekielek: Yes, a quadratic equation. I remember reading that paper. Like a perfect quadratic equation. Dr. Trey: Yes. Then, with this discrepancy between these large tons of numbers and the lack of organ donors, then the question is where do those organs come from? I talked with Falun Gong practitioners who said they were detained for two years and they were blood tested 10 times. David Matas interviewed a prisoner who was not a Falun Gong practitioner, and he said he was not blood tested, but he saw that Falun Gong practitioners were blood tested. If you hear one witness talking, one Falun Gong practitioner saying he was subject to forced medical exams while in detention while being subject to torture, which itself is already implausible. If there is one Falun Gong practitioner saying he was medically examined, you can say it’s an anecdote. But there are hundreds and thousands of Falun Gong practitioners over 20 years who keep repeating this and similar experiences, and who say, “I was threatened and the policeman said that if I don’t follow this, they will take my organs”. If you hear this many witness reports, then the anecdote is not an anecdote anymore. It becomes evidence. If you take all of this together, then you have an overwhelming set of circumstantial evidence. Each piece itself might not be that strong, but if you put everything together, then you can say there’s enough evidence to say something is wrong here. Mr. Jekielek: Obviously, the Chinese communist regime has been accused of these practices multiple times . How have they responded? Dr. Trey: In one case with Sujiatun, they didn’t respond at all when the claim was made. They were silent for five weeks and then all of a sudden they say, “Oh, now a delegation is being invited”. And of course a delegation after five weeks did not find anything. This is typical. If you have scheduled inspections, you will not find anything for sure. What China is not doing is it is not allowing unscheduled investigational inspections. It is basically denying that this is happening. If you want, you can compare it with the 1989 student massacre in Tiananmen Square. The Chinese government says it didn’t happen, although there’s footage, but it didn’t happen. And the same with the forced organ harvesting from Falun Gong prisoners of conscience, it’s also denied that this is happening. Mr. Jekielek: Why is it the Falun Gong that were particularly targeted? Dr. Trey: For once, it is a large group that is detained. All of a sudden you have access to a very large pool of organ donors, not organ donors, but sources, organ sources. That’s one aspect. But you can also argue that other groups, other prisoners of conscience could also be targeted. Those are not typically targeted. It is mainly Falun Gong. If you want to look into the reason, then you have to look at 1999 when the persecution of Falun Gong started and overnight the Chinese government basically declared Falun Gong as a state enemy. But it was not the fault of Falun Gong, because nothing had changed in their practice. It was just their practice of being truthful that imposed a perceived threat to the Chinese government. At that point, overnight, the head of state, Jiang Zemin, single-handedly said, “This group is now banned and basically has no rights”. The experience with the student massacre showed the Chinese government that it cannot just crack down on a group with high intensity, because then the international community will respond to it. So, they had to come up with a different approach. They wanted to destroy this group, Falun Gong, but in a way that it is not raising international attention. So basically, over time, the executions were shifted from the courtroom to the operation room. Organ harvesting turned the previous persecution form of torturing or torturing to death into a profitable business. The organs from Falun Gong practitioners could be sold for transplants. So, there was a financial aspect that was used by the Chinese government. They want to eradicate this group, they want to destroy it, and what better way could they be than using Falun Gong practitioners as an organ source? Mr. Jekielek: I was talking with Ethan Gutmann perhaps half-a-year ago. He’s one of the researchers who did a lot of really valuable work in developing the set of evidence. In past years the Chinese regime ramped up the genocide of the Uyghur people, and he’s saying that this has become a significant group in recent years. It struck me that if you don’t deal with something for years, and it doesn’t stop, it will get transferred to another group that’s targeted for eradication. Dr. Trey: Yes, this is a very typical phenomenon. If you violate ethical standards and you get away with it, then you get the appetite to go to the next level, and to go to the next profitable area. For example, for the Uyghur group, because they are Muslims, they don’t eat certain food, so you find people from the Middle East who are specifically looking for Muslim organ donors to get the type of organs that they prefer. The Chinese follow this market to open the Uyghur people to serve this group of transplanters who are looking for specific organs. But we cannot forget that this is, relative speaking, a smaller group, whereas the Falun Gong practitioners were estimated to have 100 million people in 1999. So, it’s an extremely large group, and because it is persecuted in the whole country, you have a pool of organ donors that can still serve the transplant hospitals in the different regions. We cannot shift our attention to just one group, while the other group that has been subject to forced organ harvesting for 20 years is being sidelined. This is a very dangerous move. Mr. Jekielek: Do you feel that’s happening somehow? Dr. Trey: The World Medical Association came up with the statement resolution where it acknowledges the genocide of Uyghur people. However, so far, Falun Gong, who has been subject to this destruction over 20 years, has not been recognized as a victim to genocide. We follow this very closely, and we think there’s an imbalance. Mr. Jekielek: One of the things I wrote about years ago was the inability of people to just accept that human beings do such terrible things. I was citing Jan Karski, who broke into concentration camps in [Nazi-occupied] Poland. He was a Polish nobleman, masqueraded as a Ukrainian guard, saw what was happening, got out, went to England, went to the West and to the U.S., and tried to tell people, but people wouldn’t listen. Even the Attorney General of the U.S. said, famously, “It’s not that I thought he was lying, it was that I was unable to believe him”. That was, I believe, the official line or something close to that. How much does this figure into the current state where essentially the Chinese Communist Party has been largely held unaccountable to this in almost any way? With a few exceptions. Dr. Trey: I believe that there are several factors that come into play. One is that the crime is just too unbelievable, it’s beyond what we can fathom. But at the same time, it is probably also an effect of the effort of the Chinese government to cover it up. You can imagine forced organ harvesting, the killing of people for the organs. This is a serious crime. It’s probably the most outrageous violation of human rights that one can imagine. Not only are you killing people, but you are also using their organs to make a profit. You can imagine that if this would surface, if this would be reported in the mainstream media, China would have a hard time stopping an international outcry. Of course, China tries everything to stop this issue, to use bribery, and to use other influence to stop newspapers from reporting about this issue. Specifically, on this topic of forced organ harvesting, we have an issue of self-censorship in Western media and we need to look at, because the crime is just too big to be censored. Mr. Jekielek: It’s striking to me that the Transplantation Society, which is the premier global organization focused on organ transplantation, has either not taken a position, or essentially taken a position that mirrors that of the Chinese Communist Party. One; how much has that hurt your advocacy efforts? And two; what’s going on with that? Dr. Trey: Yes, this is a discrepancy that I’ve followed for some time. On one side, the Transplantation Society says they are a professional society and they don’t have the resources to investigate in China. On the other side, the Transportation Society also makes statements that China’s on the right way. So, on one side you say that you cannot investigate this topic, and on the other side, you produce statements that China is developing in the right way. There are several reports and investigations that are hundreds of pages long, but I don’t know if the Transportation Society or the leadership in the Transplantation Society has really studied those reports and looked into it. Mr. Jekielek: The China Tribunal comes to mind, which is one of the most comprehensive bodies of evidence. I believe you testified there. Briefly, tell me what that was. What were the conclusions? And yes, why is the Transplantation Society unaware of the findings? Dr. Trey: The China Tribunal took about a year to review all the different reports. They listened to 50 experts in two hearings. It was a very objective, independent, and thorough review of the evidence. And they came up with the conclusion that forced organ harvesting takes place in China and that the main victim group are Falun Gong practitioners. There was a very clear conclusion. It is striking to me that other medical organizations have not taken this into consideration and said, “Well, maybe we need to look into this.” Because again, this is one of the biggest violations of medical ethics and of medical practice in history. You cannot just go back to business as usual and continue scientific exchange, and exchange with personnel and doctors in China. There should be a pause to review the evidence. Mr. Jekielek: One thing that strikes me, I always remember back to where Dr. Jacob Lavee, who at the time was the head of the Israeli Transplant Association. He had a patient that told him, “I’m going to China to get an organ”. He went, he got it quickly, and Lavee recognized there was no way this could be ethical. He actually advocated very quickly for laws to be passed in Israel where the state health system wouldn’t pay for such transplants, basically discouraging people from doing it. Maybe you can tell me, has there been a significant response from any country other than Israel? Dr. Trey: There has been some acknowledgement and response. The U.S. Congress has passed several resolutions on this topic, acknowledging the forced organ harvesting, the European Parliament did as well. But those are more non-binding steps, which are more like statements and acknowledgement, but without really taking responsibility to stop this transplant abuse. They are not strong enough to send a signal to China that says, “We are serious on this topic.” “Stop it. We know it is happening. This doesn’t fit into the international community”. We observed over time that this is not only happening in governments, but also in organizations where the information that we provide on this topic is blocked at a certain level. I would think that it occurs at the leadership level. The members of an organization are much more open to the information and willing to take steps. For example, we once approached the American Medical Association. We were working together with the Medical Society of Washington DC, and we submitted a resolution. The leadership of the American Medical Association was more hesitant. But then at one point, the House of Delegates, which is more on the level of the members, was bringing up this question and said, “We want clarity”. Those are the doctors that really want to know what is going on. They were members on the floor who were really looking into answers. They wanted answers. That’s a very typical phenomenon. The block is happening at the leadership level, and I assume that this is also a reflection of the pressure and the influence that comes from the Chinese government. It can happen very quickly where the Chinese government says, “Do you want to come to our country for certain conferences? Then don’t bring it up. Do you want to be ostracized from our conferences? Then don’t bring it up”. This can happen very quickly. Mr. Jekielek: I’m going to deviate a bit here, but I can’t help but think this mirrors some of this catastrophic response that the world had to Covid. It’s almost like what you’re describing. It kind of set the stage for what we saw happen at a much larger scale, affecting a much larger group of people, essentially almost all of humanity to some extent. It’s a chilling thought. I don’t know if you’ve thought about this at all. Dr. Trey: Yes. It is interesting if you have somebody who’s violating ethical standards, just basic standards, and you don’t react to it. If you think about it, the Chinese government is willing to kill people, not only a few, but hundreds of thousands on an industrial level—most likely more than a million people over the past 20 years. What kind of mindset is that? If they do this to their own people, what do you think the Chinese government does to foreigners? This is the situation, and we didn’t react to it in time, probably because we thought, “China is so far away, why should we care?” Then, a few years later, you are hit by a pandemic that spreads from China. Mr. Jekielek: I can’t help thinking about this, that basically we as a society turned a blind eye for decades to what you describe as the grossest violation of medical ethics in history. Over the last few years, we found ourselves in a situation where there were rampant medical ethics violations. I can’t help but wonder if turning a blind eye didn’t somehow influence this current situation where trust in the medical system has been lost for such a huge number of people. Dr. Trey: That’s an interesting aspect. By being a bystander, and allowing China to commit this forced organ harvesting, some of our due diligence in ethics in the West has deteriorated, and that is the danger. But I would actually say that is also the intention from the Chinese government to influence the Western society by making forced organ harvesting a staple in the transplant field. We are risking that our ethical standards are decaying. All of a sudden we are now facing the situation with the pandemic that really caught us by surprise, where decades and centuries of scientific work has been cast out. For example, if you have a vaccine, the typical form is that you have to test a vaccine for 10 years to make sure that there are no side effects. This fact has not been appreciated. I wonder if you give a vaccine that you tested half-a-year, how can you say with certainty that if you give it to children that it doesn’t have effects in 10, 20 years, maybe causing cancer and other problems? We don’t know. There’s a decay in our due diligence in enforcing scientific procedures, which is based on an appreciation of ethics. Ethics gives you a good guideline to apply scientific methods. Mr. Jekielek: This is chilling. You’re basically telling me that this is actually part of the CCP’s game here, to undermine our whole ethical system and which can lead to results like we’re seeing here. I’m in the middle of this and I hadn’t thought of it that way until this moment. Dr. Trey: Yes. I had many years to think about why the Chinese government is doing this. To summarize, you can come up with three reasons. One is to become a leader in the transplant field. Why is it so important? Because if you are a leader in the transplant field, and you are the most advanced in the transplant research, and you have the numbers to produce and you can do research, then you are in the position where you can set standards. That’s one aspect that the CCP is pursuing to become a leader, so that it can set standards for the transplant field. Think about it, today, we would not think that we could take organs from prisoners, it is unfathomable. The WMA, the World Medical Association has condemned this. But if the Chinese transplant market is so big that it can set the standards, it could even say, “No, it is okay if you take organs from prisoners”. This is something that the Chinese government pursues. They want to become a leader in the future, so that they can set the rules. Another aspect is that there’s a side effect to this, that by performing forced organ harvesting, they know they undermine the Western concepts of ethics and human rights, and they know that they will provoke the West. This is predictable. They do this because they want to create this kind of chaos in the scientific field, and in the transplant field. Now you have discussions where some doctors may say, “You cannot do it”, but others say, “Why not?” All of a sudden we are having a discussion that we didn’t have years ago. You can think of the Chinese government taking advantage of this chaos. Think of a fish that can only survive in water, and the Chinese Communist Party needs chaos in the world to be dominant. So, this is one aspect. A third reason why I believe forced organ harvesting in China takes place and has reached these dimensions is the intention to destroy Falun Gong. Mr. Jekielek: You must have some really low days when you’re faced with all these realities. I can see you’re trying to keep a light heart through all this, but this is very tough. Tell me where you see the hope here. What’s the situation? Dr. Trey: Probably the most discouraging for me is when I hear doctors in the West, in the free world, who are taking the side of the Chinese government, and trivializing forced organ harvesting. There was a case where a doctor within 24 hours organized two liver donor livers. We would say, it is impossible within 24 hours to find two matching livers. But then the Western doctors here in the U.S. said, “Why not? It’s possible that by coincidence, the same two people with matching organs, deceased and organs were available”. This is discouraging, because in a proverb it is said, if you hear hoof beats, then the first thing that comes to your mind is that they must be horses, not zebras. This is a very common phrase in medical diagnosis. It is a reminder what happens if you think of what is most likely. And it is not most likely that by coincidence, two people passed away donating two matching organs. It’s probably one of the most painful moments if you see this. But at the same time, the most encouraging and maybe joyful moments are when you talk to other doctors colleagues and they understand it and they support you. One of them said he read my book and he couldn’t stop reading it. He was reading the book until three or four am through the night, because he couldn’t put it out of his hands, and he was very supportive. So, those moments are really energizing and give me the motivation to continue. Mr. Jekielek: You may be talking about the book State Organs, which you edited, and wrote a chapter. It was a very valuable book to me back in 2012. I would recommend it to our viewers. You’ve written quite a number of papers, and you’ve written a couple of books on this. What would you say is the most important thing you’ve contributed? Dr. Trey: There was one article that was probably most consequential in putting this whole picture together, and that was the article called Cold Genocide: Falun Gong In China. It was the first time that I understood that forced organ harvesting is not an isolated violation of medical ethics, but it had a function, a purpose, and the purpose was to destroy a certain group. In this case, it was Falun Gong practitioners, because there’s no better way to silence a group of people. At the beginning, when I was thinking about this topic, you see the student massacre that was really obvious to the world in 1989, versus the persecution of Falun Gong that led to the forced organ harvesting, which is not perceived. I thought, “What is the difference here?” And then something came up, which actually came from medical school, and this is when we learned about flies. The compound eye of the fly has a certain characteristic. It doesn’t have a clear picture, but it can detect motion. That is what it’s good for. That’s why it’s difficult to catch a fly. It catches motion. If you move fast, it’s very difficult to catch a fly. But if you move slowly, the fly doesn’t see the hand coming. So, if you move slow enough, you can commit a crime that nobody is noticing. I realized that the Chinese government learned from the student massacre and knew they cannot do it in high intensity. They need to proceed in a slower motion, and then you have a cold genocide. And that is more devastating, I would say, than other forms of persecution, because it can happen slowly over years, over 20 years without actually being noticed because it is too slow to trigger international reaction. That really opened my eyes that China is operating in a way that is very planned. If you think of a slow moving destruction and then expand it to other areas in the society, then you see that China is not seeking confrontation, but it is slowly infiltrating our society and diluting it with influence. If you are at universities, you cannot have forums that are critical of China, you cannot have this at your university. All of a sudden the university finds itself in a situation where it is driven to self-censorship, because it doesn’t want to lose the thousand students from China. This is a slow moving influence that is infiltrating everywhere in a society. You find this pattern of the core genocide actually in many areas in the economy, business, and education. Mr. Jekielek: Fascinating. Of course, we’ve covered this issue of Chinese Communist Party infiltration in the U.S. and in the West, and its motives. We have this new film, The Final War, which just premiered, that talks about a lot of these things and how there’s been this slow hundred year plan to subvert America. I’ve never thought of it in the context of this cold genocide they describe, which I remember reading in that paper, a very, very powerful piece. In the face of all this, what can the typical person do? Dr. Trey: This transplant industry is a combination, a reflection of incentives. Doctors earn money from those transplantations, that’s their incentive. Even Western media might receive incentives by not reporting about this issue. But then, what is the incentive of the Chinese government? It’s not about money. Their incentive is to silence Falun Gong, so that they cannot convey their practice and their message, which is based on three principles; truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance. These are good values. The world would benefit from those principles today. But the Chinese government, the Chinese Communist Party doesn’t want the people to know. If you want to defeat this purpose of forced organ harvesting, you have to break the silence. If the people around us would learn more about Falun Gong, would learn about the persecution, would talk about it, and would bring it to the social media, the purpose of silencing this group would be defeated. Mr. Jekielek: There is this first principle that practitioners follow, which is the truth, and that manifests in all sorts of different ways, which the communist party really doesn’t like, such as exposing communism for what it is, and exposing the crimes of the party. That’s one area. Another one is whistle blowing around Covid things. That was a big one. A lot of people were persecuted horribly for doing that. These are just a couple of examples. Dr. Trey: If medicine is not able to stop forced organ harvesting, then what will happen with the medical profession? The concept of medicine, the goal of medicine is to help a patient, to save a patient. But if someone else is being killed to provide cure to others, then medicine is at a crossroads. I believe that every medical doctor who is taking his or her profession seriously needs to look into this. This is not just a topic that should be addressed by transplant surgeons, but by every medical doctor. Mr. Jekielek: Dr. Torsten Trey, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Dr. Trey: Thank you. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Dr. Torsten Trey 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

This episode features a CPAC interview with Xi Van Fleet, a woman who escaped Maoist China and endured the Cultural Revolution. Xi came to America to pursue the American dream, and now is speaking out against the cultural Marxism she sees taking over America and erasing our freedoms. Xi has confronted schools pushing critical race theory, most notably challenging the Loudoun County School Board in Virginia and exposing the similarities between communist China’s division by class and America’s division by race. Xi has many things to fear from speaking out, but she says what she fears most is living under communism again. She wants to save America before it is too late, saying that if America ceases to be free, there is nowhere else to escape to. Watch the video: Welcome to The Beau Show, where we discuss topics related to faith, family, and freedom. In this episode, we'll dive into the recent Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) held in the D.C area, where high-profile speakers addressed attendees, including Ted Cruz, Matt Gates, James O'Keefe, Mike Pompeo, Nikki Haley, and Young Gun Vivek Ramaswamy. Of course, President Donald Trump also addressed the crowd, announcing his bid for the 2024 White House. Now, what makes Trump's speeches stand out is how he addresses the audience as a partner. It's not "I, Donald J. Trump, did this or that," but "we did it," or "they are attacking my free speech because it's you that they're after." Trump's speeches are full of bravado and ego, but he knows how to rally his base by making them feel like they are part of something bigger. Trump knows that the battle for America's future is happening right now, and he believes that we're engaged in an epic struggle to rescue our country from people who hate it and want to destroy it. The sinister forces trying to kill America have done everything they can to stop him and silence the people, but Trump believes that he's just standing in their way. He's standing up for us, the American people. At CPAC, Trump won the presidential straw poll over Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley, who spoke at the conference but clearly did not have the support of everyone for president. Trump took a more measured tone in his almost two-hour speech, calling out the Bidens and the globalists, but did not attack his Republican rivals the way that he might have been expected to. However, he did mention some Republicans that he feels are part of the old establishment, saying, "We are never going back to the party of Paul ROV and Jeb Bush." Trump's MAGA movement is distinctly different from the GOP of old, and he wants to revitalize our failing buildings and roads and name them after American greats. He believes in renaming our schools and boulevards not after communists but after great American patriots. This is in contrast to what leftists are doing, trying to remove our history and rewrite it according to whatever makes them feel better. Trump sees the difference in vision between the two sides. Leftists embrace Marxism, so they want to remove various statues, even of our great presidents and replace them with Marxists. Trump, on the other hand, is talking about revitalizing buildings and naming them after those who made this country great in the first place. The issue of cultural Marxism is a hot topic in America today, and many Chinese Americans, like Xi Van Fleet, who fled communist China to come to America, are warning us about the dangers of this ideology. In a recent school board meeting in Loudoun County, Virginia, she spoke out against critical race theory, which taught students to hate their country. She compared critical race theory to the Chinese Communist Cultural Revolution, which Mao Zedong created to divide people into classes and punish those who were counter-revolutionary. In the USA, we're seeing something similar with the push for diversity, equity, and inclusion, cancel culture, and the hypersexualization of content for minors. There's a movement afoot to propagandize our culture and punish any traditionalist. Overall, Trump's speech at CPAC and the issue of cultural Marxism illustrate the deep divide in America today between those who want to preserve traditional American values and those who want to tear them down. Keep watching The Beau Show at epochtv.com for more on this topic and others related to faith, family, and freedom.

The mysterious death of Mark Middleton, one of President Bill Clinton's former aides with connections to Jeffrey Epstein, has shocked many people. Middleton was found dead on his ranch in Arkansas in May 2022, with a gunshot wound to his chest and an extension cord tied around his neck, which was attached to a tree. The official explanation was that the gun recoiled 30 feet after Middleton pulled the trigger, but the circumstances surrounding his death remain shrouded in mystery. Middleton worked as a White House aide in the Clinton Administration in the 1990s, and he signed Epstein into the White House on seven different occasions. The little black book of Epstein, which contains the names and contact information of his high-profile contacts, also includes Middleton's name, address, and several phone numbers. Middleton was not only Epstein's contact in the White House, but he was also involved in trying to be an international deal maker. However, Middleton's executive privilege was revoked after an internal White House investigation determined that he was abusing both his connections and position. In 1999, a report from the house committee on government reform revealed that Middleton was hobnobbing with businessmen like Epstein and Donald Trump, which got him in trouble with the administration once he left. There were claims that Middleton flew on Epstein's infamous Lolita Express Jet, but this is not confirmed with the available flight logs. Middleton's death has added to the growing list of mysterious deaths connected to Epstein, including his own alleged suicide in a New York jail in 2019. Epstein was a convicted sex offender who was accused of trafficking and sexually abusing numerous underage girls, as well as running a sex trafficking ring that involved powerful and wealthy individuals. In a separate case, a French modeling agent and close associate of Epstein, Jean-Luc Brunel, was found dead in his Parisian prison cell in February 2022. French authorities had been investigating Brunel for several years as part of their investigation into Epstein, and he was arrested on suspicion of drugging, sexually assaulting, and sexually harassing multiple minors as well as multiple adults. Until his death, Brunel denied any wrongdoing, and his lawyers claimed that he had been "crushed by the allegations." The connection between Epstein, Middleton, and Brunel adds to the mystery surrounding Epstein's life and his associates. The truth behind these deaths remains unknown, and people can only speculate about what really happened. The circumstances surrounding their deaths are disturbing and raise many questions, but the answers may never be revealed. The deaths of Middleton and Brunel only serve to deepen the shadow of suspicion that surrounds the world of Epstein and those who were connected to him. Watch more on epochtv.com: https://www.theepochtimes.com/c-facts-matter

I sit down with Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor of health policy at Stanford University’s School of Medicine and one of the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration that argued for focused protection of the vulnerable—instead of large-scale lockdowns. “Many people that are dead today would be alive, had we been allowed to make that argument,” Bhattacharya says. We discuss how Big Tech, his university, and the highest levels of the federal bureaucracy worked to silence him and other scientists. Last December, he was invited by Elon Musk to visit Twitter headquarters and see how he was censored. “I was actually placed on the blacklist the very day I joined Twitter,” he says. After years of destructive pandemic policies, what is the path forward? How do we prevent the same policies from being adopted the next time there’s a respiratory virus pandemic? Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/dr-jay-bhattacharya-the-deadly-consequences-of-censorship_5082966.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Jay Bhattacharya, it’s such a pleasure to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Dr. Jay Bhattacharya: Thank you, Jan. It’s so good to be with you. Mr. Jekielek: Jay, it’s been a while since we’ve spoken on camera. And since then, all sorts of evidence has come to light about work you did around the Great Barrington Declaration trying to talk about focused protection and gradients and harms across age. There were all sorts of elements of society, Big Tech, government, your own institution, Stanford, all working to suppress some incredibly important information. And of course, there is the Missouri versus Biden piece which revealed all the information. What’s your reaction at this point having seen all of this? Dr. Bhattacharya: It just makes me incredibly sad, Jan, because it’s one thing for me to be censored. If it was just a story about me, that would be one thing. The problem is that me and many of my colleagues were trying to make an argument that the public health response we were following was incredibly misguided. It was going to lead to the harm of countless children and the starvation of millions of people around the world because of the economic harm from the lockdowns. We were arguing that the diversion of attention from other vital medical priorities was quite shortsighted, and that there was an alternate strategy, focused protection, that could also have better protected older people from the disease. If we had been allowed to make that argument clearly, if we had not been suppressed by the government, by the university that I work at, or news organizations that basically put out propaganda, we would have won that argument, Jan. We had better science. We had the better argument regarding the balance of harms. We had the better understanding of who was actually at risk of COVID. We would have won that argument and the world would have been better off. Many people that are dead would be alive today had we been allowed to make that argument. That’s why to me, it’s so important to tell this story about the suppression of science by the government, and the failure of academic institutions like my home university, Stanford, to stand up for academic freedom when it counted most. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s start with Stanford. You have been tenured at Stanford for 15 years. You’re one of the premier epidemiologists in the world, and many people would agree with me. So, what happened at Stanford? Dr. Bhattacharya: Almost from the beginning of COVID, I faced tremendous backlash within my own home institution for speaking up. I wrote an op-ed in March of 2020 in the Wall Street Journal, the first op-ed I had ever written in my life. It said that we don’t yet know how deadly COVID is. I just went through some evidence from the Diamond Princess data and said, “Look, the disease might be much more widespread than we initially believed.” And it called for a study. The conclusion of the piece was. “Let’s do a study.” We had already locked down the world. It wasn’t like we could go back in time. It just said, “What is the empirical basis for the policies that we are following? We don’t even yet know how deadly the disease is.” That almost immediately led to my getting death threats. I started getting messages from friends. One of them eventually de-friended me on Facebook. It was petty little things. But the thing that was funny on campus was that it didn’t lead to a broader discussion. Even though I had been at Stanford for 36 years, 20 as a professor, and 15 tenured, I felt like I was on the outside immediately. I had done something where I had breached some norm. Mr. Jekielek: The term canceled comes to mind, although not to the fullest. Dr. Bhattacharya: Yes. What happened was that I wrote the Great Barrington Declaration. I work in a medical school. I do health policy and infectious disease epidemiology for a living. We just put forward in the Great Barrington Declaration, in October 2020, a major proposal for an alternate strategy to the central policy problem facing the entire world. It generated an incredible amount of attention, both positive and negative, and it certainly needed to be platformed at Stanford. What I mean by platformed is that one of the main things about the life of a university is that professors give talks about their ideas. It sounds so mundane and boring and most professors are saying. “Who cares about most of my talks?” But that is actually quite important, Jan. It tells the world, “Look, these ideas are things that are worth discussing, that are worth paying attention to, that are worth respecting even if you disagree with them, even if they turn out to be wrong.” Normally, what would have happened when a professor at a major university makes a major proposal like that is that there would have been invitations within the home institution of the university for debate and discussion. Instead, what happened was essentially omerta, silence. Nothing. Again, I was still getting death threats from various random sources. On campus, I started hearing the mutterings of people wanting to figure out how to deal with the Jay problem. The summer before, in 2020, there had already been an attack on my colleague, Scott Atlas, who was an advisor to President Trump. A hundred of my colleagues had signed a letter, which I believe was a deeply irresponsible thing to do, attacking him for things he didn’t do. The letter actually said that hand-washing was important, somehow implying that he didn’t believe in hand-washing. Scott was trying to argue for focused protection of vulnerable people. He was trying to argue for opening schools. He was following the scientific evidence that actually supported all this, and that’s what he was advising President Trump. These one hundred people that signed the letter didn’t understand the evidence as well as Scott did. These were colleagues of mine, people I’ve written papers with, and people I respected. I called one of them and asked him why he signed the letter. He said he hadn’t taken a very close look at it. There was tremendous social pressure to sign, and even junior people who didn’t have tenure were scared that if they didn’t sign, what would happen to their tenure? That was the atmosphere at Stanford when the Great Barrington Declaration came out. I couldn’t get any traction on trying to get my views aired on campus. At one point, the former president of the university, John Hennessy, called me and asked me if I’d be willing to do a debate. This was in December of 2020. I was absolutely thrilled. I thought, “Okay, finally we have someone who’s well respected in the Stanford community trying to organize something. I don’t even know if he agreed with the Great Barrington Declaration. It didn’t matter, right? What mattered was that there was going to be some discussion. He couldn’t get anybody on the other side to sign on. In my home department, the department chair essentially sent the proposal for a debate or a discussion off to a committee that he must have known was going to fail. There was no platforming. There was no time when Stanford said, “Okay, we’re going to host a discussion about this.” I just want to emphasize why that was important. It’s not because of me personally, although personally I did feel hurt. It was important, because if Stanford had done that, it would have been a major institution telling the world, “Look, this is a debate that’s worth having.” We were already having legitimate people with legitimate credentials that didn’t agree with the lockdown consensus. There wasn’t a consensus, Jan. There was never a consensus. That was an illusion created by Tony Fauci and a small number of incredibly powerful people. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s go to the second bit of evidence. Let’s try to tie this all together. What came out in some of the discovery in Missouri versus Biden was an email thread that talked about the devastating takedown of some fringe epidemiologists. What was your reaction when you learned of this? Dr. Bhattacharya: Four days after we wrote the Great Barrington Declaration, and I learned this months and months later, Francis Collins, the head of the National Institute of Health, wrote an email to Tony Fauci calling me, Sunetra Gupta, and Martin Kulldorff, the three primary authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, fringe epidemiologists. I actually just laughed when I heard this because it’s just funny. Mr. Jekielek: I’ll jump in. Martin Kulldorff and Sunetra Gupta, how would you rank their international stature in epidemiology? You don’t have to talk about yourself. Dr. Bhattacharya: I’m not fit to be in their company. Martin Kulldorff is probably the best biostatistician working in vaccine safety today. He designed the statistical infrastructure that the FDA and the CDC uses to track vaccine safety. I had used his methods before the pandemic, even before I met him or knew about him. Sunetra Gupta, she is essentially the professor of theoretical epidemiology at Oxford University, an incredibly brilliant mathematician and epidemiologist. Just before the pandemic, she was working on developing a universal flu vaccine, a vaccine that you don’t have to update every year. She is an incredibly impactful scholar who’s had a career at the center of epidemiology. Mr. Jekielek: I just want to establish the fact that none of you are actually fringe. Dr. Bhattacharya: I have a business card somewhere that says fringe epidemiology. A friend of mine sent it to me afterwards. Okay, you’re serious, because you’re asking me this question seriously. It was a deeply irresponsible thing for Francis Collins to do. It was an abuse of his power. He’s the head of the National Institute of Health. He sits on top of $45 billion of federal funding. For instance, Stanford gets a half a billion dollars a year from the NIH. Not only does he control the money, he also controls the social status of scientists. If you don’t get NIH grants as a biomedical researcher, it puts you down the social hierarchy within the social structure of academic medicine. I would not have gotten tenure at Stanford if I had not won NIH grants. To say that these three people are fringe, why would he do that? It’s because he didn’t want to cope with our ideas. He didn’t actually want to address the substance of our ideas. He just wanted to dismiss us, and socially, make us outsiders. He wanted to excommunicate us from the scientific community. What is the message that top universities get when they hear this? They don’t want their social status and their brand hurt by association with fringe epidemiologists or fringe figures. They don’t want the possibility that maybe the funding sources that the NIH provides will get threatened, or that the social status conferred by the NIH to these institutions will get threatened. They brag about how much NIH funding they get. So, you have a federal government figure abusing his power. Why? Because he couldn’t stand the idea that there were prominent scientists that disagreed with him about pandemic policy. That’s why he called for a devastating takedown of our premises. Initially, the best they could do was tendentious articles in Wired magazine. The substantive counterattack didn’t exist. When there finally was a substantial counterattack to the Great Barrington Declaration, it came in the form of pieces in prominent scientific journals, but with ridiculous scientific arguments like, “We don’t know if there’s any immunity after infection.” There was a memorandum called the John Snow Memorandum signed by very prominent people, including the current CDC director, who signed her name in November of 2020. Mr. Jekielek: Just very briefly, why is that? Why was the John Snow Memorandum problematic? Dr. Bhattacharya: It misread the science. For instance, it said that you can’t know for certain that there is immunity after protecting it. It acknowledged that there were some lockdown harms, but downplayed them. It pretended as if they were inevitable, as if the lockdowns were the only inevitable choice to make. All of the harms that came from them were just downstream from this inevitable decision, as opposed to a thing that we decided to do. It dismissed the possibility of focused protection, essentially sending a signal to the public health community, “Don’t even try. The lockdowns will protect old people. That should be enough.” But the result of that was essentially a corruption of the scientific process, a corruption of major institutions, governments, universities, and top scientific journals in service of a policy that almost everyone now agrees was entirely ineffective. Even by the standards of COVID deaths alone, how many millions have died? Did the policy work? It essentially ignored the possibility there could have been alternate policy, which there was. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s jump to something a little more recent that you have realized from one of the earliest drops of the Twitter files, that you had been identified as someone to be shadow-banned, and that there was this public-private collaboration to make that happen. What was your reaction? Dr. Bhattacharya: I joined Twitter in August of 2021. I only joined for one purpose and I figured I needed to make a very public case for the ideas in the Great Barrington Declaration for sane public health. Just writing scientific papers alone wasn’t moving people within the scientific community. It was also clear to me that it was the public that had been most harmed by these lockdown policies—our kids out of school, poor people decimated by COVID, and the difficulty of working class people to make a living and feed their family. I wanted to tell the public that there was this alternate policy. The purpose of joining Twitter was to reach people that hadn’t heard my message, and perhaps disagreed with me. I could put the evidence that I had in front of them, and put the arguments they had in front of them. With Twitter, you have your followers, you can send your message, and generally the followers will see it. Not always, but generally. Sometimes though, the posts go viral. They trend in the language of Twitter, so that the broader Twitter community, the millions and millions of people that read Twitter also see those messages from time to time. Not every message, but from time to time. When Bari Weiss wrote that piece about the Twitter files and she put me at the top of it, she revealed that I had been placed on a trends blacklist. I love that term, Jan. It reminds me of the McCarthy era back in the 1950s. Actually, that’s what this era feels like. It’s like a strange suppression of dissidents by the government that is so sure that it’s right, that it feels okay to do this. The trends blacklist made sure that whenever I did a Tweet, the broader Twitter audience wouldn’t see it. I felt like I was reaching an audience, because I had 100,000 followers, but I didn’t know that I had no chance of actually accomplishing what I wanted to accomplish by going on Twitter, which is to tell the broader public that there was something deeply wrong with the COVID policy. I got invited to visit with Elon Musk as a result of these revelations in the Twitter files. What I found out during my visit there at Twitter headquarters is that I was actually placed on the blacklist the very day I joined Twitter. Why did that happen? It’s not Twitter 1.0 on its own that decided this. That came about because government actors were involved at the highest levels of federal bureaucracy telling social media companies what ideas to censor and who to censor. Maybe the first or second post I did on Twitter was the Great Barrington Declaration. It is still my pinned tweet. You can go see it. And that is what led to the blacklisting. Mr. Jekielek: What do you make of this type of collaboration between the highest levels of government and Big Tech? Because we’ve seen from Missouri versus Biden that it wasn’t just Twitter doing this type of activity. Dr. Bhattacharya: There needs to be a bright wall of separation because there’s a power imbalance. You can read the emails from Missouri versus Biden; the deposition testimony, the FOIAs, and all the discovery emails, and it looks like there’s this collaborative buddy-buddy relationship. The government says, “These are the people to censor and these are ideas to censor.” And Twitter says, or the social media companies say, “Oh great, we want to help you do this.” It looks like a collaborative relationship, but at its heart, it cannot possibly be a collaborative relationship, because the government telling these companies to do this has an implied threat within it. The government regulates these companies. The government has tremendous powers to make these companies succeed or fail. And so, when it gives these kinds of instructions, the implied threat is that we can destroy your company. Normally, the U.S. Constitution would protect against these kinds of things. It was built into the very fabric of our government agencies that this would be something so far out of bounds they wouldn’t do it. It’s one thing if you have the government say, “This guy is an international criminal terrorist.” You can understand how there may need to be some kind of line of communication around that. But the line between that and suppressing scientific discussion, suppressing policy discussion should have been a bright red line that never should have been crossed. The government agencies essentially decided to treat scientific debate on COVID policy as if we were dissidents who were on the other side of the government, as if they were just like those international terrorists in some sense. They thought it was okay to suppress those kinds of people and those kinds of ideas. As an American citizen, it’s not right for the American government to have that kind of power. The basic fundamental American norm is free speech. I understand there are nuances around exactly what that means. Free speech is not the freedom to reach everybody, but at its very heart it is permitting a space for debate to take place among scientists and policy makers and concerned members of the public on vital policy issues. The government decided through its actions that they didn’t want to let that happen during the pandemic. Again, as a result, it’s really not about me, it’s about the fact that we would have won this debate about lockdown policy. So many people that were harmed would not have been harmed. These vaccine mandates would not have been in place. People wouldn’t have lost their jobs or careers over them. The schools would’ve opened earlier. The panic mongering would’ve been addressed, so the anxiety and depression problems that we are seeing might have been less. The economic devastation from the lockdown policies might have been avoided, at least to some degree. From all of these consequences, the conclusion I take away from that is that this censorship activity killed people. Ironically, during the pandemic, we heard all these things like we can’t have free speech during the pandemic. The constitution is not a suicide pact. Ironically, had the First Amendment actually been in place during the pandemic, it would have saved lives, would have led to less damage and destruction with fewer people dead. Mr. Jekielek: From the numbers I’ve seen, I think by considerable margin? Dr. Bhattacharya: Yes, there’s no question, just take the damage to poor people around the world. There was an estimate that the World Bank put out that a hundred million additional people, as a consequence of the economic dislocation caused by just the early lockdowns, were thrown into dire poverty, living on less than $2 a day of income. And many of those people starved. Many of them didn’t send their kids to school. Actually in poor countries, they put their kids to work, and pulled their kids out of school entirely. Uganda is a good example of this. Four-and-a-half million kids never came back to school after two years of school closures. A lot of them, especially the young girls, were sold into sexual slavery because the families couldn’t feed them. When you take an action as dramatic as a lockdown, you set in motion a whole domino set of effects. You talked about supply chains. The end point of a supply chain is some poor person in some poor country that’s reorganized its economy to fit into the global economy. He loses his job, can’t feed his family, and then he has to make a terrible choice between starving, or exploiting his kids so that they don’t starve. These are the kinds of things that policymakers really need to be thinking about when they make these decisions. We didn’t think about them. They didn’t think about them because the people that would’ve brought them up were being suppressed. Mr. Jekielek: You wrote this piece in Tablet about what happened at Stanford. You mentioned suicidal ideation. You mentioned people not getting their medical checkups. Ostensibly, the lockdowns were to prevent hospital overrun, but the hospitals were actually empty. Not all of them, but more so than normal. It was a cataclysmic social intervention that, as you say, had these very, very far-reaching effects. Dr. Bhattacharya: We’re going to be paying for them for a very long time. Some kids were out of school for a short time, let’s just say in the United States. Some kids were out of school for not just a short time, but a very long time. There’s social science literature that precedes the pandemic that found even short interruptions to kids schooling has long-term consequences for the kids. They end up being poorer as adults, more likely to have chronic illness, and they live shorter lives. It’s not equally distributed. It’s the poor kids that suffer the most from this, because there’s no making it up, or less of making it up. It’s a generational driver of inequality that we created during the pandemic. Mr. Jekielek: You’re involved in a number of efforts to try to rectify some of these things. We started with these lockdowns, then it went to various types of mandates. Now, there’s a whole discussion of were these vaccines rolled out too quickly? What exactly happened? What are the incentive structures with big pharma? You’re involved in numerous groups that are trying to wrestle with this. One example that we’ve covered recently is the Norfolk Group that has a whole series of recommendations on what questions to ask to figure out what really happened. That’s how I read it. Just briefly tell me about that and what should we do now with this reality? Dr. Bhattacharya: There have been a number of attempts to try to do an after-action report about the pandemic. The Democratic House, for instance, conducted one. There have been a couple of other COVID commissions, the idea of which is a good one in the sense that after natural disasters, after plane crashes, after terrible things, after a patient dies in a hospital, you come together with the experts that are involved, sometimes outside experts, and you do an honest assessment of what went wrong with the goal of reforming the process so that it doesn’t happen again. The problem is that these after-action reports have been conducted by people who made the decisions in favor of the lockdowns. As a result, they have not asked the critical questions that need to be asked to really do an honest after-action report. For instance, why was the immunity after COVID infection ignored in basic decision-making? The science was really clear in 2020. What were the forecasting models that were used to justify lockdown? There was a lot of evidence that those models were deeply inaccurate even at the time. Why was that evidence ignored? Why were the schools closed for such a long time when the evidence from around the world, especially in Europe, was showing that wasn’t necessary? Mr. Jekielek: I’ll add one. Why was vaccination chosen as the one route to solving the problem, when you had a highly mutable, highly mutating type of virus that made the vaccines quickly outdated at the outset, and this was known? Dr. Bhattacharya: I would phrase that question, “Why did people think that vaccination would lead to permanent protection against infection, when there wasn’t evidence from the randomized trials confirming that was true? These are both scientific questions and policy questions. Why were lockdown harms not considered? Normally, when you take an action, the regulatory agencies have to do a benefit-harm calculation. You can’t just pretend there’s only benefits, especially for a lockdown policy, which almost certainly causes deep harm. If you don’t consider the lockdown harms, then of course you can’t consider how to mitigate them. These questions have to be asked and any honest COVID inquiry will ask those questions. It may be a question of who, but to me, the emphasis is on the what and why. If we answer those what and why questions, we will be in a much better position to make reforms so that the disaster of lockdowns does not recur. Nearly every prominent institution in the world that should have protected us failed. That disaster shouldn’t be repeated. But if we don’t ask those questions, Jan, it will be repeated, because of what has happened in the commissions that have already come up. They have just whitewashed it. They have whitewashed the lockdowns. And they have institutionalized the lockdown strategy as the strategy that they will follow in future pandemics. That’s where we are currently. It’s not a theoretical matter. These institutions, in order to avoid embarrassment, have said that they did a good job without ever asking the critical questions. This might have led people to conclude that they didn’t do a good job. For the questions that we put in the Norfolk Group document, there may be good answers to them. There may be answers where you say, “Okay, yes. They did a good job on this.” You can understand why they did that. But if you don’t ask those questions, you can’t get good answers and you can’t get good reform. You can’t get a good policy. Where we are now, when there’s another respiratory virus pandemic, we will lock down again and we will use the vaccine-only strategy. The Biden administration actually put out a policy idea where the goal in the next pandemic will be to get a vaccine in 130 days. There’s a few things about that. If you are aiming at a vaccine in 130 days, what that means is you can’t test the vaccine for very long, maybe for one month. You probably can’t recruit very many people, so you’re going to approve a vaccine in 130 days, and recommend it at scale with pretty inadequate testing. What are you going to do for those 130 days? There is this deadly disease going around. At least that’s what the authorities will say. And there’s this promise that the science is going to produce the vaccine in 130 days. What we’ll do is we’ll lock down for four months in anticipation of the vaccine. The de facto policy now for respiratory virus pandemics going forward into the future is the policy that we followed, this disastrous policy that didn’t protect us against COVID, and that led to all the lockdowns. That is the current policy of the United States, and it’s the current policy of many countries around the world. We need an honest discussion, and an honest commission that actually asks the hard questions, which is what the Norfolk Group document is. It is providing an agenda for what those questions might be. Of course, there’s going to be more. We welcome more. It’s going to happen again. Mr. Jekielek: On the vaccine side, you even have Dr. Anthony Fauci saying that these things don’t work very well. After all of this, what was your response to that? Dr. Bhattacharya: I think you’re referring to an article that he published recently where he talked about mucosal immunity. Mr. Jekielek: Correct. Dr. Bhattacharya: Mucosal immunity would be as follows; not to get overly technical, but there are immune mechanisms in your nose where generally, when you’re first exposed to these viruses, they are effective at neutralizing them. And then, there’s the immunity that is in all of your body, with different kinds of mechanisms of protecting you. The vaccine that we used for the pandemic relied on your systemic immunity, the immunity in your body, as opposed to the mucosal immunity in your nose. Again, not to be overly technical, the article that he wrote, if I understand it correctly, was making an argument that mucosal immunity would be potentially more effective for respiratory viruses, than the systemic immunity that we use for the vaccines. I can understand some uncertainty around that. To me it seems pretty clear that would be the case, but it might be difficult to have a vaccine produced that can stimulate your mucosal immunity that would work. There may be technical problems with that, and so you can still understand a strategy of trying to do systemic immunity. What I can’t understand is that Tony Fauci through much of 2021 and even in 2020 was essentially promising that the vaccines that we developed would neutralize the disease, and would protect you against getting sick and spreading the disease. On the basis of that idea, an idea that he couldn’t possibly have known was true, and in fact in retrospect turned out to be false, he recommended vaccine passports. He recommended vaccine mandates, because if you have 80 per cent of the population with a sterilizing vaccine, it’s above the herd immunity threshold and it’s permanent. You can really pretty much get the disease down to very, very low levels. You don’t have to worry about it ever again. That was the logic he had. But that logic was premised on something you could not possibly have known was true. It’s funny to see him now write this article where, in a way, he is indirectly questioning the premise of the policy recommendations he made to two presidents. On the basis of those policy recommendations, so many people lost their jobs. So many people felt discriminated against. So many people lost confidence in public health, which essentially promised, through the vaccine, a prevention that was almost like an eradication of COVID. That was never, ever going to be possible. Mr. Jekielek: We also learned it wasn’t even tested by the manufacturers, if I recall, from some of the Pfizer testimonies. Dr. Bhattacharya: Yes, the randomized trials. What they did is they recruited a lot of patients. I wish they had recruited more older people. They could have had one of two clinical endpoints that would have been useful epidemiologically. They could have checked for prevention of severe disease. That would have been really useful, because then you can use the vaccine for focused protection. You can prove that it protects against severe disease, or they could have checked for prevention of infection. They didn’t check for either of the two. What they checked for is prevention of symptomatic infection. They did this for about two months, and they found 95 per cent efficacy against symptomatic infection. When I saw that evidence I reasoned that if you prevent symptomatic infection, it’s likely you prevent severe disease. You can’t get severe disease without a symptomatic infection. Sunetra Gupta and I wrote an article in December of 2020 arguing for using the vaccine for focused protection of older people. The argument was essentially a balance of risks. We don’t know all of the side effects of the vaccine, but we do know that COVID is a very deadly disease for older people. So if you reduce the risk of severe disease and death, this unbalance goes away. Mr. Jekielek: Was this the cost-benefit analysis? Dr. Bhattacharya: For younger people it’s much less important because the harm of COVID is much less. Tony Fauci, Rochelle Walensky, Debbie Birx, and many others looked at the same evidence of prevention of symptomatic disease, and assumed that meant that it also prevented all infection and also prevented transmission. That’s a logical leap that’s just false. You can’t make that logical leap even in December of 2020. And yet, they made that logical leap. They premised their policy recommendations—the vaccine passports, the mandates, the coercion, and also the gaslighting of people who are actually vaccine injured on this idea that we have to get a sufficient fraction of the population vaccinated for the disease to go away. The problem was not only was it not justified at the time on the basis of the Pfizer trial, it actually turned out to be false. So many countries, even in late spring, early summer 2021 that were heavily vaccinated saw huge numbers of cases. The vaccine wasn’t stopping transmission. It was very clear from that. Rather than back down and say, “Look, let’s use this for focused protection,” they doubled down on it and recommended more vaccine mandates, more requirements that young men and women in college get vaccinated, when the evidence never supported the need for those folks to get vaccinated or for the disease to go away. Mr. Jekielek: I just have to touch on this too. There are newer bivalent vaccines which have even less evidence around whether they are safe or even efficacious in any way, from what I can tell. What do you make of this? Dr. Bhattacharya: After the big trials you can see they were trying to be responsible with the trials in 2020. They were trying to do a real serious study to check whether the vaccines had the effect they wanted to. They recruited tens of thousands of people. For the boosters, they made an assumption that if some booster induces you to get antibodies in your blood it’s probably going to have some good effect. But they don’t know that. Now, with the flu we do that and there’s some reason for it. It’s called immune bridging. The idea is that the flu vaccine produces antibodies that are good against the current circulating flu in test subjects. Then, that means that it will protect you against severe disease from the flu, maybe even infection from the flu. Now, that’s an assumption that we don’t know for certain. But in the flu, there’s a lot more evidence going back decades that it might be a reasonable thing. Here you have a new vaccine, a disease that’s not the flu, and they made that assumption that you could use this immune bridging idea. Just test the bivalent booster, the new version of the vaccine, and see if it produces the antibodies. And if it produces antibodies, I can assume this can protect you against severe disease and death, and protect you against transmitting disease. Essentially, the evidence-based standards on which we would normally decide whether to approve of these updates were essentially gutted by the FDA when they did this. You can see what happened. There’s almost no uptake of these bivalent boosters. Mr. Jekielek: So, with people, there’s some awareness of this reality. Dr. Bhattacharya: Yes. One of the meetings where they approved the bivalent boosters used a presentation from the expert committees at the CDC that was based on eight mice or some small number of mice rather than humans at all. If I were on that committee, I would have demanded that the manufacturers produce human evidence with a real meaningful clinical endpoint. If you ask them to run a randomized trial and we won’t approve the vaccine unless you run one, they would have run one. That is a failure of the regulators there. By the way, that’s one of the questions in document one of the Norfolk Group. Mr. Jekielek: I want to go back to these groups that you’re participating in to try to assess all of this. It’s almost like it got worse somehow. What didn’t work was doubled down on, and then the standards were lowered subsequently, which just strains all credulity. It’s just out in the open. Does this make any sense to you at all? Dr. Bhattacharya: It’s the power of groupthink married to power. You have a relatively small number of very powerful science bureaucrats who surround themselves with people that won’t tell them that they’ve gone wrong. That’s why that fringe epidemiology thing is so telling. You have these outside experts telling you you’re wrong, “They must be fringe, because our group thinks it’s right.” They thought they were right. That’s the danger, Jan. They thought they were so right that they could exclude outside voices. And there was the doubling down as the evidence started getting worse and worse about the policies they suggested, or that their reading of the science is wrong. It’s very difficult for powerful people to say, “Yes, we got it wrong,” and change their minds. I’ve seen a few, but it’s very, very rare that it happens. The scientific establishment, especially the scientific bureaucracies in the World Health Organization and in the U.S. government and many other places just dug their heels in and doubled down, exactly the way you said. Mr. Jekielek: On the one side there’s censorship and there’s shadow-banning or your inability to be on the trends list. But on the other hand, what that creates is effectively this ability to shape the illusion of consensus. I never grasped how powerful these tools were. Dr. Bhattacharya: In 1500 in Europe, if you wanted to know the truth, you would look to your priests. There would be these trusted centers of authority that would tell you, “Here’s what’s true, here’s what’s false.” Those centers of authority were rooted in the Christian religion. When those trusted centers of authority went outside of their real expertise, they got things very, very wrong. The persecution of Galileo was a good example of this. In the modern world, the analogy of the Christian clerisy then, is the scientific bureaucracy and scientists now. If you want to know what’s true and false, you follow the science. But science isn’t like that. Science is complicated. At its heart, there’s this deep humility that we’re up against our ignorance about how the world actually works, and there is this method to try to develop it at the same time. So, you have this humble method that’s trying to slowly expand our knowledge about the way the physical world works. At the same time, you have the tremendous power from being at the top of this clerisy that can distinguish true from false unerringly. And then, based on that, policy gets made. People get excluded from society because they have an idea that is out of sorts with what the supposed consensus is. It’s the same problem that the Middle Ages faced. You have a high priest, and a clerisy that has divorced itself from the actual scientific method that gives it power, opining in places and making decisions in places where they don’t actually know what is true or false. But in the minds of many, many people who don’t know how to read science—like infectious disease epidemiology, it’s a complicated subject—it’s not surprising that so many people don’t know how to read it. There’s nothing wrong with that. The problem is that you have someone like Tony Fauci going around on TV in a sort of avuncular way conveying to the world that he is some knowledgeable guru who can tell the difference between true and false unerringly, even when he changes his mind five minutes later, and even though the things that he’s saying are not connected to actual science. It has a tremendous influence on the minds of people and we have to figure out systems to allow that to not happen. Mr. Jekielek: When what you just described is married to a structure that is our public square, which is Big Tech, it can say this voice will be amplified, and the other voices will be hidden, without you even realizing it. Dr. Bhattacharya: You put your finger on the key mechanism to guard against what we’ve gone through. The key mechanism is to allow a very large diverse set of voices to be heard, and not allow the government’s power to render scientists that disagree with the government off to the fringe. We must permit dissent. The scientific process involves debate and discussion. So I can say, “I have a hypothesis. It has some implications about what I expect to see in the data. You have a different hypothesis. You expect different things in the data.” We don’t fight. What we do is we go collect data and evidence and run experiments, and on the basis of that, the experiment may come out in the way they predicted, not my way. Then, I can say, “Now, your hypothesis is more likely to be true than mine. Maybe someone else will come along and have a different idea about what’s going on with implications that you didn’t think about and now you run experiments.” It’s a conversation. It’s a debate. It’s a discussion. It often gets very heated because people are very attached to the way they think about the world. But that’s fine. You want that debate and discussion. Now, of course, there’s a whole range of scientific topics. The earth is round, and there really isn’t a debate on that. People who say the earth is flat, you can pretty much dismiss them because there’s tremendous evidence that Earth is round. You don’t have to refight that over and over again. But on the most important scientific matters, things where it’s not known what’s true and false yet, because we’re still in the midst of our ignorance over it, you have to have that debate. On the edge of scientific discussion and scientific knowledge is controversy and debate. If you don’t allow that process to happen, science is dead. Mr. Jekielek: We first met in Florida when you were advising Governor DeSantis. You joined a new commission that he created. Please tell me about that, how it works, what it hopes to accomplish, and can this be replicated. Dr. Bhattacharya: It’s a public health integrity commission. It was started in December of 2022. There’s a number of very prominent epidemiologists on it, including Martin Kulldorff, Christine Stabell Benn from Denmark, Tracy Beth Hoeg, and Joseph Ladapo, the surgeon general of Florida. The goal of the committee is essentially to provide a second opinion when the CDC gets something wrong. Sometimes they’ll get things right and we’ll say it. Now, we’re still starting to figure out how this is going to work. It’s not all completely set up yet. It’s been a few months and we’re still just a few months into it. We’re still learning how the process is going to work. But the ultimate aim is to say, “Look, the CDC says X. Here’s our scientific view of it.” Actually, what I would love to have happen is why just Florida? This should happen all over the country. Every state should have their own second opinion of CDC policy decision-making. It’s not like the CDC is some oracular power that knows best and can distinguish truth and false. Let’s have a lot of voices. Let’s have those commissions all over the country, and all over the world. Let’s set up an institutional structure where you are allowed to contradict the CDC when they get it wrong. At the beginning of the pandemic, I had this idea, and I still have this idea. There are things that public health can do that are really quite good. If you contradict them, especially with some authorities, you’re committing a sinful act. If I tell you, Jan, that smoking is good for you, as a professor of Stanford University School of Medicine, I’ve committed a sin. People may listen to me. By the way, folks, smoking is bad for you, really bad for you. Don’t do it if you can. But I’ve committed a sin if I tell you that it might be okay. By contradicting public health orders, I might actually convince some people to do things that everyone believes are dangerous. Mr. Jekielek: Okay. Let me just jump in for one second. But what you really should do as a doctor or public health official is tell me what the cost-benefit is here. Maybe I really like smoking and I’m ready to take the risk of cancer. This doesn’t mean I’m going to get lung cancer, it just means my risk is higher. Dr. Bhattacharya: Yes, that’s right. I agree with that, Jan. Public health works best when we reason with people. We don’t force people to do things. We tell people, “Here’s what the evidence says. Here’s where it’s strong. Here’s where it’s weak.” Now, we have to do it in a certain way because a lot of the material is technical, so I want to be able to connect with people without getting deep into the weeds on the technical stuff, but also being true to the technical stuff. That kind of public health communication when it’s effective is really, really powerful, because it’s persuasive in a way that doesn’t run roughshod over your autonomy. You’re not just listening to me because of my authority. You’re listening to me because I’ve provided you with evidence that convinces you that this is the right thing to do. Jan, if you listen to the evidence, and you understand it and say, “Okay. Well, I’ve got to smoke.” I’m not going to approve of it, but I’m also not going to force you to listen to me. Mr. Jekielek: This is what I’m getting at. What I’m saying is that by telling people smoking is bad, but attaching this moral veneer, that this is just bad, that’s shorthand. That’s easy to do. It’ll reduce the number of deaths, but you’re not actually telling someone the truth of the situation. You’re not giving them the evidenced, reasoned response. Maybe it’s because you think that they’re not smart enough to really deal with the reality. Maybe they’ll make the wrong choice because the right choice is for them to not smoke. This is the mentality that we’ve seen. Dr. Bhattacharya: You’ve absolutely nailed it. The right way to communicate that smoking is bad for you is by telling them why it’s bad for you. “Here’s what the evidence is. There is all this evidence that your rate of lung cancer will go up, whatever the fraction is of people looked at in scientific studies. Here’s the rate of heart disease. Here’s the rate of all these maligned events. Are you certain to get all of these? No, but you’ve raised your risk of these things.” And then, let people make their own decisions. That will be much more effective in the long run than if you make some pronouncement like, “If you get the COVID vaccine, you will not get COVID, you will not pass COVID on.” It turned out to be false. Now all of a sudden, who’s going to believe the person that said that? The only real way for public health to be effective is to treat the people that they’re supposed to represent, the people they’re supposed to help, as reasoning adults with moral autonomy, not like chattel or children to be manipulated or nudged, or made to do exactly what public health wants them to do. The responsibility for public health officials is to convey the science as it is, as honestly as possible. When there’s uncertainty in the science, when there isn’t a consensus, don’t lie and say there is one. And when there actually is a consensus like smoking causes lung cancer, just convey that. The problem during the pandemic is that public health abdicated responsibility to convey scientific ideas, ideas about benefit and harm in a reasonable way. They treated people like children, as opposed to treating people like adults and reasoning with them. Mr. Jekielek: Where are we at today? Dr. Bhattacharya: Right now the policy situation is actually quite grim due to how public health has looked at lockdowns. Most people have moved on. The compliance and the fear, a lot of that has just dissolved away. People mostly think that COVID is over in one sense or the other, at least as far as their own lives are concerned. They don’t view it with the same kind of concern that they did in March 2020. At the same time, the governments have essentially institutionalized these policies. We haven’t firmly repudiated them, and so we’re in actually quite a dangerous place. Because as I said, if there’s another respiratory virus pandemic, it will happen again. The legal authority, the regulatory precedent, and the fact that this power exists to impose the lockdowns is now institutionally part of government. With a lot of the assessments, there has been a whitewash of what happened. There is this disconnect that needs to get fixed. I don’t believe if the people actually knew how unnecessary the lockdowns were that they would ever want them again. Now, many, many people feel the harms of the lockdowns themselves. They feel it deeply, but they can’t articulate exactly what went wrong or why it was unnecessary. We have to have an honest discussion, and I would hope that it would be bipartisan. I don’t see any reason why it needs to be inherently political, because it’s a failure of public health in my view. Public health isn’t supposed to be Democrat or Republican. It’s just supposed to be public health. So, the polity has a responsibility to do the assessment in the bipartisan way of public health, which is supposed to serve the polity. That’s where we are now. We are in a situation where people feel like it’s over. There’s a lot of relief. Of course, COVID is still floating around. It will be here forever, so it’s not over in that sense, but the danger it poses is gone. We don’t want the disruptions to continue anymore in our lives. Public health authorities want to take a victory lap. They can’t really, but they can whitewash their sins. That’s the situation we currently find ourselves in. Mr. Jekielek: I have to stress this. I find it difficult to find a single policy that was good. I’m sure there is one, but in these large, very socially impactful decisions across the board, I find it very difficult in talking to many experts to find anything that was substantive. It feels like the entire thing needs a reworking. Dr. Bhattacharya: You could point to some focused protection policy. In Germany I saw some cities that had organized free taxi rides for older people to go to the grocery store. There was an attempt to deliver food to older people in their homes. Governor DeSantis actually had this great idea for a policy where there was this therapy called monoclonal antibodies. You had to get it with an IV. Normally, you would have to go to the hospital to get it. He organized… Mr. Jekielek: The infusion sites. Dr. Bhattacharya: People could actually just call and then the infusion site would come to them in their home, for older people and vulnerable people. There were some good policies. All the policies that were focused on protecting older people in ways that didn’t destroy their autonomy were actually quite good. It’s not to say that everything we did was wrong. I don’t agree with that, but I think that so much that we did was wrong. So much that we did in the name of public health was unethical, and so much that we did in the name of public health was so destructive. You have to have an honest assessment or else the public is never going to trust public health again. Public health isn’t going to deserve that. And yet, the government power to enforce public health ideas is going to remain in place. It’s a recipe for disaster. Mr. Jekielek: Unfortunately, in a number of recent interviews, we’ve been exposing very convincing, foundational problems in different societal structures. In this case, we’re more focused on public health. It can leave people who are watching and who are just realizing this really distraught and to some extent kind of hopeless. Because like you said, things mostly went wrong. Some leadership is patting itself on the back and pushing for more. What do you see as the best path forward for the typical person that is faced with this reality? Dr. Bhattacharya: There has to be an honest assessment of whether the leaders of public health want it or not. Too many people have been hurt and too many people sense that there were huge mistakes made, at the very least, if you want to call them that. So, there needs to be an assessment. The only question is the form of it. And for the folks at home, what can you do? You can ask your school leaders, “What was that two years of school closure about? What are you doing to address the gaps in knowledge that happened?” You can go to the nursing home where your mom or dad is and say, “When they were depressed, why didn’t you let me come and say hello? Why didn’t you try to figure out some safe ways to allow humane treatment?” You go to the hospital where your parents died and say, “Look, why didn’t you let me say goodbye?” You can push your elected leaders for reform so that things like this never happen again. There are things that happened to you during the lockdown that were bad during the last two-and-a-half years as a result of the lockdown policies, and as a result of the fear mongering. You can constructively use that hurt to push leaders to acknowledge the harm and to make reforms. That’s really the source of my hope—that all these people that were hurt, and the populace at large coming to understand what happened wasn’t necessary, and we can do better. In my deepest heart, I believe that will happen if we can just get the agenda in front of the people, saying, “Here are the questions to ask your leaders,” and to actually ask for new leadership in those institutions that failed. I think that can happen. I think that will happen. I think it’s inevitable that it will happen. The only question is how can we help the process along, and make it as constructive as possible? I’m not interested in Nuremberg 2.0. That’s tremendously destructive. What I’m interested in is deep institutional reform, and this is still the United States, a country that responds to people, and that is driven by the people. Government is for the people. Government is by the people. As corny as it sounds, it is still true. We just need to give the people a voice and a set of questions to ask, and that’s what I hope to be able to do. Mr. Jekielek: Jay Bhattacharya, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Dr. Bhattacharya: Thank you, Jan. That was so much fun. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Dr. Jay Bhattacharya 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 - BUY "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 we saw their statistics and their projections, and the needs that they projected in the States, and the types of deaths they projected even early on and how you could see that they were wrong, right away we knew we were dealing with a very, very different beast. They had no concern for science or accuracy. It was all about the panic,” said Justin Hart, author of “Gone Viral: How COVID Drove the World Insane.” “When the threat of mortality comes down from so many avenues, over every medium, over every channel … everyone is telling you: ‘You’re going to die if you don’t take these interventions that we recommend,’ it does crazy things to society.” Hart realized early on in the pandemic that what people were hearing from health agencies and the media didn’t match up with the data, so he started RationalGround.com to provide the public with reasoned evidence and fact-based analysis about the impact of COVID-19. “We know from inner workings that Vivek Murthy and Jen Psaki of the White House—they were personally working with Facebook and Twitter to [get what] they wanted taken down,” says Hart. Hart discusses the fallout from the pandemic, from child suicides to economic devastation to government censorship and surveillance. We also look at the recently released Cochrane mask study and what the data shows. “From all of the studies they reviewed, especially towards masking, they found there was no significant evidence whatsoever that masking would stop a viral pathogen,” says Hart. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/justin-hart-the-cochrane-mask-study-failed-covid-predictions-and-fallout-from-useless-pandemic-policy_5066651.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Justin Hart, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Justin Hart: Jan, thanks for having me on. I’m glad to be here. Mr. Jekielek: Justin, I’ve really enjoyed visiting your website over the last few years, Rational Ground. I always found it to be a place where I knew I could get some new information that was heavily backed by data, and this has been a little bit difficult over the last while. Mr. Hart: We launched that website in the summer of 2020. Before then, we were posting on our own blogs or a lot on Twitter. But, all of a sudden, the waves started coming again, and we realized that the policies they had implemented early in the pandemic weren’t going away anytime soon. And so, we pulled together a group of folks, kind of like a Battlestar Galactica group of ragtag experts, analysts, moms, and dads. We put together Rational Ground as a response to the stringent policies that we’re still enacting and that are harming ourselves and especially our kids. As the fall year of the school year came about 2020, we realized that we were going to have to get organized and really have a strong response. I’m glad you enjoyed that, but we definitely pulled together some yeoman’s work to make that happen. Mr. Jekielek: I also just recently finished reading your book, which traces some of the work you did in Rational Ground and some of the things you discovered along the way. You basically dedicate a chapter to a policy or a chapter to an issue; quick chapters, quick summaries, I like that. But when you come out the other end of this book, you realize, “My goodness, did anything work? Was anything successful?” It reminded me of a tweet I put out back in October of ’21, and I’ll just read it to you, and I want to get your reaction. “It just struck me: we’re witnessing, in real-time, the spectacular, accelerating failure of the ‘governance by expert class model,’ its follies laid bare daily, even as its proponents double down on touting its benevolent inevitability. And it also struck me: in this lies hope.” Mr. Hart: That’s really insightful. What happens is there’s the science. “This is what science tells us.” But as soon as it gets inserted into public policy, all bets are off. Things become a little bit wacky. The impacts that people projected they have no idea about. But I think you’re right. I say at the outset in my book, I say, “I’m not a healthcare expert. I don’t pretend to be one.” And I say, “I normally wouldn’t insert myself into someone else’s domain.” But, Jan, they had no problem inserting themselves into my domain, my kid’s education, my healthcare, my barber shop. And so, I hope they will forgive me if I check the math, because that’s sort of my forte. And when we checked the math, we realized it was completely off and that they were based on these very rigorous, stringent policies like stay-at-home orders and quarantining healthy people. We said, “Something is absolutely amiss here. We’ve got our policy really wacky.” When the experts in a particular domain like science prove themselves to be real follies in the expertise around public policy, that’s when disaster ensues. Mr. Jekielek: There’s also this very interesting nuance. Sometimes you can have an expert, and that expert is an expert in a very, very specific field. And maybe they really are an expert. But to have that expert crafting the public health policy overall would be kind of insane, because how could they possibly know? That is not their job. Their job hasn’t been to try to integrate all of the science with the social outcomes that are likely to result from certain types of policy. Mr. Hart: Yes. You think about masks, for example. That’s always a touchpoint of great contention over the last three years. But even if masks were 100 per cent effective—flashback, breaking news, they are not—even if they were, it’s unclear whether mandating that for an entire public is the right policy in general. When you put these mandates that infringe on people’s individual rights, you’re typically breaking something, and when you break something, it’s hard to earn it back. I think that panic and the threat of mortality were bludgeons that our health overlords, as I sometimes call them, used against the populace to get their way. They really do. If I think about it, I often tell my team, “Put them in the best light. What is their best intention? What is the best interpretation that you have of this thing?” Maybe their implementations, these policies that they nailed down on top of us, maybe they really did think they were going to help. But, in the end, you have to go with the evidence, and you always have to stick with your rights. If you see the government coming after you with a bludgeon and they’re coming first to take away your rights, if you stick your neck out against that, you can’t go wrong. You’ll probably end up on the right side of the equation. Mr. Jekielek: I definitely want to talk about this new Cochrane mask study, this meta-study of 78 different studies. I know you’ve been talking about it, and it settles the science much better than anything up to now. We’re going to talk about that. But before we go there, I want to go back to this thing that I was observing back in October of ’21. All of these policies are failures, and it’s almost unbelievable. We could go through your book chapter by chapter because it’s basically policy by policy. But which 10 come to your mind? Mr. Hart: We can go sequentially. First of all, they got the transmission of the disease wrong. They felt that it was primarily coming over droplets, that it was coming over a specific set of all people. We now know that it’s likely a very aerosolized disease. They got that wrong. You then go on to their projections around mortality. At one point, the WHO predicted that this was going to be a mortality where three out of a hundred people would die. Dr. Fauci got in front of Congress and he mixed-up terms around the fatality rate of people that actually test positive for COVID and are sick and those that have it and have no idea. He predicted that one out of a hundred people would die. Video: The flu has a mortality of 0.1 per cent. Sure. This has a mortality of 10 times that. Mr. Hart: We now know it’s a factor lower than that. In fact, for the vast majority of people, 85 per cent of the country under the age of 65, their mortality, that is, their risk of dying, is lower than that of influenza. Meaning that they’re more likely to die if they catch the flu. Now, when we go onto the next part, they predicted that we were going to have massive overruns on hospitals, and stagnation of people getting pitched there at the ER. Our ERs are still down today. In fact, hospitals are struggling to retain any sort of economic viability because people are still scared to go there. The impacts on that are paramount. Then you think about the silly things they implemented, like plexiglass. They implemented that countrywide. Every single 7-Eleven, even your schools, turned into what looked like a bank teller with this bulletproof glass in front of them. It was disconcerting. It was disorienting. And it turns out it was completely useless. The CDC came out and very quietly removed that recommendation for retail and for schools in March of ’21. Not a lot of people know that because they realized, “Oh, this is actually preventing a lot of airflow, and it’s also another place you have to clean.” You go on to the next intervention, perhaps the most stringent being the stay-at-home orders, the lockdowns, and the closing of businesses. Our first clues that something was wrong were from oncologists who called us and said, “Either COVID has cured cancer or something else is happening here altogether,” because they were seeing half as many patients in the spring of 2020 as they were the year before. It was not because people weren’t getting cancer. They were. They were just too scared to go out and seek treatment. The impact of that, we’re still feeling, and we’ll see that trickle in here now for years as people discover late-stage cancers that they could have caught early on. Mr. Jekielek: So, it wasn’t necessarily just treatment. It was also just checking to see if you had prostate cancer, for example. Mr. Hart: Exactly. Those regular checkups. Even 50 per cent of young infants and children missed immunizations over that time, because a lot of primary care physicians had closed down their shops except for emergency issues. The list goes on and on. The quarantining of children for the slightest exposure was perhaps the most damaging of the policies that they implemented. Almost everyone agrees that that was wrong. While most of the schools were closed down in the spring of 2020, when we came back to school in the fall of ’20 and then the winter of ’21, and then through the next year, the big issue became exposure to COVID. In fact, I would say that the fall and winter of the ’21/22 school season was far more frustrating and just dreadful for families than it was from earlier times because, at that point, there was a policy implemented almost across the nation that if your kid had the slightest exposure to anyone that had a positive case, they would have to stay home for 10 days. This is what made it personal for me. I’ve got eight kids. I’ve got a Brady Bunch family, and we have three kids that are under the age of five. From the time that Thanksgiving came around in 2021, we had kids at home for the entire rest of the year missing school, not because they were sick, but because some student had a positive test that came back, and the entire classroom had to go home for 10 days. A dreadful experience. Mr. Jekielek: I just want to remind our viewers, because I was actually just speaking with an Uber driver about this earlier today. Unlike influenza, COVID or coronavirus or CCP virus, as we call it at Epoch Times, has a very interesting characteristic, which is that children don’t transmit it, and they also are at extremely low risk from it. In fact, at some of the low ages, it’s statistically zero. It’s just unbelievable that these interventions, which obviously are going to have an impact, happen in this type of a context. Mr. Hart: And it would have this great psychological effect on kids. One in five children came up with ideations of suicide, especially young women. You think about just the years of education that got lost. Look, Jan, you and I were adults when policies and politics got inserted into our lives. We try to deal with it. Hopefully, we’ll bring it to the ballot box the next time it comes around. Our kids don’t have that luxury. They also don’t get those years back. I was over at a friend’s house, and he’s talking about the impact on kids. His child, who was then in second grade, was coloring a target type of coupon book, and there were all these pictures of kids and everything else. And he was dutifully taking a marker and putting a mask on all of the kids’ faces because he thought that’s how they should be. The psychological impact on our kids thinking that they’re a vector of disease when, as you pointed out, there’s really very little evidence of that. In fact, there’s a lot of evidence that they become a brake on the disease. It’s astounding what sort of clawback we’re going to have to do with these kids. The results are in. We’re seeing with the mass studies that the mass scores have gone back now by a decade as far as the improvements that we used to see. I talked to our preschool teachers where we had our kids. They’re now in kindergarten. They’re seeing rampage rages of biting because kids didn’t learn those key social cues due to their faces being masked. Also, consider this. We believe from two studies that were done that we probably missed about 250,000 cases, Jan, of potential domestic abuse, child abuse, and spousal abuse. Why? Because it’s typically sharp-eyed teachers and administrators who catch those things and call those out, and kids weren’t in school. And then, when kids get back into school, how many bruises on mom’s face did we miss because masks were required at drop off? Those are things where you don’t think about the impacts, but those are very real and very lasting. Mr. Jekielek: Scott Atlas, when I first met him, was saying, “It’s unforgivable that, as a society, we use children as shields for adults,” and I could never shake that thought. Mr. Hart: It really is devastating. Our team was fortunate enough, and this is where we kind of got our claim to fame later, we were the main support team for Scott Atlas when he was at the White House. We were approached by several of his colleagues at Stanford, saying, “Scott needs some help here. What can you do?” Pro bono, every morning from July of 2020 to the end of that year, we would get calls from Scott, we would get texts from him, and the team would go to work. “He’s going to St. Louis. He needs to know what are the excess death rates there? What are you seeing, as far as cases are going?” He had very little support. Whereas the stalwarts, who had entire teams, like Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx, were producing massive documents every day. We tried to meet that. Eventually, our charts would make it to the presses, where President Trump would laude them, and Scott Atlas would handle the press there. We were very proud of the work we did there. But you can talk to Scott, and you realize just the complete surprise he had at the lack of quality and the lack of real prowess there was at the White House. To put it bluntly, I had a conversation with Scott one time, and again, I was trying to find the best interpretation. What’s the kindest interpretation I could find for why Dr. Fauci and Dr. Birx aren’t turning the ship around? Scott had been completely successful in decimating the instigations of the lockdowns and school closures. Why aren’t they changing policies as we get closer and closer to that vital election? I said, “Scott, maybe they’re just having trouble saving face.” That was my interpretation. He said, “No, Justin. You need to know these people, unfortunately, are not smart. Some of them are dumb.” I’m like, “Oh, no.” It really is the case that while these people have been experts in their field, they probably are behind the ball on the latest information, especially when it comes out so quickly and when their policy implications are so vast. So, that was a really eye-opening experience that both Scott and our team had. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s jump to this Cochrane mask study. What does this study tell us? Mr. Hart: Seriously, it’s been a very contentious issue. It’s because it’s the most recognizable, and it impacted almost everybody everywhere, especially when they had to wear it for a long time. Mr. Jekielek: You talk about, in the book, how masks essentially became talismans like a type of virtue signaling tool. Mr. Hart: Right. In fact, all the evidence leading up to the pandemic, up to 2020, showed no efficacy whatsoever for these masks. Even with the high-quality N95 masks in a healthcare setting, there was no stringent evidence showing that they provided any benefit as far as curbing respiratory viral pathogens. When we got to the pandemic, we went through all of these pieces. The Cochrane report came out in early 2020 and did a review of about 10 to 12 of these things. Now, they’ve expanded that in the last few weeks to include about 78 different studies. We’re looking at interventions like masks, washing of hands, and physical distancing. From all of the studies they reviewed, especially around masking, they found there was no significant evidence whatsoever that masking would stop viral pathogens and curb that sort of thing. In fact, they found just the opposite. That the interventions were oftentimes very hard for people to implement. Here’s a headline. This is in the Santa Barbara News. “Masks are the chief ally of the disease. The masks become a veritable incubator of bacteria.” That was written in 1918. We knew a hundred years ago, when they tried to implement masking to stop the Spanish flu, that they didn’t work as a policy implementation. We’ve just forgotten the past. We’ve tried it again and again. It’s understandable why it was there. Even the author of the Cochrane Times, Tom Jefferson, admits that. This became basically some type of SOP [Standard Operating Procedure], some type of gimme to these politicians who wanted a tool that they could use and get up on the pulpit and say, “Cases are going up. You’re not masking hard enough. Oh, look, cases are going down. Thank you very much, folks, for masking.” Because they felt helpless in the face of this very, very hard disease to stop spreading, they wanted to have tools at their disposal. Masks became a scapegoat. A talisman, as actually one of the NIH reports put out. This report on masking came out and said, “There’s very little evidence that we could show that they help in a healthcare setting, but maybe they could work as a talisman.” I don’t want that in my scientific literature. I certainly don’t want them implemented as policies to mask my two-year-old and my five-year-old. Mr. Jekielek: But they also became something like a political statement, bizarrely. Mr. Hart: Yes, I suppose it’s an outward expression of an inward faith. It became a very strong virtue signal for people, especially for our young adults who were going to college. A generation ago, my parents, who went to college in the 60s, would have thumbed their noses at any type of government intervention that made them wear this mask. But for our kids today, the kindest interpretation I have is that the risk of them of being captured on social media in the wrong place with the wrong implementations, not wearing a mask, not social distancing, that risk was far greater to their being than having to stick their neck out and go against the grain. That’s why people complied, it was an actual virtual signal. It felt good to help other people. But again, once you implement a policy that is your requirement to do to help other people, even though you are not sick, there are serious ethical issues involved, and it does intimately disrupt those interactions we have with each other day to day. Mr. Jekielek: You’re just reminding me of something you wrote in the book and I’ll quote it, “Fear of living life is with us now.” I had a guest on the show, Lenore Skenazy, who runs an organization called Let Grow. She observed that there is this very weird safetyism in our society where people always gravitate towards the side of safety, as opposed to the side of adventure. The point being that safetyism, that strange development, suddenly went on steroids in COVID. I’m not even sure how we will recover from this. Mr. Hart: It’s going to be a different difficult path to claw back that normalness that we so crave. Politicians are very averse to anything that hints at mortality, at risking someone’s imminent demise. Even over in England, they’re having a trial right now concerning a couple of city streets, because they’ve had multiple injuries of people looking at their cell phone while walking down the street and running into poles and signposts because they’re not looking where they’re going. Instead of curbing that and having people learn from their mistakes, they’re putting pads around the poles, so that people don’t harm themselves when they run into them. We all live in a padded cell. And in fact, if you weren’t an agoraphobe or if you were right on the cusp of that before the pandemic, you almost certainly are an agoraphobe now, and that’s not easy to win back. Because we rewarded that sort of virtue signaling so strongly, it became part of our society. Now, it’s going to take us a little bit to pawn that off there. But this is nothing new. We can go back 400 years to a real plague, the one that took over Europe in the 1600s, The Plague, which would take one out of three lives. But the panic that ensued around that was pretty amazing as well. There’s an author from the 19th century, Alessandro Manzoni, who wrote The Betrothed, a book about two lovers trying to find their way in the time of plague in Milan. People were panicked back then, and he read through their journals. He uncovered some real journal entries from the 17th century. An old man was in a church. It was rumored throughout the city that outside forces were coming in, and they were washing the walls with infected water and anointing the pews with this infected dirt as well so that it would spread the disease and take over the City of Milan. That was the fear induced by the rumor mill. One gentleman is at the front of the pew at church, and someone sees him brushing off the pew and assumes that he was anointing the bench. He yells out, “He’s anointing the bench. He’s anointing the pew. He’s spreading the disease.” A crowd took the man outside, and the journal entry concludes, “I do not think he could have survived very much longer.” We saw that panic on planes, in schools, at school boards, and in confrontations. When you instill that fear into society, crazy things happen. Manzoni mentions in his book, “The fear of the disease besought and took over the minds of the people more than any damage that the disease itself could have done.” That is true for this pandemic too. Mr. Jekielek: There’s a journalist in the UK, Laura Dodsworth, who is able to document how so-called nudge units in the UK government were sowing fear into the population. We know, even through looking at the Twitter files and some of the work that has been done on the Missouri versus Biden case, that there’s censorship happening around certain types of material. And on the other side, there’s the manufacturing of consensus happening around other ways of viewing the pandemic and what you should do in response. There was this fear, but it seems like this fear wasn’t entirely accidental. It wasn’t just necessarily a natural byproduct of people panicking. Mr. Hart: In his book, Dr. Atlas talks about an incident where he had an encounter with Dr. Fauci in the hall, and he questioned him. He says, “Don’t you think people are scared enough?” Dr. Fauci replied, “No, they’re not nearly afraid enough.” That is terrible public policy. Where I come from in San Diego, our local health director, the unelected Wilma Wooten, came to the pulpit at the end of 2021 and said, “You should just assume that everyone you meet has COVID and treat them as such. Video: Assume that everyone has COVID-19. So that’s my advice, not only to parents that are sending their kids from out of state. That’s my advice for everyone throughout San Diego County, throughout the state, and throughout the nation. Mr. Hart: We would see these accounts again and again. You remember these terrible videos of grandparents hugging their grandkids through these plastic draperies. One account I know for sure that I want to find justice for was the incident with a woman named Franca Panettone. Franca’s in Florida, 49 years old, and she’s mentally disabled. She has Down Syndrome, and she’s had it her entire life. Of course, she’s largely non-verbal. Her sister is her life vein, she helps her, and she is her legal healthcare representative. She contracts what we think is COVID early in the pandemic. She’s taken to a hospital. There at the hospital, she’s separated from her sister, and because of the policies of that hospital and the panic of that day, her sister and her family would never see her again. She was taken to the back. For the next 10 days, she suffered not knowing what was going on, having no one there to validate her to support her. They later learned, Jan, this chokes me up, by reading the notes on her file, that she was so distressed she tried to get out of her bed multiple times. They strapped her to the gurney, a Down Syndrome woman, midlife, cut down. They watched her die over FaceTime from the parking lot. There is no justice until we find that justice for Franca Panettone, because we need to make sure this doesn’t happen again. Those policies caused fear, and it rippled through society. Every single industry was devastated. That’s the next mode we’re in. We’ve got to have accountability and transparency on these things and justice for Franca. Mr. Jekielek: I’m remembering one of these modelers that basically grossly overestimated how many deaths there would be being interviewed. I can’t remember who it is right now, but they were being very unapologetic. Like, “Yes, I overestimated, but it happens.” Mr. Hart: Yes, it is frustrating. Those were some of the first people we went after because we’re math guys. When we saw their statistics and their projections and the needs that they projected in these states and the types of deaths they projected, even early on you could see that they were wrong right away. We knew we were dealing with a very, very different beast. They had no concern for science or accuracy. It was all about the panic. They really did feel like if they could instill enough fear in people, they would go at it. I had some friends in Orange County. They texted me saying, “Justin, both my parents have died now, neither from COVID. One died from a blood disease, the other one from an undiagnosed cancer. They were too scared to go out and seek treatment.” Early on in the pandemic, my team got access to a host of death certificates, redacted of personal information. We found what they died of, and this is in the summer of 2020. We looked at 700 of these things. There was one phrase that kept coming up, and it’s something very common when you find someone who was in a nursing home in their last months of life. It said, “Failure to thrive.” And that denotes what a lot of these people experience, especially when they are suffering from Alzheimer’s. They rely on human interaction. When that is yanked from them, their life is shortened dramatically. Mr. Jekielek: Before we continue, I want to touch on something you mentioned, that you’re a math guy, but you’re not a scientist. But you do have an acumen, and there is a way that you got into creating Rational Ground. So, give me the background here. Mr. Hart: My background is I’ve been a chief marketing officer for several companies. I’ve been a chief data officer, and my forte is I’m a funnel doctor. A funnel is something that all business people recognize, right. You have certain people that come to your website, and they then leave their emails. We’re now getting down in the funnel, and you approach them with more interesting things about your products and services. They become an opportunity for you to convert them to a customer, right. So, it goes from a lead, as we say, to a customer very quickly. That’s very much how the CDC looks at their numbers when they talk about people that get infected, people that test positive, people that go to the hospital, and people that die. If you know how those things are calculated and what you should expect, generally, it’s almost a universal rule on these things. And then, you look at what they projected early on. That’s when I knew something was broken because I knew funnels. When I looked at their numbers, and then I looked at the raw data, I said, “Someone has really got their thumb on the scale here, because this is not what the numbers say.” We would bring all sorts of practitioners from different fields to take a look at this. We had insurance agents. We had people that were looking at cell phone data. We had people that were looking at UV rays because they’re engineers of cement bridges that are being built, and they knew exactly what was transpiring down to the Nth level, and we all lent our expertise. But beyond all that, you don’t need a degree in anything to push back on policies. Again, there’s the science, and the problem is that we decided to give the reins for who makes the policy to the people who determined the science. Dr. Fauci, and Dr. Collins, the head of the NIH, not only influenced the policy of what sort of implementations and interventions should be used, they also determined the grant money that would go out from the NIH. What were your chances of getting a paper or a proposed study approved with funding from the government if it didn’t toe the line on their particular narrative? Like natural immunity, for example. We now know from uncovered FOIAS that Dr. Fauci and other influencers were telling them to completely dismiss a hundred years of epidemiology 101, which is that if you get infected with a disease, the impact of that disease down the road is likely lessened, and you have some really, really good strong antibodies in your body to deal with it. They completely dismissed that notion and said, “Everyone must get vaccinated.” That decision alone may have huge, huge ramifications. We know from replete evidence and even in the trials of young kids who have had the disease and then get vaccinated, that their systems can go; tilt, joint pain, high fevers, because the body’s already producing a lot of this stuff. They’re young, so it produces a lot more than us in our old age here. And then, their systems just can’t deal with it. So, it starts sending it throughout the body. Now, a lot of that is probably over my skis, and a little bit beyond my pay grade as well, to understand what’s happening there. But given the track record, lockdowns, stay-at-home orders, vax efficacy, natural immunity, and everything that they did that was wrong—with their trajectory, I wouldn’t bet on them for sure. I would bet on the guys who are saying there may be some serious harms in the vaccine. Mr. Jekielek: There are some very prominent doctors right now calling for a pause of the deployment of these genetic vaccines until a much more thorough review is done. Going back to children, there has never been a case for vaccinating kids, given that their risk was extremely low. Even I know that at this point. There is also quite a bit of data showing that these companies that created the vaccines were aware of substantial harms that weren’t publicized. Mr. Hart: Professionally, I’m a demographer. I rely on immense surveys of the population. I’ve worked for presidential campaigns. I’ve worked for Fortune 500 companies helping them understand, “Here’s what the public is saying. Here’s what that means.” When the surveys come back now and they show that a very large percentage of people know someone who has been harmed by the vaccine, and when you see the details come back as to who is getting the latest bivalent booster, the population that is getting it is very low. I don’t think we’ve even reached 20 per cent right now as far as 18-year-olds and older who have gotten that vaccine. And for that newly approved vaccine for infants and toddlers under the age of five, it hasn’t even reached 10 per cent. Something is afoot. People are sick and tired of the multiple boosters they’re required to get. They think it’s a bit of cry wolf, or it’s something more replete. The word has gotten out, and there are some serious known personal damages that people are recognizing or maybe they themselves have experienced. Mr. Jekielek: I’m going to read something else from the book.”The virus of the mind has done more damage than the virus ever did.” Mr. Hart: Yes. In my own family, and I think a lot of people can relate to this, there are contentions. There are people that are more attuned to risk, and people that are less attuned to risk. I’ve got parents who are elderly, and it became a real confusion as to what they should do. A lot of times, this became very political, which automatically divided the entire public immediately. Republicans are against masks. Democrats are for them. But I think it goes a little deeper. I’ve now given dozens of interviews on this book, and I have one good friend who’s in big strong conservative radio talk shows. I’ve known him for years. I’ve gotten him exclusive interviews, and for some reason, he was the one holdout to give me an interview. I DM’d him the other day. I said, “When are we going to do the show? I’ll send you a book.” He says, “Justin, I can’t. I think you’re causing more harm. I think your attitude has actually caused deaths.” That’s a perfect encapsulation of what we’re experiencing. It cuts across boundaries. One of my closest friends now is Jennifer Sey. She’s this spry former athlete. She was the 1985 U.S. gymnastics champion. She went on to be a very successful marketing officer for Levi’s. She was set for the top job, and then she gave it all up because she knew that her kids counted and that they weren’t putting them back into school. She put down a golden parachute to exemplify what she wanted to do. She’s now my friend. She was a lifetime Democrat. I have more Democrat friends, and more friends on the other side of the political aisle than I could ever count. Now, my lines are blurring too because I knew a lot of people that didn’t step up. There’s an old rabbinical story that’s passed down through the ages, and it goes like this. “The people in those days were very wicked, which is why God sent the flood, and the people who didn’t make it onto the boat, which were many, when the waters rose to their knees, they pulled their children to their waist. When the waters rose to their waist, they put their children in their arms. When the waters rose to their neck, they put their children on their shoulders, but when it rose even further, they put their children under their feet so they could survive.” When the threat of mortality comes down from so many avenues and over every medium, over every channel, everyone is telling you, “You are going to die if you don’t take these interventions. You’re going to die if you don’t take these interventions that we recommend.” It does crazy things to society. Some of them are funny and humorous. I did some interviews for the book with executives from the toilet paper industry. I was a little curious, why did we all run out of toilet paper? I remember doing the run on Costco and getting my big Kirkland swab like everyone else there, so I could have enough for the stay-at-home orders. It turns out, if you’ll forgive the phrase, we do half of our business at our businesses. The type of supply chain-quality TP there is very different from the soft cushy bear stuff that we’re used to at home. When you cut that off, all of a sudden, the manufacturers had to scramble to produce more of the cushy bear stuff. What’s funny is now that the pandemic is over, they’ve got all of these big reams, the things you might see at a stadium mounted into the stall there. What are they going to do with them? Well, the marketing guys, like myself, they’re really smart, and so they came up with this great idea. Charmin forever. They’ll send you the metal stand with one of those big rolls. You can mount it right next to your little latrine there, and there you go, toilet paper for a month. No problem. Those sort of impacts are things we didn’t think about. Take another interview that we did with engineers across the Vegas Strip. One engineer, Michael Hurtado, talked about how he spent the entire spring of 2020 with his team walking the floors of his hotel in Vegas that was then empty. They had to go into every single room every week and tend to the loo, turn on the shower, make sure the sink isn’t clogging up, because otherwise when things are back and open, it could be Legionnaire’s disease or worse. Plus, the plumbing systems of these hotels were designed for at least 10 to 15 to 20 per cent occupancy all year round. They count on that amount of water flowing to keep things flushing. So, like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, Michael and his team walked the halls of the Ahern properties off the Vegas Strip, going room to room. All work and no play makes Michael Hurtado a very dull boy in Vegas, and we would see that again and again in industry after industry, the impacts that no one ever saw when you turn the lights on. Just consider this. How many experiments were completely trumped and stowed away or killed altogether because all of the animal specimens, like rats, had to be put down in the spring of 2020? Years of data wiped away. How many diseases will be foregone because we stopped those experiments? Mr. Jekielek: How is it possible that we implemented these terrible policies that were almost ubiquitously just bad ideas, policy after policy after policy? But some people will say, “Well, this was the “plandemic.” It was all actually a big plan from the beginning. This is what we would call a moderate virus by pandemic standards, but we took these really disproportionate measures.” Other people might say, “The panic happened, and there’s just a lot of opportunists in the system. They took advantage.” Where do you lie on this? Mr. Hart: I’m more towards the latter only because I don’t think our governments are that smart. You’ve heard these implementations that somehow the vaccine contains microchips, and then when the 5G networks go out, they’re going to turn us all into zombies. That’s literally a theory out there. Mr. Jekielek: I’ll have to tell you, I have not heard this one. Mr. Hart: That one’s a great one. It’s fun to go down that rabbit hole, but don’t go down that rabbit hole. But the bottom line is that’s not happening because our government is just not smart enough to make that happen. So, I tend to lean towards the moment that they’re conniving and absolutely going after power if they see that gap. In this case, it was instilled by an immense fear that we were going to lose everything and everyone was going to die. They saw that moment to insert themselves. Even the World Economic Forum admitted a few weeks ago that they were immensely pleased when they said jump, most of us in the world said, “How high?” That’s unfortunate because I think it’s amazing what we’ll give up for the security that we think we’re getting, and we actually didn’t get any of it. They tried to implement the same policy for everyone across the board. They tried to protect everybody and ended up protecting no one. In the end, they probably saw the breach in the wall and said, “That’s our moment. Send in our army, send them in surreptitiously, but let’s get them in there.” And now, they’re well positioned. There’s a good feeling of people wanting to say, “I want to put this in my rearview mirror.” Right. Even my good friends and family members are telling me, “Justin, so glad that you’re talking about some other things other than COVID.” They hear me repeating myself. Maybe they’re sick of it a little bit. But at the same time, what people failed to realize there was the battle against the disease, but there was another movement afoot which was implemented throughout the policies. Those same tactics, stay-at-home orders, testing for whatever else, physical implementations, government override of your rights, those are just tools. Those are tactics. They will pull those straight out of their dormant toolbox any day for the latest boogeyman that they think is required to curb this all together. For climate change, any one of those policies could easily be implemented. Heck, it took the climate people four decades to convince us and put into law that what we exhale was killing the planet. It took them four weeks to convince us that what we were exhaling was killing grandma. The next thing is going to go even quicker. Masks for climate change, we guarantee you, coming up. Mr. Jekielek: Masks for climate change. I suppose anything is possible these days. Mr. Hart: You’re breathing CO2 at me right now, Jan. I can feel it over here. Mr. Jekielek: Oh gosh. Mr. Hart: I have to be careful. Let’s whisper a little more. I’m a tenor, and by one study, tenors exude more air. That was an actual study in the middle of this whole thing. Someone drove the world insane, right, and we started doing studies around which section of the choir would be more infected than the other. We decided to mask them all just to be safe. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s talk about this, because society did go crazy. There were some unbelievably authoritarian policies that were implemented. There are emergency orders still in play which allow all sorts of suspension of rights, even if those aren’t as heavily in play. What’s to prevent this from happening again? Mr. Hart: Very little, unfortunately, because Pandora’s Box was unleashed. I was a huge supporter of President Trump. I predicted he was going to win in 2016, much to the chagrin of many of my friends. When the pandemic happened, we all sort of agreed to a two-week pause in life to try to curb this thing. What we know, right? I remember that fateful day, March 29th, 2020, three years ago, when President Trump got up to the pulpit in the Rose Garden. Dr. Fauci, Dr. Birx, Vice President Pence, and the rest of them all there and said, “We are extending the federal recommended lockdown for another 40 days.” I tweeted out, “He just lost the election. He just lost the election.” I’m saddened that I was right on that, because I knew even just demographically, if just 3 per cent of the population over the age of 65 decided to stay home and not vote for anyone nor Trump, he would lose. Because we rely on some of those demographics to carry us over the board there. But I also knew that this was going to unleash Pandora’s Box. There were 50 governors, 3,200 unelected health directors, and 13,000 school districts across the country that had their own policies. It’s a mess out there. You could go county to county. Your restaurant could be 500 feet from another restaurant in another county. You are closed down, but they can take people right up to the counter. It made no sense whatsoever. Unfortunately, I don’t think any of that’s going to be fixed until we get something at the top that can go in and take a look at all the wrenches that have been thrown in the works down below. We’re going to need some really strong leadership at the top to figure out what’s going to happen because, right now it’s still a mess. Emergency orders are there. Take Hollywood, for example. This is a perfect example of how I don’t know when they’ll ever be out of the pandemic. I don’t know if you know this, but every single movie set still tests to the Nth degree, with PCR tests as well, and they’re incentivized to do so. They employ tens of thousands of people now whose job is just for COVID safety. If you’re an actor, you actually get a little bit of a stipend if you’re called in for a last-minute little role. You have to go and get a PCR test. They’ll throw 100, 150 bucks at you. That’s good money in the pocket. It’s incentivized in totally the wrong way. A lot of the reason why these emergency orders are still in place is because our hospitals are still recovering. They need these reimbursements in big ways. When you shut down the most profitable parts of the business, and this is again my kindest interpretation of what happened at the hospitals, any administrator worth his salt is going to say, “You just took away everything that makes my possible profitable and keeps us in business. What am I going to do? Elective surgeries? I can’t do those things.” And so, what happens? They almost go under for all this reimbursement money.” In fact, in October of 2020, they lobbied again for the CMS, which handles all the reimbursements for hospitals, to get government money. They asked, “Can we make an observation bed? For someone who we think is here for COVID, can we make that a COVID patient?” They replied, “Sure, you can make that a COVID patient.” Well, $39,000 in the pocket right there. These are actual equations in their brain that say, “How do I stay in business?” So, those emergency powers are going to stay in place, especially as we go through rocky times, although I hope they’ll curb down here in the next few months. We’ll see how it goes. Mr. Jekielek: I want to mention something that I like to remind people of, which is that one of the consequences of all these policies was the biggest upward transfer of wealth in history, essentially to the richest people in society. Mr. Hart: At the beginning of the pandemic, I had a couple of really big clients. One was providing golf excursions for baby boomers. Dead. Next one was an online system for parents to evaluate which school to send their college kids to. Dead. And then the third one was a high-end vacation club for families. By the time the spring was gone, I had no clients to speak of. I had lots of time on my hand, which is kind of why I dove into this. But, if I was still a chief marketing officer at a tech company, I might have kept my mouth shut, because it might have impacted my job. I might have been kicked out of there for all of my finagling out there. I can’t imagine some people that really had to keep their mouth shut, otherwise, they’d lose their job entirely. You can look at people who are in the white labor classes whose laptop class kids could enjoy the refreshments of the backyard, a big pool, and bring out the laptop. They may bring in tutors. That’s an incredible amount of success that they’ve had in their lives, and to give that all up to go against grain is a tough call to make there. But you definitely see that when you look at LA, for example. During the first lockdowns of the stay-at-home orders from school when they went virtual, a third of all the students in the LA Unified School District never signed on to a single class. I don’t think that’s because they were lazy or indolent or just skipping school altogether. “Ah, we’re doing virtual school. I can skip it.” No, it’s because they were probably taking care of things at home because their mom is gone. She’s working. Their dad is gone. He’s working because he’s an essential worker, and they’re at risk. What a crazy scene we put ourselves into. It drove this entire wedge into a caste system, and if you’re lucky to end up on one side of the fence, one side of the tracks, you had a pretty easy pandemic. In fact, it was probably nice. Maybe your family took off and went to Mexico for a month. Mr. Jekielek: You could pat yourself on the back saying, “Look, we’re sheltering in place. We’re doing our part.” Mr. Hart: Yes, it’s unfortunate how it pitted us against each other, and I think about that immense transfer of wealth. While Etsy shops suffered, the big store shops flourished. We’re going to see the impact of spending all that money to save the rest of the world when things come to bear here, so it’s not going to be pretty. Mr. Jekielek: Let’s look at accountability. There is a new Republican Congress that is promising accountability. There’s a whole select committee on government overreach. There’s the COVID select committee. The Energy and Commerce Committee is looking at pandemic policy and its impacts. There are many areas where accountability can be found, so how is that going to happen? Mr. Hart: That is our entire story for the next several years, truth and accountability. We have to know what transpired. There has to be immense daylight on all these things. I remember my own personal social media accounts were taken down in the summer of 2021. I had no idea. We come to find out later that there was an actual director of the FDA who is now working for Pfizer, Scott Gottlieb, who personally asked Twitter to take down my account. We know from the inner workings that Vivek Murthy and Jen Psaki of the White House, were personally working with Facebook and Twitter to call out balls and fouls and strikes for what they wanted taken down. Video: We’ve increased disinformation research and tracking within the Surgeon General’s Office. We’re flagging problematic posts for Facebook that spread disinformation. Mr. Hart: What a pressure to put on things there. What we tend to find is that we need to have that transparency to find out what were all the mistakes that were made, but also we need transparency on how these decisions were made. Who decided that natural immunity should be discounted? Who decided that based on all the evidence we had up until March and April of 2020, that masks work, and we implemented them? Who decided on Remdesivir as a five-day treatment that extended the stay of hospitals and skewed the stats? There are all these details that a lot of us have forgotten, because we’ve known so much now and learned so much over the pandemic. All of those need to be brought to bear. There was a recent article from a very prominent scientist who does great work, Emily Oster. She talked about how there was a need for…what’s the term I am looking for? Mr. Jekielek: Amnesty. Mr. Hart: Emily Oster, who is this fantastic author, and a very astute statistician, wrote this article for The Atlantic that there was a need for amnesty. First, that’s an admission that someone did something wrong. But also, her story is very illustrative of this issue. She and her team had all the data on masking kits. They had very closely tracked schools in Florida, North Carolina and New York down to the district level to find out what were their policies, and then what were the caseloads. Once she came out with the pre-print, it turns out that the schools that had more masking actually had more cases, but she stopped right there. The pressure was too immense in the scientific industry to go against the grain. She dropped it, submarined the data, and it just kind of stopped there, stagnant. Before we have amnesty, we need to have accountability. When you have people like Leana Wen, who is a prominent physician who was on CNN almost every day, talking about how the unvaccinated should have fewer rights. They should be kept at home. And now, she’s come out and admitted that was probably wrong. It was wrong to mask kids. I welcome her to, as we say, team reality. Leave team apocalypse, folks. Come to team reality and realize what has really occurred over the last three years. But there’s a caveat. Before you get amnesty, you must never have an influence on public policy again. I tell my team, “Don’t expect Dr. Fauci to be frog-marched against the wall somewhere after this whole thing. No, but we should make sure he never has influence on public policy again. Go about your retirement. That’s fine. But you should never again influence these policies that caused our children immense harm. We’re not going to have that.” Mr. Jekielek: If you were going to give some advice, and I’m sure you’re going to be asked for what to do, like some very specific and very obvious laws that should be passed to prevent the climate lockdowns. I’m not saying there are going to be climate lockdowns, but as you suggested, there could be climate lockdowns. Mr. Hart: The investigations really have to steer into these questions, as you say. Example; Jim Jordan has this select committee looking at the weaponization of the DOJ—how the DOJ was actually targeting parents who were getting rowdy at school board meetings and tagging them in their systems with a domestic terrorist tag. It was uncalled for, untoward, obviously outside influence helped to do that. He’s going to be tearing that apart and looking distinctly at that. I hope, and my recommendation is that he takes it a step further, and he brings those parents up, and he says, “So tell us, what were you yelling about there at the school board?” You’ll find a lot of it had to do with COVID. Or think about the massive hearings we’re going to have on all sorts of things around commerce and industry. The recession that we’re probably experiencing right now, a lot of that had a direct impact from COVID. I was a big booster of the conservative causes at the end of last year, 2022. Looking at the election, I thought there was going to be a distinct red wave, until 10 days out from the election. I looked at the mail returns and I said, “Oh no, we’re in trouble. I think COVID has killed the red wave.” And the reason why is that 17 states completely upended the way that they did mail-in ballots. Here in California, every single home gets a ballot now in the mail. In Pennsylvania, if you wanted an absentee ballot in 2016, you had to show a doctor’s note that you were an invalid at home. It went from 200,000 absentee ballots to two million ballots at home. On the day of the election, you can look at the contested Senate election between Oz and Fetterman. Dr. Oz had about 2.1 million people come out to vote for him on the day of the election. Fetterman had only about 1.7 million people come out to vote for him, but he took advantage of the new mail-in ballot laws. Whether there was finagling or misgivings or real issues with those ballots, I don’t care. He was better at collecting those than Oz was, and he won the election. 17 states experienced that. They haven’t rolled those back, and we’re going to have some real issues. Only Georgia and a few other states have had some real success in rolling those things back. As far as other legislative implementations, we need to look to places like Florida, where Governor DeSantis has allowed counties, for example, to declare emergencies, but only for a short period of time, and then it needs to be reviewed. Otherwise, that emergency declaration will be wiped away. Or his patient’s Bill of Rights. Again, justice for Franca. We are not going to allow an America where you do not have the right to see your loved one pass away into the next world next to their bed. Those are things at the federal level where we can feel very strongly about. Also the impact on children is something we need to consider very strongly. The median age, the average age of death for COVID, was 80 years old. The average age of death for the Spanish flu was 29 years old. If this was a pandemic where those being impacted were millennials and younger, we would have had a very, very different reaction. I don’t know what I would do then. I know I would still stick by my rights. I know it would probably be even tougher then. But in the end, we have to look at our rights that were infringed, our rights to free assembly and religion. How did we give those up, and give them up so readily? My own church and other churches all came to the conclusion that you were going to go home and you were going to participate in church and do it over Zoom class. The body of Christ in the Christian church for almost all Christian churches across the country and the world became an experience of Zoom. What a terrible, terrible situation. I can attest to the physical ailments. I can attest to the projections of cancer deaths because they miss screenings. I can attest to the types of suicides that you might see because of unemployment. That may be, in the end, more devastating than anything else. Mr. Jekielek: Team reality and team apocalypse. I’ve had a lot of discussion about divisive language, and we’ve talked about the pandemic of the unvaccinated. Does it really make sense to create these categories? Mr. Hart: For purposes when they’re coming at you with war, it was easy to designate that. These are more rhetorical and strategic sort of categories. There were debates. At one point, I thought that fighting the masks was just going to get us consternated every which way, and that we should probably just drop it all together. But in the end, I’m glad we fought to die on that hill. It became a symbol in some cases. Mr. Jekielek: A talisman. Mr. Hart: A talisman, right. But we’ve got to find some way to heal these things. What’s interesting is it’s amazing how quickly political dogmas dissolve across a pair of families when the same people are coming after both of your kids in the same way. Understanding that impact is going to be tantamount, especially when we’re talking about legislation. We’re adults. We’ll try to deal with it as we can, but our kids they’re going to need some protection from the harm we instilled on them. My wife just recently had an incident with our child when I dropped her off at kindergarten. She had a stuffy nose. She went in, and she blew her nose, and our kindergarten teacher is a very smart woman, but I know she’s nervous about this whole thing. And so, she had her mask during the day. Our daughter later came back and said, “Yes, I wore a mask at school today.” We didn’t want that. We told her, “Please don’t mask our kid in the future,” and that was it. My wife posted about it online. And all of a sudden, the vitriol she got was amazing, astounding, and embarrassing. It was just awful. It was wrenching. It was horrible. We look at that and we say, “Is that what we’re still facing now? Is this the America that we’ve come out to? We’re going to have to find ways to bridge that divide.” Again for people that are making the journey, that’s what this book is for. It is for those people that maybe haven’t been with us all this whole time, but also for those people that are just starting their journey back now. I want them to catch up to speed with what’s going on. It’s for that one neighbor of yours who’s still in his car, double masking alone. Just put it on his windshield, it will be right there for him. The idea is that we’re going to have to find ways to bridge those divides because they’re deep. Maybe as the old Broadway song goes, “Time heals everything,” and we’ll be able to make good with that. But I’m afraid these same tactics are now part of the tool belt of the authoritarians in this world, and they’ll pull those straight out to use against us at some future point. Mr. Jekielek: Justin, it’s been a real pleasure speaking with you finally on camera here. And again, I’ll be reading your content over at rationalground.com. The book, of course, is Gone Viral. Such a pleasure to have you on. Mr. Hart: Thanks, Jan. Great to be with you. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Justin Hart 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

Two days ago, Fox’s Tucker Carlson showed several never-before-seen pieces of video surveillance that were captured at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. This then led the legacy news outlets to once again double down and push their narrative of Jan. 6. Two months ago, during the fight in the House over who was going to be the speaker, Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) made several concessions in order to eventually secure his position as speaker of the House. Even though this wasn’t on the official list of concessions, shortly after he became speaker, McCarthy handed over about 41,000 hours worth of surveillance footage that came out of the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. He handed this footage over exclusively to Tucker Carlson and his team. Then, after Tucker’s producers spent several weeks combing through this new footage, he aired a segment on his program, which showed several never-before-seen camera angles and really called into question the official mainstream media characterization of several people. Watch online on epochtv.com => The Real Story of January 6 or BUY Jan 6 DVD => https://www.epochtv.shop/product-page/dvd-the-real-story-of-january-6

“We’re sterilizing a generation who will not be able to have their own kids. And we’re altering their sexual functioning in a way that’s going to make it more difficult for them to have loving relationships.” Stephanie Winn is a licensed marriage and family therapist who is currently treating detransitioners and parents with gender-questioning youth. She says that gender-affirming care is costly to one’s physical health and antithetical to the therapeutic process, reducing the role of the therapist from a curious explorer to someone who is not allowed to probe, question, or act with discernment. “We’re essentially agreeing with the lie that these vulnerable, young people who are in a moment of great distress, really truly have no other ways of coping than to make life-altering decisions with a lot of negative ramifications for their health. And that’s not true,” says Winn. “Puberty blockers are not FDA-approved for the treatment of a mental health condition. They’re being prescribed off label for very young children. And we know for a fact that puberty blockers damage, among other things, brain development, also bone development.” Winn and I discuss “Affirmation Generation,” a new documentary she is featured in, which critically explores the gender-affirming model, society’s suppression of detransitioners, the for-profit trans-industry and the many myths associated with being transgender. “So many of the vulnerable, young people who are presenting with gender dysphoria are autistic. Many of them have trauma histories. They’ve been bullied. They’ve been abandoned,” says Winn. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/stephanie-winn-the-trans-industry-is-creating-a-sterilized-generation-and-medical-patients-for-life_5070804.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Jan Jekielek: Stephanie Winn, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Stephanie Winn: Thanks for having me. It’s great to be here. Mr. Jekielek: Stephanie, congratulations on this amazing, amazing film and we’re going to talk about that today. Before we go there, you’re a psychotherapist yourself, and you say something in the film that I thought would be a perfect launch point for us. You say, “Clinicians, we’ve been sold a bill of lies.” What are the lies? Ms. Winn: For one, we’ve been lied to that so-called gender-affirming care is an actual model of psychotherapy like other models. We have many models of psychotherapy, DVT, ACT, CVD, EMDR, these are just some acronyms. Models of psychotherapy generally include ways of conceptualizing and formulating our clients’ distress and understanding their presenting problems, and then ways to proceed with helping treat their distress. Gender-affirming care is actually antithetical to the therapeutic process, which always necessarily includes really getting to know our clients and exploring their life circumstances. I mentioned this in the film as well. We do a psychosocial assessment. We assess what’s happening for them physiologically, environmentally, socially, internally, and in terms of their phases of life. Normally, we have to have room to explore all of these things in order to do our jobs well. But with the so-called gender-affirming model, what we’re told is not to ask questions, just to affirm, and just to agree. It’s a reduction of our role from a curious explorer who uses mirroring and reflection as one of many tools, to somebody who is relegated to the role of only mirroring and reflecting, without probing, questioning, or discernment. When I say that we’ve been lied to, I’m talking about how our generally agreeable and conscientious natures have been exploited by being asked to do something that is actually antithetical to the goals of our profession. Because therapy is mental health and mental health is part of healthcare, part of helping the individual be well. What is it to be healthy? It is to have a sense of vitality, capability, being able to do things, being able to have healthy relationships, and being able to be physically active and pursue meaningful work. These are some of the foundational cornerstones of health, along with eating well and sleeping well and things like that. What therapists are doing who are practicing so-called gender-affirming care, in other words, just agreeing with their clients on this question of gender, is not actually in the service of health. Because this social affirmation is the first step in a process that leads to hormones and surgeries that are experimental and that are very costly to physical health. This is one reason that I’m passionate about this issue. I’m sure we’re going to talk about this more, but the threat of suicide is often used to push concerned citizens, especially parents into a so-called affirmation. But we know that in the long-term, things that increase suicide risk include not having the health and vitality to be physically active, to feel good in your body, and to have meaningful relationships. I’m sure we’ll talk about all of that more, but basically, we’re undermining people’s long-term health and wellbeing when we practice gender-affirming care. We’re essentially agreeing with the lie that these vulnerable young people who are in a moment of great distress really truly have no other ways of coping than to make life altering decisions with a lot of negative ramifications for their health. That’s not true. That’s how we’ve been lied to. In the process, we’ve been lied to about our own capabilities as therapists to support our clients’ resilience and our duty to challenge them when their thought process is not completely sound. Mr. Jekielek: In the film, it’s mentioned that lobotomies were once one of these physiological interventions in very rare situations to try to deal with a mental condition. There was an analogy drawn that this gender-affirming care model leads to these very profound physiological interventions and was comparable. Please tell me about that. Ms. Winn: It’s pretty wild, isn’t it? This is part of our history as Americans, the lobotomy craze of the 1940s. That was its peak, but it was actually longer than that. If you think about lobotomies from today’s standpoint, it’s like how could we have ever done that? How could we have ever thought that you should mess with person’s brain by putting an ice pick through their nose to fix something psychological? And yet, that does bear resemblance to what’s happening today, because it was always experimental. It was always nothing but experimental, and yet it was being proposed like it was a legitimate form of treatment and it damaged people permanently. One parallel I see is that puberty blockers are not FDA approved for the treatment of a mental health condition. They’re being prescribed off-label for very young children. We know for a fact that puberty blockers damage, among other things, brain development, bone development, and every system of the body. This is a so-called treatment that is interfering with a young person’s development in a profound way. It’s not FDA approved, and yet it’s being prescribed outside of clinical trials. And we’re not even tracking what’s happening to these kids. Mr. Jekielek: I want to discuss some of the potential harms associated with these interventions for sure. They’re typically billed as not being particularly harmful. You sent me this report about puberty blockers, which I found shocking. Before we go there, there is this question that’s hanging in the air. In many cases, these are children or teens who are just discovering themselves and they’re making these profound life decisions that will affect them permanently, without being able to remotely grasp the consequences. You could ask them, “Do you want to have children one day?” They may reply, “I don’t know.” There’s a million questions I could add to that. How is this even being considered? Ms. Winn: That’s a great question, and in our documentary, Lisa Marchiano makes that comment. She says that it strikes her as extremely naive of any responsible adults to go along with this child’s understanding of who they are and what they’re going to want in the future. Anyone watching this can think of someone you know that swore up and down they did not want children when they were in their teens or 20s. And then, a switch flipped at some point, maybe at even 35, where suddenly they wanted children desperately, and now they’re so grateful that they have them. If there are healthy people who pass through normal phases of life thinking they didn’t want children, and then that changed for them at some point in life, how are we assuming that young, vulnerable, mentally unwell, impulsive, angsty teenagers and prepubescent teens could possibly know what they’re going to want in the future? I don’t understand how so many people are going along with this and how we’re assuming that the better life outcome is to live in accordance with this magical gender identity, and that we know kids are going to be happy with that, rather than leaving open the possibility of having a family. Mr. Jekielek: Almost ubiquitously, gender dysphoria is associated with some other issues, and often those issues just get swept off to the side. There’s a term that’s mentioned in the film that actually describes that. Ms. Winn: The term you’re looking for is diagnostic overshadowing. It is the idea that when you have various comorbidities or potential comorbidities that maybe haven’t even been diagnosed or ruled out properly, gender dysphoria trumps all of them. It overshadows all of them. There’s a dangerous and unfounded presupposition in this gender-affirming model that if you just treat gender dysphoria by permanently changing the young person’s body, all the other issues will go away. What I see is actually the opposite. What I see is that youth who have been exposed to this culture and these narratives around gender identity, that culture, much of it online, gives them a language, a framework, a way of thinking about their psychological distress. You’ll hear these youth refer to things as “My dysphoria.” When they say my dysphoria, they could actually be talking about anything. They could be talking about PMS or social anxiety or ADHD. We know that about 48 per cent of the children referred to the Tavistock Gender Identity Clinic, which has now been ordered to shut down, were autistic. There’s any number of things it could be referring to, but the language that they have for it is the term dysphoria. It’s always my dysphoria this, my dysphoria that. Something I’ve learned from working with the parents of these youth is that almost any upsetting life situation can serve as a trigger for so-called dysphoria. It could be that they got a bad grade on a test, or their girlfriend dumped them, or they found out that their friends were hanging out behind their back without them. It could have nothing to do with gender or even sex. Yet the language that they have for it is dysphoria. And then, they go down this sometimes obsessive compulsive route where that leads to thinking, “Now I have to cut my tits off,” pardon my language. But there’s this urgency of I have this distress, I don’t know what to do about it, so I’m going to interpret that it’s about my gender. Because that gives me something to control, and that gives me something to plan for and to look forward to. So, they are going to take that next step, whatever that next step is, depending on where the child or that young vulnerable person is in their so-called gender journey. It’s always, “Here’s something I can do about it. I can pursue that next step in passing, or in being affirmed, or in medicalizing my transition, and that will alleviate my distress.” These kids and young people aren’t being given a proper emotional vocabulary, a way of conceptualizing normal or abnormal psychological difficulties. Mr. Jekielek: What would you do in this situation where a child or a young person comes in and says, “I think I’m a different gender than my birth gender?” Ms. Winn: A therapist who ascribes to this belief system basically just has to agree with that and maybe even praise it. Let’s be honest. The attitude that you’re taught to have toward these young, vulnerable, confused people is, “I’m so glad that you told me. Thank you for trusting me with this wonderful news about your gender identity.” I’m exaggerating a little bit, but you’re supposed to be so warm and welcoming and praise this magical truth that they’ve just come out with. And then, you ask about who else knows about this and how do you want me to talk about you when your parents are around? Which then comes down to the issue of how we’re triangulating parents and children. Now, we are just focusing on how you’ve discovered this wonderful thing about yourself and found the courage to tell me and trust me with this important fact. How can I support you in your gender journey? Do you need help coming out to your parents or educating them? Do you need help socially transitioning at school? That’s the next step that therapists are expected to do with that approach. Mr. Jekielek: A number of young people in the film mentioned that by the first visit or second visit, they were already being prescribed drugs of some sort, which is very difficult to fathom. Ms. Winn: Right. The role of the therapist here is interesting, if you look at how mental health clinicians intersect with the medical system. I am an LMFT, a licensed marriage and family therapist. I’m a master’s level clinician, which means I have a master’s degree in counseling psychology. I have internship hours that I accrued under supervision after that to gain licensure and I passed an exam. There are other master’s level clinicians like an LPC, for example, a licensed professional counselor. That’s another type of master’s level clinician. You have clinicians who are at the master’s level rather than doctors. When it comes to doctors, you have clinical psychologists, but then you also have psychiatrists who can prescribe. When you look at master’s level clinicians, we have to stay within our bounds in regards to medical advice. We learn how to recognize signs that a person might need to work with a doctor on certain issues. For example, there are certain nutrient deficiencies that can cause depression and anxiety. As therapists, we can’t say, “I think you must have low vitamin D levels,” But within my scope of practice I could say, “We’re living here in the Pacific Northwest and it’s the winter and many people are low in vitamin D. You’re presenting with signs of fatigue, loss of interest, and loss of pleasure. When was the last time you saw your doctor and had some routine lab tests? Maybe there could be a vitamin D or other deficiency. We just want to make sure we’re ruling that out.” Another thing that I could say within my scope of practice would be that if someone is presenting for depression, but there’s a sign that they have sleep apnea, we know that untreated sleep apnea can make all kinds of mental health conditions worse because your brain is not replenishing at night. So, I would suggest that they work with their doctor on treatment. Normally, we stay within our limits. If a client comes to us saying, “I want to take medication for depression or anxiety or ADHD,” well, we can help them process their thoughts and feelings on the pros and cons about that. We can provide a certain amount of psychoeducation, but mostly we refer out to other professionals. Now, contrast this with the role of the therapists in the medical system with this gender-affirming care, therapists who are practicing, “writing letters recommending surgery.” Now, under the so-called informed consent model, a therapist’s letter is not even required. The letters are pretty useless anyway, because anyone who’s writing those letters has already been indoctrinated. I don’t think that there’s a proper process of assessing and ruling out who is and isn’t a fit for any of these interventions. But we’ve been asked to go outside of our limits and recommend that people take these medical steps. It’s confusing, and it’s a boundary violation. Mr. Jekielek: The assumption is that the mental state is the correct state and the body is what’s wrong. I’ve also seen this slogan, “Nobody is born in the wrong body,” and I guess this is a response to that. It would seem to suggest that gender dysphoria isn’t actually a condition. Can you help me untangle this? Ms. Winn: Right. There are two questions there. The second one being whether gender dysphoria is a diagnosable mental health condition. But the way you put this initially is really important to explore, this idea that it’s the body that’s wrong and the mind is fine. That seems like an interesting way of defending against shame. You can look at the fact that so many of the vulnerable young people who are presenting with gender dysphoria are autistic, and many of them have trauma histories. They’ve been bullied, and they’ve been abandoned. We know these kids are overrepresented in foster care and adoption. Oftentimes there’s deep attachment wounds, and deep issues with having a loving, stable connection with one’s family. The natural response to that is shame and inadequacy. That shame can be so painful and so overwhelming. It really takes a lot of maturity to learn how to integrate our shame and tolerate it. So, there is this idea that there’s nothing wrong with me, my identity, my mind, my psyche; it’s my body that’s wrong. That’s why I’m different. It’s a really convenient explanation for defending against the shame of these kids, especially the ones who’ve been bullied because they’re autistic. Autistic kids are socially awkward. They’re often bullied, and they don’t understand how to process that. They don’t know why they’ve been mocked and made fun of, but they sure feel badly about themselves. So, there’s already enough shame there. It’s very tempting to have something that says, “Oh, this is why I’m different. This is why I’ve been made fun of and then, I don’t have to feel that shame.” The idea of therapy though, proper exploratory therapy or watchful waiting feels intrusive, because if you’re walking around with this intolerable level of unprocessed shame that there’s something fundamentally wrong with me. There’s something corrupt about me that people just don’t like, and I don’t know what it is and I don’t know how to control it. The idea that a therapist could see that thing about you is really alarming. It takes the right sort of situation and the right sort of clinical relationship to help someone who’s walking around with that much shame and anxiety to understand what therapy could be for them. A lot of these young people are very guarded against the possibility that anything could be “wrong” with them. They also are resisting the hard and abstract work of self-improvement that comes with the healing process. Mr. Jekielek: There is often trauma that is associated with gender dysphoria. Is that 100 per cent of the time? I think it almost always is, from what I’ve been reading. Ms. Winn: I don’t know the comorbidity rate with a PTSD diagnosis. Like I said, with the Tavistock GIDS program referrals, 48 per cent of those young people had autism. I do know that with adoption, foster care, sexual trauma history, as well as homosexuality, we’re seeing high rates of those in youth presenting with gender distress. Mr. Jekielek: Clearly, you’re not a gender-affirming therapist today, but you were at one point. Ms. Winn: I came of age at an interesting moment. I went to grad school from 2010 to 2013, right as this stuff was starting to take hold, but kind of marginally. Our class had one social justice warrior, but I’m imagining that grad schools now have 90 per cent of the people in those classes having the same attitude as that one social justice warrior did back then. I don’t honestly remember learning about gender dysphoria or the idea of trans in grad school, except we had a psychopathology course where we study the DSM. I came of age in an interesting time because when I was in grad school, we were still operating under the DSM-IV Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. We were studying the fourth edition, knowing the fifth edition was about to come out. I believe 2013, the year I graduated, is the same year that the DSM-V came out. So. I didn’t get a lot of exposure to this in grad school. Then, between when I started practicing in 2013 to now, 10 years later, there has been an exponential rise. It wasn’t until 2017 that I went to a training for so-called gender-affirming care. In retrospect, it was quite shocking. Every time I talk about this training, I just think about how therapists have this polite, deferential, agreeable nature and we all sit quietly and do as we’re told. I think about the company culture and how that can affect how we relate to training. I also think that training was, in retrospect, a departure from how training normally goes. It was really led by an activist in disguise telling us, “This is the model now and you must comply.” I have a vague recollection of one or two people raising issues and being kind of shut down. After that, we were expected to comply, and there was a lot of pressure. At the time, I was a younger therapist working for group practice, as opposed to an older, more experienced therapist, or a more independent therapist in private practice, which I am now. In a company or agency culture, there’s a lot of pressure to be kind, agreeable, and conscientious. You don’t want to create problems for anyone, and you don’t want to look like you don’t know what you’re talking about. Even though we were being sold this really radical and frankly absurd idea, I don’t think anybody wanted to look like they were the bad guy. You go in with this deferential attitude like, “What I’m being told seems counterintuitive, but they must know something I don’t know.” It took me years of going along with this thinking—they must know something I don’t know—until I finally reached the point where I realized I actually know something that is important, and now I have something to say. Mr. Jekielek: Was there some defining moment where you thought to yourself, “I am going to change how I treat this?” Ms. Winn: I wish that I could identify one. It was such a gradual process for me, working with these trans-identified young people and not seeing them get better and feeling like we couldn’t talk about the elephant in the room. I was feeling deeply conflicted about what I was supposed to be doing. Because on the one hand, when I worked for that company, there was a slight bit of pressure that if you were a good therapist, you would go to the next level of training where they taught you how to write these letters, basically rubber-stamping people for surgery. I always felt like, “I should do that,” but a part of me didn’t want to. I was just seeing these young people not getting better, and having that question in the back of my mind of, “Is this really necessary for the ones who were pursuing surgeries and hormones, is this really it?” Especially when I was seeing other issues; autism, trauma, eating disorders, and homosexuality, you name it. As much as I had my doubts, I was being sold this story that this is what’s going to help these people get better. If you’re not seeing what’s on the other side of that, then you just have to believe it. But then I found out about detransitioners. My first exposure to detransitioners was finding out that their stories were being suppressed. That was the first time I heard about them. I heard about how trans-rights activists were trying to stop 60 Minutes from going through with their story on detransitioners. I thought, “Wait a minute, I need to hear this side of the story.” That’s when I started listening to detransitioners and phasing out accepting trans-identified people into my practice as new patients. I was wrapping up the work that I was doing with my existing patients, and really just keeping the focus on the things that they were there to talk about. I didn’t question or push back because I thought that that would be too risky to our therapeutic relationships. I researched the issue for about a year or two before I said anything publicly to anybody. Mr. Jekielek: Was one of the reasons why you were afraid to do that because you often hear this told to parents, “If you don’t affirm, your child is going to commit suicide or there’s a higher likelihood they will commit suicide. “ Presumably, therapists learn the same thing? Ms. Winn: Yes, and it’s such a dangerous myth. We do see higher rates of suicidal ideation in trans-identified young people, but we really can’t separate that out from their comorbidities. You can look at all the comorbidities; depression, anxiety, OCD, body dysmorphia, and eating disorders, which is a major one that I hadn’t mentioned yet. If you look at all the psychiatric comorbidities, as far as I’m aware, the rate of suicidal ideation amongst trans-identified youth isn’t higher than non-trans identified young people who also have those same comorbidities. But we do have to consider that a lot of these young people are actually being told on the internet and by their peers that they should be threatening suicide to get what they want; that affirmation from their parents, or whether it’s a binder or puberty blockers or hormones. Therefore, we do see a higher rate of suicidal ideation in general. However, ideation and behavior are two different things. Suicide attempts or self-injurious behavior and completed suicide are very different. For every one person that actually completes suicide, there are many who attempt and end up in a hospital or not even needing hospitalization depending on the degree of self-injury. The thing is with teenagers that they can be very impulsive. To put it more casually, they can be dramatic, they’re kind of known for that. Teenagers are actually quite safe in their home environments with their parents, because the love that a parent has for their child is one of the most powerful forces that we know as humans. If people say, “Your child will commit suicide,” First of all, “will” means might. “Commit” means attempt—not complete. When a child expresses any degree of suicidal ideation, appropriate therapy involves really exploring how far they’re going down that train of thought, and whether they actually have access to any type of weapon, sharps, pills, a vehicle that they could drive off a cliff, or whatever they’re thinking. You need to know if they have a specific plan in mind and you need to assess their reasons for wanting to die, but also their reasons for wanting to live. Usually, there’s a fair amount of ambivalence and there’s almost always at least one thing that’s keeping them going. Unfortunately, for a lot of these trans-identified youth, the thing that’s keeping them going is the fantasy, that dangling carrot of, “If my parents will just affirm me and if I can just transition,” but all of that is socially mediated. If we were to expand it and get them off of that kind of obsessive way of thinking, there’s usually something else to live for too. It could be their cat, or it could be wanting to see their favorite band in concert. It could be wanting to go to the college that they’ve dreamed of. It could be having a crush on someone. My point is, just because a teenager expresses having thoughts of suicide or self-harm, it doesn’t mean that they have a plan. It means an intention, and it certainly doesn’t mean they’re unsafe at home. As therapists, we’re all trained to guide parents through this process of how to inspect your child’s room and remove sharps, lock up sharps and weapons, lock up pills, and conduct checks every 15 minutes if you have to. Remove their door if you have to. There are things that parents can do to protect their children. The threat of suicide has been grossly distorted and people have been backed into a corner and intimidated in a way that’s really quite sick, because that is truly every parent’s worst fear. I happen to know, not professionally, but personally, a parent who has lost a child to suicide. The fact that people are making light of that by using it in a manipulative way is just morally abhorrent. My concern is for the long-term suicide risk. Adolescents are actually pretty safe as long as they have parents who are not neglectful. We have plenty of data on suicidality, and all therapists are trained to understand some of the basic risk factors and protective factors. One of the biggest protective factors is responsibility to children or loved ones. So, we’re talking about lifespan suicide risk. If you’re a therapist like me and you’ve been in practice long enough, you’ve had that experience of actually sitting with someone who’s deep in depression and who’s actually had fantasies of driving their car off a cliff. We’ve actually had these conversations, and then you ask them, “What has kept you here so far? “How come you didn’t do that on your way home from work last night?” If they have kids, it’s definitely the first thing out of their mouth. If they don’t have kids, but they have a husband or wife or somebody that they love, it’s like, “Well, I couldn’t do that to my loved ones.” That’s always the first thing out of their mouth. Responsibility to loved ones is a huge protective factor, even for people who are in the worst part of depression. One of my concerns for why so-called gender-affirming care is so harmful is because it actually takes away that protective factor. We’re sterilizing a generation who will not be able to have their own kids, and we are altering their sexual functioning in a way that’s going to make it more difficult for them to have loving relationships. You take away people’s ability to have families, to get married or have a long-term stable loving relationship. You just took away a huge lifelong protective factor. Engagement in hobbies is also a big protective factor, and also the ability to do things that make you feel good physically, like sports, dance, and exercise. They are huge protective factors, as well as helping people exercise again if they’re in the depths of depression, and helping people remember things that they love doing and pick those interests up again. We’re potentially taking away those things as well, with so-called gender-affirming care. Why? Because puberty blockers create problems with bone density. We’re inducing osteoporosis and osteopenia. In our documentary, David medically transitioned to living as a woman in his adulthood just using estrogen. He didn’t take puberty blockers as far as I’m aware. He developed osteoporosis and osteopenia. He was walking with a hunch. We’re actually inducing disabilities, and that’s just the bone stuff. I’m not even talking about blood clots, heart attack, diabetes, and all of the other medical complications that result from these things. We’re inducing chronic pain. Chronic pain is a major risk factor for suicide. People who live with chronic pain disability or chronic illness are across the lifespan at a much higher risk of suicide. Again, speaking from experience, I lost someone to suicide, and it is speculated that chronic pain and disability was one of the reasons that he felt so hopeless. I’ve also had that clinical experience, talking to people about what makes them feel so desperate that they’re thinking about ending it. It is when you can’t get out of bed, not just because you’re depressed psychologically, but because you’re in pain physically and you live with that day in and day out. You can’t do the things you might have enjoyed, and you can’t go out with your friends and you can’t work. We are also putting people in a situation where their ability to work is going to be impacted because of the increased risk of all these diseases and disabilities, combined with the problems that we’re creating for people cognitively. Because we also know that these drugs affect people cognitively. Puberty blockers impair brain development, specifically with regard to executive functioning and emotion regulation. Taken to an extreme, you’re looking at the potential for crippling levels of attention deficit and emotion dysregulation. Borderline personality disorder is the behavioral manifestation of somebody who has extreme chronic issues with emotion regulation. When someone can’t concentrate, can’t function, can’t take care of themselves, can’t stabilize their emotions, and can’t deal with life’s ups and downs because their brain has been chemically altered during a developmental period—yes, you’re setting people up for poverty and unemployment. These are huge risk factors for suicide. I could go on; so-called gender-affirming care is full of these risk factors. Mr. Jekielek: The worst nightmare for any parent is their child committing suicide. I imagine one of the worst nightmares for a therapist is a patient in their care committing suicide. Given the strength of this ideology, I’m trying to imagine being the person that says, “I’m not going to affirm,” and then, what if that suicide actually does happen?” Suddenly, it’s clear that you’re the villain, or at least in this thought construct that I just described. Ms. Winn: Yes, and you’re right. Therapists have, I would say, two main worst fears. One of them you just described, the fear that our patient will complete suicide. The other is more self-centered. It’s that we will suffer attacks against our license and potentially lose it, and I have faced those attacks. One of the flaws in the typical personality profiles of a therapist is we’re a little too fear-based sometimes. We work so hard to get our licenses. We sometimes go into hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt for graduate school. And then, after getting a graduate degree, we have to complete thousands of supervised hours, and we work so hard to study for this exam. We work so hard to get our licenses. We’re just so afraid of losing them. Between the fear that someone could make a complaint against your license, and the fear that one of your patients could end up hospitalized or dead, those two fears keep us acting from a place of fear rather than a place of courage, rather than trusting our intuition and acting honestly, and doing what love would compel us to do. Ultimately, we can never really control either of those. Again, speaking from personal experience, while I personally have not lost a patient to suicide while they were under my care, while I worked in my first job in the mental health field, I worked at a facility where my coworker, who was quite young and vulnerable herself, was the primary counselor to a resident who died of suicide while we were there. I’ve seen how this affects people, and he was not the one we were most worried about. We had a very high acuity population. We had people with psychosis, schizophrenia, schizoaffective disorder, complex trauma, personality disorders, people who had been in and out of the streets, in prostitution, and on drugs. We were working with a very high acuity population. We had many people we were a lot more worried about than this young man, but he was the one who took his life during this time or actually shortly after leaving, and we found out about it. You can just never know. Like I said, I’ve also lost someone to suicide. He was a therapist. He was a brilliant therapist who saved people’s marriages and he died of suicide. Again, it’s speculated that chronic pain and disability was a reason for that. You just never know. My message to therapists that I want to encourage to be bold on this issue is that, yes, it is scary living with the knowledge that you could face a threat against your license or that a patient of yours could complete suicide. Just like it’s scary having a child and knowing that something bad could happen to your child. It’s a fear that you choose to take on living with every day as part of the package, part of the responsibility that you’ve taken on. But you do it because it’s meaningful, and ultimately, you can never know whether going this way or that way will make things better or worse. A lot of parents who are concerned about their trans-identified youth are in a very similar position. They ask me questions like this, and it’s coming from a place of so much fear and worry for their kid. They ask me, “If I say this, if I do that, do you think that’s going to push my child further away? If I draw a harder boundary and tell them what I really think of all this gender stuff, is that going to push them away? Am I going to lose my kid?” The answer is always, “Maybe so, maybe not.” So ultimately, given that we can never fully predict or control the impact of our actions, we have to choose some kind of guiding value, and I just don’t think fear is a very good guiding value. I think courage and love are better guiding values. Mr. Jekielek: You did mention that this gender-affirming care doesn’t work as a therapy, whereas this watchful waiting, which you referenced briefly and I’m becoming more familiar with over the last months, is something that actually has been shown to work. Ms. Winn: Yes. We don’t have evidence that the long-term outcomes for these kids are going to be any better, and gender-affirming care doesn’t actually propose any particular approach to therapy itself, other than just agreeing with the patient. Watchful waiting, which you described, it’s also not particularly an approach to therapy. It’s not a whole therapeutic toolkit. It’s basically just the message that if a kid presents with distress or confusion about their gender or sexual identity as a young person, just don’t do anything about it. Just let them be a kid and give them time and chances are, they’ll grow out of it. Usually it will turn out that they are gay. At least that’s how it was before this became a social contagion, back when the rates of gender dysphoria were lower. Most of the people who had gender dysphoria were males. Now, the gender ratios flipped, and mostly they would turn out to be homosexual, and puberty was actually the cure. Just going through the natural process of puberty, the gender dysphoria would desist, because the kid becomes a sexual being as they go through adolescence. As they develop an identity in adulthood, hopefully if they’re in a supportive environment, they can come to terms with accepting themselves as potentially a gay or lesbian person, or simply a so-called gender-nonconforming, tomboyish girl, for instance. Watchful waiting is basically just the idea that we don’t need to pathologize gender nonconformity, or gender atypicality, which is a more kind of neutral term that Leonard Sax uses. I like gender atypicality. We don’t need to pathologize that. Kids will be kids, they’ll play around with different identities. Kids will believe in all kinds of things. We as adults need to just watch and wait. Mr. Jekielek: You watch and wait, but it sounds like you can also try to address some of these other comorbidities which are almost always there. Ms. Winn: Exactly. If you look at gender dysphoria 20 or 30 years ago, before it was a social contagion, some of the reasons that a young person might present with feeling of distress over being a boy or being a girl, might have to do with their social environment. Let’s say they’re a gender atypical child in a household that adheres to gender norms. It’s going to be more distressing if you’re a girl who wants to play in the mud, growing up with a mother who wants to dress you up in pink and tell you how a good girl should act. That mismatch with your environment is going to create more distress than that same girl with that tomboyish disposition who wants to play in the mud whose mom says, “Yeah, go for it. Dinner is at six.” The social environment plays a role. But yes, in this day and age, we increasingly see that a variety of mental health conditions are all kind of getting subsumed under this gender dysphoria umbrella. We’re not looking at what’s really going on, and why they’re feeling so much distress in the first place. Mr. Jekielek: You mentioned now there’s a lot more girls than boys. I’ve heard about this rapid onset of gender dysphoria and that it almost functions like a social contagion. There have been some papers written showing that this is a thing. How did this happen, exactly ? Ms. Winn: The term rapid onset gender dysphoria was coined in 2018 by Dr. Lisa Littman, who’s also featured in our film. She’s a physician and a scientist who noticed the same pattern of one after the next group of adolescent girls all suddenly declaring that they’re boys, typically all together. Dr. Littman has done some really great work looking at the pattern of these clusters of socially-influenced groups. In that study, she talked with parents about their observations about their children’s behavior. And then, she also did a study on detransitioners that was illuminating as well. Mr. Jekielek: We talked very briefly about this as we were preparing, and it’s something that I’ve been interested in. There is some evidence of a connection between consumption of pornography and gender dysphoria. Ms. Winn: Absolutely. I’ll divide that connection into two broad categories; male and female. With males, we’re looking at an older cohort, typically heterosexual, and autogynephilic, meaning attracted to the idea of themselves as a woman. That cohort tends to be influenced by certain, how shall I say it, deviant porn that they’ve gotten into after a process of becoming addicted and needing higher and higher levels of stimulation. I am more interested, for the sake of our conversation today, in the experiences of these young women. Because it’s now increasingly prevalent that adolescent girls even, not just boys, are being exposed to pornography at very early ages. Even for the girls who aren’t exposed, they are around boys who were looking at that porn, and that porn is shaping the boys’ behavior, and their expectations of the girls. Girls are either getting exposed directly to these horrifying images of being exploited as being associated with what it is to be female, or they’re being mistreated by boys. For example, I’ve heard many stories now of girls whose first sexual or romantic experiences were very pornographic in nature, because of how the boys that they’re interested in have been shaped by porn culture. This combination of factors of how porn is directly and indirectly affecting girls is understandably making these girls quite frightened at the idea of being female, if this is what it means, if what they’re seeing in porn is what it means to be female. Who can blame them for wanting to opt out and say, “No, thanks, that’s not me.” Then, they have this alternative idea of being a boy, and specifically for many of these girls, the idea of being a gay boy, which is fed into by, I believe, anime and other aspects of online culture that I’m not terribly familiar with. It’s like, they get this horrifying porn, this degrading, humiliating gross porn on the one hand that says, “This is what it is to be a female.” Or you could be this sweet anime gay boy who has a love story. Those love stories, they’re being shown with the anime, and I’m sure there’s more words for it, and some listeners probably know more about this than me, but there is a whole online culture in which these young people fantasize about these kind of idealized gay boy relationships that are very affectionate and romantic and loving, which is what girls have always wanted. It seems that these girls like the path to having a safe, affectionate, loving, sweet, innocent relationship, which lies in being a boy rather than being a girl. Mr. Jekielek: These days, what kind of patients do you work with? Ms. Winn: I still see ordinary people who aren’t particularly concerned with gender over other issues, and I work with couples as well. But for the people concerned with gender, I work with detransitioners and parents who are worried about their children. I don’t work with gender questioning youth because I’ve already faced threats to my license. It’s very easy if I were to work with these youth for them to Google me, become outraged and submit another complaint to my licensing board. So I stay out of that, but I work with parents who are concerned about their youth. Mr. Jekielek: You’re working with the parents, not their kids. Ms. Winn: Right. Parents who come to me are typically extremely stressed out. This crisis takes a toll on the whole family, on their sleep and their wellbeing. Sometimes we have to talk about self-care. Also, I want to say that my background, my professional training is in understanding and working with family systems, and looking at how all the parts connect. What we see in families with trans-identified youth is that the youth are sometimes what we would call in family systems theory, the identified patient, meaning there’s a problem in the whole system. The whole family is not well, but there’s one person who manifests that unwellness and typically becomes scapegoated for it. Sometimes you’ll see that the youth presenting with gender distress is the identified patient in the family. It’s really just a symptom. My job is to look at what it is a symptom of. What is the symptom trying to diagnose the system with? Since I’m not working with the youth, I’m hearing the parent’s report, and I’m getting a picture in my mind. I do have some pretty good skills with regard to when someone tells me about someone else who’s not present. I can usually make inferences and I’ll say, “It sounds like this person might react this way. Does that sound like them?” They’ll say, “Yes, that is how that person would react in that situation.” So, I’ve gotten good at consulting about someone who’s not present in the room. These parents tell me what’s going on with their children, and I help them identify what it could be a symptom of. For example, in some families, by the time the youth is identifying as trans and the family is getting into conflict over that, it’s just the pinnacle of something that’s been developing for a long time. It’s sort of the image of the glacier where there’s only a little part that’s above the water. The part we can see is the trans identification. But there’s so much that came before it that might have to do with problems in the marriage, difficulty figuring out how to parent together, maybe unprocessed trauma dating back generations, and even skewed roles in the family. There are times where these kids are trying to control or alter something in the family system by presenting with this distress. That’s why I ask the question, “What is this diagnosing about the family system?” And then, I work with the parents on what they can do. If the parents typically haven’t had very good boundaries, then I work with them on boundaries. I work with them on staying emotionally grounded, but also understanding there’s a huge cognitive piece to our work together, because I help them understand the mentality of a teenager who’s been indoctrinated into a cult. I provide a lot of psychoeducation on what these kids are being exposed to. That’s another thing. A lot of these parents, some are in their 30s, but a lot of them are in their 40s and 50s. They may not have grown up with the internet. They’re certainly not as immersed in it as their teenagers are. I’ll get parents coming to me saying, “My kids said the craziest thing, can you believe this?” And then I say, “Yes, that’s what they all say. It’s a TikTok trend.” It sounds crazy, so I’m educating the parents on what their kids are being exposed to, helping them understand what their kids are going through, and I do that with a lot of compassion for the kids. But it doesn’t mean that we have to agree with the kids’ self-diagnosis or their preferred way of addressing the situation. Mr. Jekielek: You referred to the term gender cult earlier in our conversation. How is it a cult? Ms. Winn: Boy, how it is not a cult would be a shorter list. The one thing that cults typically have that the gender cult does not is a single charismatic leader, but you still do have several charismatic leaders. There are many of them, and they’re internet influencers; the Jeffrey Marsh’s and the Dylan Mulvaney’s of the world, and that Addison character. You have these public figures who get a lot of attention. The splitting off of vulnerable, young, naive in many ways, but also very bright in other ways, young people from their families is a classic move of cults. If you can drive a wedge between parents and their children, then you have vulnerable people at your disposal who still need love and something to attach to, someone to idealize, and something to believe in. They’ll work very fervently for the cause that you reattach them to. The family triangulation is a big one. Obviously, it’s a body modification cult, that is literally what it is. It has this bizarre kind of quasi or pseudo-religious way of thinking about the world. There’s a lot of magical thinking. There’s a lot of nonsensical ideas that you have to buy into to believe in this stuff. For example, there’s an episode of my podcast called The Myth of the Magical Child with Matt Osborne, where we talk about how he was raised being told that he was an indigo child, and he sees the similarities between the idea of the indigo child and the idea of a trans child. Again, there’s a departure from reality where the normal laws of human nature don’t apply, like the idea that a child knows who they are, and that what a teenager wants right now is what’s always going to be good for them. There is this suspension from disbelief. If you look at the progression of cults, there’s a lot of similarities here as well. Where again, you start off with young, vulnerable people, many of them gifted, quirky, weird, and you start off with love bombing them, giving them this idea of belonging and that it’s all going to be so great when you join us, and it’s just literally rainbows and glitter. Those are the symbols that they use. So first, there is this love bombing, “We are your family now. It’s all going to be better when you join us and when you take these steps.” But then you progressively have to give up more and more of yourself in order to please them. There’s always that dangling carrot of, “Well, if you’re really one of us, then you’re going to take these steps.” Of course, that first step is social transition and social affirmation. It might be things like binding, taking puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and surgeries one after another. It’s typically not just one surgery and these surgeries have a high rate of complication. There is always that next step that you are expected to take. “We love you so much, but also you’re not really one of us if you don’t take that next step, if you don’t fight for our cause, if you don’t proselytize our cause.” I noticed this back when I was still working with these indoctrinated youth, they didn’t want to be around what they called cis people. They wanted to only be around their kind of people, and that is just a reflection that they’re being progressively cut off from the world, and told that the world is unsafe. That’s something that this has in common with cults as well. The idea that the world is unsafe, and that normal people aren’t special. They don’t get it, and are out to get you. You have to at all times surround yourself with reminders of what we are about. Those are just a few of the characteristics that trans stuff has in common with cults. Mr. Jekielek: One more that comes to mind, and maybe you can comment on this because you do work with detransitioners, there is often a high cost of leaving. Ms. Winn: Absolutely. Mr. Jekielek: What is the situation? Ms. Winn: Detransitioners, I admire the courage many of them have. I know some of them would push back against that saying, “I had no choice.” But they’ve really had to give up so much. Because when they finally realize that this is not what they thought it was, and that these people don’t really love them, and that altering their body didn’t make them feel better, and in many cases it made them feel worse psychologically and physically. Whenever that all finally breaks down for them, they have to give up everything that they have built their identity and worldview and sense of self on for the past however many years. Sometimes it’s been their entire adulthood. Sometimes it was their entire adolescence and adulthood. There’s a real shattering of the ego and of everything they thought they knew that had to take place. Then, to admit that to other people is to not only risk losing friends, but to risk having people turn against you, telling you that you are bigoted or that you are indoctrinated into a Right-wing cult now. That’s one of the things that they believe. Another thing I’ve noticed with detransitioners is so much fear and guilt about letting people down, especially if they pushed their parents into it, or if they feel like their parents really thought they were doing the right thing, or whatever steps they took in whatever relationships to get people to go along with this. They have to walk it back and admit, “I was wrong, and I put you through all that for nothing,” You can look at some of the worst case scenarios, and not to say that all of these have been things I’ve seen in my office, but things I’ve heard in different situations. There are people whose parents divorced over this. What is it like to feel like you are responsible for your parents divorcing, because you were so sure that you were trans and you were so adamant, that mom who was backing you up was right, and dad was the bad guy? And when mom decided to divorce dad over this, you had mom’s back and you thought that was the right choice. Now, you realize that you were just in a cult the whole time, and you feel responsible for splitting your parents up. There are a lot of situations like that, and a lot of variations on that, but I think the guilt is about, “Wow, I did so much to get other people to go along with this.” Then, there’s employment difficulties as well, because for people who have to detransition at work, that can be really embarrassing and in a number of different ways. In one of my podcast interviews with a detransitioner in Australia named Oliver Davies, he talks about how he had been using the women’s facilities at work. He was in the habit of biking to work, and he would shower when he got there. Then, just as he was gradually realizing that this wasn’t really him, he just kind of walked it back like, “Oops.” But that’s relatively mild compared to what some detransitioners go through with their employment situations, because I’ve also heard stories for examples of female detransitioners who were in male-dominated professions. When they were passing as a male, they were treated one way, and then when they reverted to living as their birth sex, they were treated a different way. Their experiences of discrimination are in some ways even more painful than the average woman’s experiences with discrimination, because they actually knew what it was like to be treated with the assumption that they were competent. And then, years down the line with even more experience under their belt, they’re now being treated like they’re not competent because they’re presenting as their birth sex. So, that can be extremely painful and isolating. Mr. Jekielek: One of the things that’s mentioned in the film is when some of these young people get these very extensive interventions, essentially that puts them on a track to basically be medicalized for life. There’s a kind of whole budding industry ramping up for this purpose. Please tell me about this. Ms. Winn: Absolutely. It is a huge industry that is growing a lot, and it’s a big money maker for hospitals. Matt Walsh leaked a video from Vanderbilt talking about how much money is in this. There are some charts in our film that show the exponential rise of the profits in this industry, along with the exponential rise in the youth presenting with this distress. It’s becoming increasingly difficult to believe that this is all happening organically. You’re right that these trans-identified young people are absolutely being set up to become medical patients for life, and that can happen in a number of ways. Once someone is on cross-sex hormones, they have to continue taking those hormones. If they don’t, if they physically “detransition,” then they are going to encounter another host of medical problems. The detrans young people I’ve met are dealing with really complex and novel medical situations that a lot of doctors don’t know how to treat. If a trans-identified person has certain body parts removed, then they will always have to be on exogenous hormones. So for females, with a hysterectomy, or for males being castrated, the body parts that produce hormones naturally are gone. They either have to remain on those cross-sex hormones, or if they wish to switch back to their natal sex hormones, they have to take those exogenously as well. So, there’s the dependency on hormones. There’s also the continual pursuit of more and more surgeries in order to so-called pass for their new gender. Then, there’s the medical complications that these hormones and surgeries create, the increased risk of early Alzheimer’s and dementia, and even psychosis. Mr. Jekielek: That’s with having the uterus removed? Ms. Winn: Hysterectomies, yes. But also, cross-sex hormones have been known to create early dementia in males, bone loss or failure to develop bone density, osteoporosis, osteopenia and all kinds of musculoskeletal issues that can result from poor bone structure. There is an increased risk of all kinds of cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, and even certain types of cancers. People are going to become sick for life. The young people making these decisions are starting off with young, healthy bodies. Most of us accept those who grew up with some kind of disability, most of us can remember how invincible we felt before we’d ever really gone through a major illness or injury. By the time you get to be my age or your age, we’ve been humbled because we’ve been sick, we’ve been injured and we’re grateful for our health. We don’t take it for granted. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that this stuff is being marketed to young people who have no idea what it’s actually like to live day in and day out with chronic pain and disability. Mr. Jekielek: This is obviously critical information that both parents and kids should know at the outset of having these discussions, and as we’ve been discussing, they don’t often get that information. I’m reminded of something that you posted in your Twitter handle. You have three purposes in life, or in your practice. The third one is to promote justice and healing for those who have been harmed by gender-affirming care. You’ve converted your practice into doing this, and you also have this podcast called, “You must be some kind of therapist.” You have some really fascinating guests. Please tell me more about what you’re doing to facilitate that healing. Ms. Winn: In our film, a therapist named Lisa Marchiano describes detransitioners as shadow people. She talks about how Jung said that the shadow is any part of us that we don’t really want to know about. She talked about her process of thinking about how detransitioners really hold the shadow for society, because society is turning a blind eye. There are people who are still bought into the idea that trans kids are a good thing, that it’s about compassion and justice. They don’t want to face that shadow of having their faith shattered and realizing that people are actually being hurt by this. So currently, I would say detransitioners are in the shadow, as Lisa Marchiano has described, of our society and really ostracized and outcast, and they can’t get proper medical care. One of my main concerns as a mental health professional is how badly my field has betrayed these vulnerable people. In many cases, therapists played a role in doing this. We actually pushed people down a path of transition, and it’s not pretty and a lot of people don’t want to talk about it. But what I’ve learned from listening to detransitioners is that the people who have been medically harmed by this and regret it, in some cases have homicidal levels of rage toward the people who did this to them, including people in my very own profession. So, when I talk about promoting justice and healing for those who’ve been harmed, sunshine is the best disinfectant. The first thing we need to do is stop putting them in the shadow and start bringing them out into the light and looking at what people are experiencing, being present with the pain and suffering that we have caused them, taking responsibility for that and seeking to earn and be worthy of their trust. Because right now, we’re not. Detransitioners have been medically and mentally harmed by the professionals who are supposed to help them, and now they don’t trust us and that’s our fault. We need to earn back their trust, and that is not a process that can be rushed. One of the first things you learn when you’re studying to become a trauma therapist is how sacred trust is, how easily it’s disrupted, and what it takes to actually develop that in a healing relationship. Frankly, detransitioners have no reason to trust therapists like me even, not to speak of therapists who created this mess. Somehow, we need a cultural shift to help society turn the light of day, and our compassion and our desire for justice and all of the liberal values that are caught up in this craze, we need to turn those values toward this new rapidly emerging population of people who are suffering in these profound ways. We need to start talking about it, and we need to start educating a new generation of professionals to deal with the aftermath, as well as making some societal shifts. For instance, medical care for detransitioners is not properly funded. Can you believe that in some cases Medicaid will actually pay for a confused, distressed young woman to amputate her breasts, but they won’t pay for reconstruction? Not that you can ever reconstruct breasts, you can’t restore the breast tissue if the mammary glands have been removed. But if she wants at least something cosmetic to help her feel like she’s restoring her dignity, they won’t provide that. The same thing with how insurance will pay for testosterone, but it won’t pay for laser hair removal for females who regret the impact of testosterone on their body. We need them to get appropriate medical care. We need to train medical professionals in how to deal with the novel and complex medical situations that detransitioners find themselves in. We need to train therapists in a whole new degree of competent trauma therapy. Mr. Jekielek: The film Affirmation Generation is one step in that direction. I really think it’s a film that has the ability to help anyone with an open mind accept its contents. It’s beautiful in that way. So, congratulations again. How can people see it? Ms. Winn: Thank you. Affirmation Generation can be streamed online at affirmationgenerationmovie.com. We’re encouraging people to organize screenings for March 12th, which is Detrans Awareness Day. If you happen to be watching this before March 12th, we encourage you to have some friends or family over into your living room or rent a whole theater if you have access to that, or anything in between to share the message that we’re trying to spread. Our producers really put a lot of thought into how we can share everything that we’ve learned in an hour-and-a-half film. If there’s one thing that you could ask someone who’s on the fence about this issue to do, what would that thing be? It’s to watch this film. Mr. Jekielek: Stephanie Winn, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Ms. Winn: Thank you. It’s been great being here. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Stephanie Winn 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

“If you say that there’s structural racism, institutional racism, systemic racism, then I have to insist on one other kind of racism. And that is surmountable racism,” says Ian Rowe, co-founder of Vertex Partnership Academies, a new network of character-focused, International Baccalaureate high schools in the Bronx. Prior to this, he was CEO of the Public Prep charter school network for ten years. “What we owe to young people is to tell them the truth about those behaviors that are far more correlated to success: education, work, faith, family formation, usually marriage before children,” Rowe says. Last year, New York’s state and city teachers unions sued to block the creation of his new school system. But less than a week before the school was set to open, Rowe’s legal team won a decisive victory. All students at Vertex Partnership Academies take a special course called Pathways to Power. “There are no victims in our school, only architects of their own lives,” Rowe says. Interview trailer: Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/ian-rowe-were-handicapping-children-with-victimhood-narratives-instead-of-teaching-them-how-to-succeed_5087162.html FULL TRANSCRIPT Ian Rowe: Welcome to Vertex Partnership Academies, which we are growing into what will be a world-class International Baccalaureate high school. We’re in District 12 in the Bronx. Something really important to know about this district, only 7 per cent graduated from high school, ready for college. And so, we thought it was very, very important to create a new opportunity, a new educational institution focused on excellence for more families who are desperate for their kids to have a shot at the American dream. Therefore we created this option, and now we’re here. We’ve opened Vertex Partnership Academies in a beautiful old Catholic school. This building is the old Blessed Sacrament School, which was built about 100 years ago. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor actually was a student here from kindergarten through eighth grade. It’s quite inspiring for our students to know that a Supreme Court justice was educated in this school, in this building. Unfortunately, the Blessed Sacrament School closed about a decade ago. We are revitalizing the building and revitalizing the school, because this is now our home for Vertex Partnership Academies. Jan Jekielek: Do you think that one school can nudge that 7 per cent number? Mr. Rowe: My hope is that we can build an entire network of great new high schools. This is just the first one, but you have to start. We’re in a community where, yes, only 7 per cent of kids are graduating from high school ready for college. But we know that 100 per cent of all kids are capable of achieving their highest levels. We need to build institutions like Vertex Partnership Academies that demand excellence, and that don’t lower expectations. There are no victims in our schools, only architects of their own lives. That’s what we are really trying to cultivate in our kids. Mr. Jekielek: I found it really interesting as I was walking through, in the staircase you have a set of values that expand on these four cardinal virtues. Mr. Rowe: Yes, sometimes the word indoctrination is used in a negative way. We’re trying to indoctrinate our kids into the four cardinal virtues, plus also something called the International Baccalaureate learner profile. These are the kinds of characteristics that we want our students to develop; resiliency, good communication, and community-mindedness. Because school is about academics; math, science, language and literature. And it’s about the habits of mind, the virtues, and the character-based strengths that we want our kids to develop. Mr. Jekielek: You said a whole bunch of things I want to follow up on. I’m going to start with this, “Agency is an empowering alternative to the narrative of equity.” There is so much to unpack here. Mr. Rowe: We’re living in a time where there are these dominant narratives, that particularly for young people, are pushing this idea that you’re simply a victim. There are these forces in our country that are so overwhelming, so powerful, and so discriminatory that you, as an individual, are immobilized because of your race, your gender, and also as a result of listening to this narrative. As someone that runs schools in the heart of the Bronx, where kids are hearing these messages all the time about everything that they can’t do in their life, I’ve really come around to believe this idea of agency can be a much more empowering alternative. It’s a tool that you have to walk a path of prosperity in our country. Mr. Jekielek: Agency, it’s almost like a different worldview. Because on one hand, you have this idea that you can act and change your reality, whatever your situation may be. And the other view is that you’re given what you have and you’re stuck with it. Mr. Rowe: I like to describe the two narratives that I see out there, what I describe as blame the system, or blame the victim. With the blame the system ideology, that’s a view of our country. It’s a view of America as a place that’s inherently oppressive. Based on your race, your class, and your gender, there are these systems that are just rigged against you. Maybe if you’re black, there’s a white supremacist lurking on every corner. Capitalism is evil. These systems are so discriminatory and so oppressive that you have no agency, and you have no independent ability to lead your own life. But on the other side, there’s this other narrative that I call blame the victim. In that narrative, America is great. America is not the problem, you’re the problem. There’s some pathology that you have. You haven’t pulled yourself up by your own bootstraps. You haven’t taken advantage of all the opportunities that exist in this great country. And so, between blame the system and blame the victim, either you are powerless against these systems, or it’s your fault that you have not been able to take advantage of these opportunities that exist in America. I find both of these narratives dangerous for our country, because it robs young people of this idea that they can lead a self-determined life. I define agency as the force of your free will guided by moral discernment—the force of your free will guided by moral discernment. If you think of agency like a vector or velocity, velocity is not just speed, it’s speed and direction. If you, as a young person, are starting to think about your life and you know that you’ve got free will, but how are you going to wield that will towards the right direction? Agency is what I like to believe in. If we can cultivate a new age of agency in our country, we would have a much more optimistic, future-oriented generation that is rising. But the key point is that agency doesn’t just come from nowhere. We all have free will, but there are lots of people that exercise free will that aren’t good people. So, how do you learn how to become a morally discerning person? That’s why I’ve created this framework that I call F.R.E.E., which is really focused on the key institutions that help young people develop agency; family, religion, education, and entrepreneurship. We can go into each of those, but those are the four pillars that if we were to invest in them as a society, we would start to see a whole generation of young people move away from this ideology of victimhood and dependency and grievance to hope, empowerment, and agency. Mr. Jekielek: The blame the victim narrative that you describe is talking about people needing to exercise agency, make decisions for themselves, and overcome their victimhood. Please explain to me the problem with this view. Mr. Rowe: Blame the victim, in some ways, is infantilizing the very people that you’re talking about. Let’s talk about race and crime. Unfortunately, there are disproportionate numbers of black men that are incarcerated relative to their percentage in the population. There are those that say, “That’s just a result of systemic racism.” It’s almost as if they have no power. They’re just in a system that’s driving them towards achieving those outcomes. And if you have any other answer to the problem other than structural discrimination, then you’re blaming the victim. You’re blaming them for the very circumstances that they’re in. The thing is, at some point, there has to be some kind of personal responsibility. There has to be some recognition that an individual is making a decision towards a certain type of behavior. For example, I study the implosion of the family in certain segments of our society. The nonmarital birth rate in our country for women 24 and under has been in the 70 per cent range for well over a decade. It’s 61 per cent of white women and 91 per cent of black women, 24 and under. These numbers are staggering. When you point these types of data out, some people say, “That’s just the result of the conditions that they are in.” I say, “That might be true and we need to work on structural factors.” And again, I can talk about some things that I would certainly work on. But we can’t ignore the fact that if people are making decisions to have children they are a player, they are an architect in their own outcomes. Some people say, “Well, you’re blaming the victim.” I say, “No, we just have to acknowledge that when we’re looking at social conditions, we have to analyze the role of structural barriers, while also recognizing the importance of individual decision-making and personal responsibility.” This is why I run schools. I run schools to let kids know that they can do hard things, that they aren’t just, as Martin Luther King says, “Flotsam and jetsam on the river of life,” and that they just go with the flow. They have the ability to turn the tide, even if their circumstances may suggest otherwise. Mr. Jekielek: What you’re saying is there are structural things and we need to be honest about them, and look at the actual data from studies, like the ones you’ve described. Irrespective of those realities, there are also tools for people to use to transcend some of those realities. Mr. Rowe: 100 per cent. Mr. Jekielek: Right? Mr. Rowe: 100 per cent. Mr. Jekielek: And it’s not a black and white situation. Mr. Rowe: No. What we’ve lost in our country is the ability to deal with this nuance. In New York City, there is a legislative cap right now on starting a public charter school. If you had a great idea to open a great school to serve all these kids that need more high quality educational options, you couldn’t do it. That’s an example of a real structural barrier. That is a policy barrier, and that’s why we should be fighting for school choice, fighting for more educational freedom. A seven-year-old can’t solve that problem on their own. That’s an example of a structural barrier that I acknowledge. But that doesn’t take the seven-year-old off the hook for being able to go to school, apply themselves, and be supported by a family and community that will help them thrive. I run schools to create environments to help kids build that capacity which overcomes that mindset. That’s what I say, we can acknowledge structural barriers, which today, by the way, are often not on the dimension of race as much as it’s often purported to be. But as an example, as relates to education, that’s a real example of a barrier. But we have to fight that battle simultaneously along with cultivating this idea of agency within young people who need to succeed regardless of their circumstances. Mr. Jekielek: We’re going to talk about the school battle, because this is something that you faced directly. Mr. Rowe: Yes. Mr. Jekielek: In your understanding, what is the reason for these astounding numbers of children being born out of wedlock in our society at large? Mr. Rowe: That’s a profound question. It has not always been this way. It was in the 1960s in the black community that Daniel Patrick Moynihan, at the Department of Labor at the time, did an analysis. It was focused on the black family. And in particular, he was focused on those segments of the black community that seemed to be entrenched in poverty and dysfunctional behavior, generation after generation. He found a deep correlation between poverty and these dysfunctional behaviors, a cycle of disadvantage. He found a deep correlation between those behaviors and this growing nonmarital birth rate that existed within the black community. At that time in the mid-60s, the nonmarital birth rate in the black community was 23.6 per cent. He said, “Crisis, crisis, crisis.” He tried to bring out a loudspeaker. “We have to address this issue, because we aren’t addressing this issue. This is at the core.” What’s interesting is that the terminology of blaming the victim emanated right after he put this data out. Because all these critics came forward and said, “All you’re doing is blaming these black people for being victims of situations that they didn’t create. It’s because of a legacy of discrimination, and it’s because of contemporary racism.” Literally, the term blame the victim emerged out of the criticism of that report. The nonmarital birth rate within the black community today in 2023 is more than 70 per cent. In the white community, it’s close to 30 per cent, even far higher than the rates that existed in the 1960s that Moynihan was talking about. Why has that happened? Cultural mores have certainly shifted. There’s a very interesting study that Janet Yellen and her Nobel Prize-winning husband, George Akerlof, did in the 1990s trying to understand this question. They saw skyrocketing nonmarital birth rates, as well as deep correlations with poverty and dysfunctional behavior and crime. They came to the conclusion in their analysis that it was reproductive technology shock. It would be very interesting if the same study were done today. But they claimed that it was the advent of the pill and abortion that fundamentally changed the relationship between men and women. Heretofore, in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s, if a man and woman were to come together and have a baby, there was almost this implicit agreement beforehand that if this happens, we’re getting married, therefore the whole idea of the shotgun wedding. As more options started to be created when an unplanned pregnancy occurred, it shifted where we often talk about a woman’s right to choose. And men started to have the right to choose by saying, “If you now have the option of an abortion and you’re not choosing one, then I am stepping away from my responsibility.” You can see in the data what has shifted over these last 30, 40, 50 years in terms of what occurs when an unplanned or an unwanted pregnancy comes about. It used to be that marriage was a top option, or adoption was an option. That has now been flipped, in that abortion and single parenthood are almost always a significant percent of cases. This is now across race the choices being made by young women and men. That’s why you see such declining rates of marriage, particularly in low-income communities. This is something that we as educators and leaders have to restore and re-emphasize—the role of family and the timing of family formation for the rising generation. This all ties back to this idea of agency. Because if you’re a young person growing up in an unstable family without high quality choices in education and not rooted in a faith community, it’s really hard to lead a life of your own choosing, because you don’t have the building blocks to help you build that sense of agency. Mr. Jekielek: It’s hard to even imagine what that would really look like. Mr. Rowe: In 2016, I had been running a network of public charter schools for about six years and we were doing quite well. In terms of academics, we had maybe a couple of hundred open seats each year, but we had nearly 5,000 people on our wait list each year. People were desperate to send their kids to a great school. We decided to move our headquarters from Tribeca in Manhattan to the South Bronx, because that’s where there was such a huge demand for our schools. I’ll always remember on July 11th, 2016, we had this epiphany moment where we decided to take the team out on a walking tour to get to know our new neighborhood. Where’s the local deli? Where’s the local bank? We were now going to be in this neighborhood and our team was a little apprehensive, because there was a needle exchange right on the corner where our new office was. But this is where our school was going to be, so this is where our headquarters should be. As we were on this walking tour, we saw in the distance this baby blue, 27-foot Winnebago truck with all these people around it that were excited to see it. What is that? It’s almost like the ice cream truck, but these were adults. As we got closer, we saw graffiti lettering on the side of the truck that said, “Who’s Your Daddy?” What is that? It turned out, Who’s Your Daddy, is a mobile DNA testing center where low-income folks were spending somewhere between $350 to $500 to ask questions like, “Could you be my sister? Are you my father?” Literally, these were like DNA tests being given so that people could answer fundamental questions about who is their family. And so, when you ask, “Are kids even seeing models?” Absolutely. These kids are growing up in different environments; the Bronx, Appalachia, Chicago, Los Angeles, and all over the country. The nonmarital birth rate in this section of the Bronx was 84.5 per cent. If kids aren’t seeing enough models about what the building blocks are for family, not to mention all the other pathologies that they may be exposed to, how is it that we can expect them to develop the kinds of attitudes and behaviors that lead to a life of flourishing? This is why we have to recognize there are structural barriers, while also still holding kids accountable for their own behavior. But don’t put kids in such a situation that you’re not acknowledging some of these factors, and when they don’t have the models to reinforce what their behavior should be. Mr. Jekielek: As you’re saying all this, I keep coming back to this idea that the structural barriers that we’re told about, these narratives are actually just simply untrue. They’re almost like a distraction from the really difficult barriers that actually do exist. Mr. Rowe: Yes. Let’s take Nikole Hannah-Jones. Nikole Hannah-Jones is a recognized reporter for the New York Times. She was the lead writer for a project that the New York Times did, called “The 1619 Project.” She’s a big proponent of reparations, which is a multi-trillion dollar program where black people should just be paid money by the government as restitution for slavery and past discrimination. She wrote a piece in the New York Times Magazine called, “What We Are Owed.” It’s all about the rationale for reparations. She says that it doesn’t matter what a black person does. A black person basically is powerless to close the racial wealth gap. It doesn’t matter if you get married, it doesn’t matter if you save, it doesn’t matter if you buy a home, and it doesn’t matter if you get educated. None of those things will matter or none of those things can help “close or address 400 years of racialized plundering.” Like, whoa. And of course, mind you, Nikole Hannah-Jones, in her own personal life, has done all of those things to lead a life of flourishing. And good for her, because she’s recognized that whatever barriers there are, there certainly seems to be a pathway that creates a much greater likelihood of success, even for the kid who’s in the poorest of conditions, not born into the “most stable family structure.” And yet, the narrative that’s often given is that these people are not succeeding because of structural this or structural that. I often like to say, “Okay, if you say that there is structural racism, institutional racism, and systemic racism, then I have to insist on one other kind of racism, and that is surmountable racism. Unfortunately, racism or other forms of discrimination are a part of the human condition, and it’s practiced by people of all races. And yet, there are also tens of millions of people that seem to be flourishing in their lives despite these challenges. Why? What is it that we can learn from people who seem to succeed? That is the central question that I often find the opponents of some of my ideas not willing to explore. Mr. Jekielek: As you say this, I’m thinking about the central tenets of the Woodson Center, and I know you’re a part of the Woodson Center too, and I was very happy to learn that. This methodology of finding the people who flourish in really difficult circumstances, figuring out what they’re doing, and empowering them to do more of it just seems like something we should be doing a lot more of. Mr. Rowe: If you really want to be intellectually honest, if you really are really focused on finding solutions to any range of social pathologies or social issues, you have to start with the premise that not everyone is in prison, not everyone is poor, and not everyone is being raised in a broken marriage. Or if there’s a substantial group of people, even if they’re in the minority overall, but if there’s still a substantial number that seem to be leading a life of flourishing under conditions that seem to have others succumb, or you’re saying that’s the reason that others are succumbing, then there must be something to learn. For example, we often talk about poverty within the black community. It turns out that for nearly 30 years, the poverty rate for married black couples has been in the single digits. What might we learn from that? And yet, 70 per cent of kids in the black community are born into nonmarital households. Maybe we should think about the role of family formation as something we should be strongly advocating for, and then go even further. There’s something called the success sequence which some of your viewers might be familiar with. Many of your viewers may not know the term, but they certainly know the series of behaviors, because they may have practiced it in their own lives. But basically, if you finish just your high school degree, then get a full-time job of any kind, you learn the dignity and discipline of work. And then, if you have children with marriage first, the data shows that 97 per cent of millennials that follow that series of decisions avoid poverty. And the vast majority enter the middle-class or beyond. That certainly seems like valuable information young people should learn not as a prescriptive, like you must do this, but as a descriptive, saying, “Look, you are going to face a whole series of decisions in your life. We want to make sure you’re equipped with that body of evidence that shows people with the same conditions as you have made these kinds of decisions and flourished. For some reason, the people who are the gatekeepers of information say, “No, no, no, you can’t teach that to these kids. You’ll somehow be embarrassing them.” Like, no. I fight against these kinds of ideas. Let’s not do what Nikole Hannah-Jones did. I say to her, “You are not preaching what you’ve practiced in your own life. In fact, you’re preaching something else and that’s harmful to kids.” Mr. Jekielek: Every self-help book has this idea of exercising agency as a central tenet, however, it’s constructed. There’s no self-help book that says you don’t have to take control of your life to do something. Mr. Rowe: Or that you have to wait for somebody else before you can be free. Mr. Jekielek: The people that are teaching the victimhood mentality, they’re not practicing what they preach. They’re actually doing this opposite thing. Mr. Rowe: Correct. It’s astounding to me. I may have to do a few papers on this. It’s astounding to me. The people who are often advocating for the powerlessness of certain communities in their own personal lives have exhibited the behaviors of power. And what I mean by that, typically, you have finished your education, you’ve had full-time work, and you typically have some kind of personal faith commitment. If you’ve had children, you have almost always gotten married first. But it’s not 100 per cent. There are always exceptions. We’ve all heard the stories of the individual that was raised in a single-parent household and they beat the odds. We’ve also heard stories about kids raised in married two-parent households where the marriage was dysfunctional. So, you have to acknowledge that there’s always exceptions. There are no guarantees in life. But what we owe to young people is to tell them the truth about those behaviors that are far more correlated to success; education, work, faith, family formation, and usually marriage before children. The people who are often out there, the big social justice activists that are claiming systemic racism, or systemic this or systemic that being the reason for all the disparities that may exist in our society, never seem to acknowledge what they have done in their own life to avoid those same challenges. And that is dripping with hypocrisy. We have to just call it out. Mr. Jekielek: So very briefly, Pathways to Power. We’ve been talking about Pathways to Power essentially. What is this course? Mr. Rowe: We have a class called Pathways to Power. We teach it almost like a probabilities class. With this series of decisions, here’s your likelihood of entering poverty. With this series of decisions, here’s your likelihood of entering the middle class or beyond. With this set of decisions, here’s your likelihood of really leading a life of flourishing. Our job is to make sure you are equipped with the best information. That’s what Pathways to Power is all about. Mr. Rowe: They’re finishing up an assignment related to “The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens.” This has been our primary reading for the last semester. They’re learning about goal setting, overcoming challenges, and the strategies that they can deploy to be effective in their own lives. That doesn’t mean that you’re not going to face challenges like every human being, but you have within your capacity the tools to make decisions where you can be successful. Instructor: This is where we start to apply all of the work that we did with the seven habits. You’re going to look at that student’s academic profile, because that’s all you know. You just know the grades that they have as of last week. You are going to take this chart paper, and put it in the center of your table. You need to apply the seven habits to this specific student based on what you know about them, which right now is their grade. Can you stand up, Devin, please? Student: For science, student A got one. For art, student A got one. For language and literature, that’s two. For global, two. Math, four. World language, three. And physical education, three. So, the habits we discussed. Instructor: Tell us what does that mean to you? Like when you’re looking at that, what does that make you think before going into the habits? Student: It makes me think that the student may have the potential to be better, but the student may need to set goals for themselves. So, the habits to discuss, be proactive. And besides to be proactive, stay off the score, get tutoring, or you can ask the teacher. For put first things first, you can prioritize their failing grade. For begin with the end in mind, you can set specific goals for tasks, be able to improve grades for different classes, or you can stay after school. And to seek to understand than to be understood, you can advocate with the teacher that you are lost so people know where or why you are confused. Complete your work and get notes from classmates. Instructor: Good. Really good work. And what I’ll say is I didn’t see a lot of people use the habit; seek to understand, rather than to be understood. Mr. Jekielek: This would’ve been a wonderful course for me to take. Mr. Rowe: Oh, yes. Mr. Jekielek: You were going to say? Mr. Rowe: No, the truth of the matter is we are in a society today where a lot of kids across race see this narrative of America as this inherently oppressive nation, or that capitalism is evil. There’s actually something happening to our rising generation that they’re becoming much more risk-averse. They’re not starting families and they’re not starting businesses. There is this kind of malaise, especially amongst young men. You got more kids spending more time watching pornography and playing video games. They’re not engaging in life. Even some data just came out recently that kids aren’t dating as much. There’s a lot more of a passivity culture. Mr. Jekielek: There’s a kind of safetyism. This is the term I learned from Lenore Skenazy over at Let Grow, and it’s a very real thing. And also, I might add, there is this inability to think in terms of risk-benefit or probabilities. It’s very black and white. Mr. Rowe: Yes. It’s the binary, right. If you divide the world into that’s good or that’s bad, you lose nuance and you lose a sense of what your own role is in determining what the outcomes will be. Like, what levers are within my control? Even if for some people the outcomes might be bad, or for some people the outcomes are good, at the end of the day what energy am I putting into my own life? And again, the message to the kids in our school is that there are no victims in our school, there are only architects of your own lives. At the end of sophomore year at Vertex Partnership Academies, our new high school, each student will have the option to choose the International Baccalaureate Diploma pathway or the International Baccalaureate Careers pathway. With the careers pathway, while you’re also still taking academic classes, you now have the opportunity to do apprenticeships or internships. For example, the Mayo Clinic will be one of our partners where you’ll be able to choose a course of study, like for phlebotomy and how to take blood. You’ll be at a New York City-based hospital maybe one day a week, interning. At the end of your senior year of high school, you’ll be credentialed as a phlebotomist or in another discipline within the healthcare arena. It is the whole idea that you have optionality and choice, because we want you to know that you’re not just boxed in, that you’re not just a cog in some larger system. You have agency, but there’s mutual responsibility. As a school, we are going to create some amazing opportunities for you. But you as an individual have to step up, you have to rise. That’s where I think safetyism is coming from. There isn’t this recognition of mutual responsibility. You have to step up. You have to take advantage. And on the other side, there has to be people who are working towards your betterment by creating these opportunities. Right now, I feel that young people are not seeing enough to let them know that they have to be the curator, and they have to be the architect. And then we, as the grownups, have to make sure that we are providing the kinds of information and data that help them make better decisions. Mr. Jekielek: It’s astounding to me to think that you almost didn’t get a chance to realize these schools. You are also putting your money where your mouth is. As I understand it, as you were developing this school, there was a potential court case you would have to face which might have prevented you from having this school up and running. And it was just 10 days before opening that you got the go-ahead. But all sorts of very large educational institutions were dead set against you doing everything we’ve just talked about. Mr. Rowe: We’re not going to Scarsdale with this idea of building this beautiful International Baccalaureate high school. We want to go to District 12 in the Bronx where only 7 per cent of kids are graduating from high school ready for college. One would think that there would be enthusiasm for such an idea. Mr. Jekielek: I’ll just clarify. There is enthusiasm amongst the parents. Mr. Rowe: There’s enthusiasm amongst parents for sure. As always, the people who are desperate for options, especially to improve the life outcomes for their children, they’re the ones clamoring for these opportunities. No, it’s the gatekeepers, it’s the adults and grownups who have said, “No, we know what’s better. We can’t give choices because somehow that will ruin the entire system.” Tell that to a 22-year-old mom who just wants the best for her five-year-old to start to have different choices than she had in her own life. But as it relates to Vertex Partnership Academies, we said, “Wait a minute.” There are existing charter schools that currently end at middle school and would very much like to have a guaranteed high school where they could send their students when they’re leaving eighth grade. We said, “That makes sense.” We’ll run a world-class high school for all of your rising ninth graders, and we can do that for all these different schools that end at eighth grade. The State University of New York said, “That’s a great idea. We’re authorizing Vertex Partnership Academies to be a high school program for all these charter schools that now want to send their kids to high school.” So, it’s not violating the cap. These are existing charters that are simply growing their grades from kindergarten through eighth grade to now kindergarten through 12th grade. It’s a very elegant, wonderful solution. It allows new charter high schools to open. The United Federation of Teachers in New York said, “Nope, we’re going to do everything in our power to shut this down even before it opens.” So, they filed a lawsuit against us. We had gotten approval from the state in February of 2022. In March of 2022, just when we’re in the midst of recruiting staff and students, the teachers union sued to shut us down. Thankfully, we were able to get Kirkland & Ellis, which is an amazing law firm to defend us pro bono. And yes, you’re right. The first day of school was August 22nd. August 16th was the date that a New York State Supreme Court judge had heard the case, looked through the materials, listened to what the union was saying, and completely dismissed their case, completely dismissed their case. The union chose not to appeal because they knew that there was no basis for it in the first place. But they hoped by simply bringing a lawsuit, that would be enough to bring us to our knees. We said, “No, we are not going to stand down.” And so, we opened on August 22nd, we have 108 ninth graders, and we’ll be adding a grade every year to build a new institution in the Bronx dedicated towards educational excellence. But it’s not for the faint of heart. You have to go into this knowing that there are people who want to preserve the status quo, often the very people who claim to be advocating for the low-income kids who are in these schools. We just have to fight back. Mr. Jekielek: Given these terrible statistics that you mentioned earlier, what possible leg is there to stand on? It strains any semblance of credulity. Mr. Rowe: If you are a thinking person, it does. But you might just want to fall into a narrative where you gain power through victimhood. Just think of all the people who claim systemic X is the reason. When you make that your claim, you basically absolve yourself of any responsibility. If systemic racism is the reason for any disparity in outcomes in groupings by race, and you say systemic racism is a problem, then what can I do? I’m black or I’m whatever the victimized group is, and it’s all because you, the oppressor, are imposing your worldview. In a weird sense, you gain power by consistently espousing your victimhood. There are those who generate wealth, generate notoriety and attention by continuing to claim victimhood, victimhood, victimhood. You almost have a perverse incentive never to exit. Shelby Steele said this to me in an interview I did with him. He said, “In the black community, our biggest problem isn’t racism.” He said, “Our biggest problem is freedom.” It was really profound. He was basically saying the responsibility of freedom of now being in control of your own destiny is actually scarier than the safety of being trapped in a narrative of victimhood, where you’re constantly never asked to be responsible for your own actions. It’s always about somebody else who’s doing this to us. Mr. Jekielek: And the incentive structure is completely upside down. This is what’s dawning on me as you’re speaking here. In a sense, this is the reason why Vertex Academies can’t be allowed to exist, because if it disproves their point so thoroughly, then their whole reason for operating comes into question. Mr. Rowe: Right, this has been our battle running public charter schools. There are those who may say the reason low-income kids or kids of color are not doing well in school is because of structural racism or structural this or structural that. And then, along comes a network of schools that are educating the same kids in the same school buildings for even less money per pupil. Because charter schools throughout the country get less money on a per student basis than the traditional district system. And they get better outcomes, generally, but not all charter schools. So, we have to acknowledge that. But there are a good number of charter schools that get some great outcomes under the same conditions that other systems have consistently failed kids. How else could you process that and not come to the realization that maybe there are strategies that these schools are adopting that we have something to learn from. But if you don’t believe it, your answer is shut ’em down, let’s stop them before they can even start. It doesn’t matter if the kids are in that system or just trapped in that system, that’s not my problem. Again, for many of these people, do you know where they’re sending their kids to? Private schools. They’re moving to nice neighborhoods where they can send their kids to high-performing public schools. So again, they’re not preaching what they practice in their own life, which is that a lot of them are exercising school choice for their own children, but restricting it for kids in low-income communities. And so, we just have to fight back. When I started running schools, I thought I just needed to run great schools. Like that’s the most important thing. You start to realize that there are whole forces of people that are just determined to shut what we are doing down, and we just have to fight back. Mr. Jekielek: In preparation for our interview, you alerted me to a kind of an amazing reality of another type of school choice that happened back under Jim Crow, which was actually incredibly effective, but then was bizarrely shut down, ostensibly, under the best intentions. Mr. Rowe: Yes. Brown vs. Board of Education is arguably considered to be the most important Supreme Court decision of the last century, and as you say, well intentioned. This was at a time post-Jim Crow. You had conditions in schools for black children in many places that were horrific. Plessy vs. Ferguson had occurred, which basically allowed racial separation to be legal in our country, especially in schools. The Brown vs. Board of Education landmark decision basically established this premise that separate by race meant unequal. Schools separated by race were unequal, and this is where they took it one step too far, inherently inferior. So not only could a state, the government, not allow racially-segregated schools, but even schools where people had voluntarily separated themselves by race, that also was deemed unconstitutional. The reason this is important is that in the early 1900s during the Jim Crow era, black kids getting an education was horrific. Mr. Jekielek: And there was actual systemic racism. Mr. Rowe: And there was, oh, my God. Clearly, there was lynching, there were all sorts of terrible things that were happening in our country. And yet it’s one of the greatest examples of agency and self-sufficiency in the black community. Booker T. Washington, who had founded the Tuskegee Institute partnered with Julius Rosenwald, who at the time was the CEO of the Sears, Roebuck and Company. Imagine in today’s world, Jeff Bezos or the head of Walmart today saying, “We are going to partner together.” Booker T. Washington and Julius Rosenwald built nearly 5,000 schools throughout 14 states throughout the south, exclusively to educate black children. There were black professors, teachers, and principals all dedicated to this idea of excellence, regardless of the conditions in the 5,000 schools. And while Julius Rosenwald put in money, the deal was every single school local communities had to come in, chip in money, and help build the building. There was often one schoolhouse building, or sometimes it was in churches. But the idea was there was ownership in the community. For the academic achievements of these schools, Maya Angelou was a Rosenwald graduate, as well as John Lewis. Amazing, amazing, amazing stories. The levels of academic achievement of black kids was soaring. But after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision on the premise that separate meant unequal, and separate meant inherently inferior, the Rosenwald schools, all 5,000 of them were deemed unconstitutional, and they were all shut down within a decade. Just think about that. Even in one of the most landmark decisions, these narratives of group identity must mean inferiority, or it must mean superiority oftentimes exactly hurts the very people that you claim to be wanting to help. Mr. Jekielek: What an unbelievable story. I’m embarrassed I didn’t know it. You can’t help but wonder what the world would look like if those schools were allowed to grow and flourish and perhaps go beyond race if they so chose to. Mr. Rowe: Exactly. It’s the idea that at the end of the day, we’re all individuals. What has slowly occurred in our country, certainly over the last decade, is that we’ve almost replaced individual dignity and personal responsibility with group identity and narratives associated with group identity. You’re no longer just an individual kid. You are white. And as a result of that, you are inherently an oppressor, you are inherently privileged regardless of all the other things that may be going on in your life. And that’s just very dangerous for our country. With the kids in our schools, we don’t teach groups. We teach individuals with each their own capacity to feel, to achieve, to succeed, to fail, to get back up, and to be resilient. Those types of lessons are learned not because you think your entire value to society is defined solely based on your skin color or solely based on your gender. That’s a false promise to young people. Something else that is also very important, especially in a rising generation where young people are hearing so many narratives of how oppressive America might be, is that they understand that they live in a good, if not great country, a country that is not hostile to their dreams, a place where your dreams are actually possible, but that also recognizes you can’t do it alone. Agency is individually practiced, but socially empowered. You live in a country where there are institutions like the family, the faith community, and educational opportunities. We are going to fight to make sure that kids have those opportunities, plus the entrepreneurial mindset, all of these things can exist in our country in a way that you can lead the life that you want. Often I think that kids are hearing exactly the opposite of that message. We’re fighting very much to allow young people to know that the path of human flourishing is within their grasp. Mr. Jekielek: I wish you godspeed with that. Please tell us where people can learn more about the academies and your work. Mr. Rowe: That’s very kind of you. First of all, the name of our school system is Vertex Partnership Academies. If you go to vertexacademies.org, you’ll find lots of information about our schools in the Bronx. We’re actually looking for corporate partners who want to create new pathways of talent into computer science, engineering, healthcare, real estate industries; entities that want to create apprenticeships with students that are still in high school to discover whole new ways to pursue life opportunities. We’re very excited to have folks join us in this endeavor. There are no victims in our school, only architects of their own lives. Mr. Jekielek Ian Rowe, it’s such a pleasure to have you on the show. Mr. Rowe: I’m inspired. Thank you for having me. Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Ian Rowe 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