American Thought Leaders - Michael Shellenberger: How China Gained Control of Solar—And Why It Matters

Episode Date: June 1, 2025

“It’s now been revealed that the Chinese—who manufacture virtually all of our solar panels, both in the United States and Europe—have been installing cellular radios inside the inverters, which can act as kill switches,” says Michael Shellenberger, an investigative journalist, author, founder of Public, and CBR Chair of Politics, Censorship, and Free Speech at the University of Austin.Shellenberger is the author of the books “San Fransicko” and “Apocalypse Never.”In this wide-ranging interview, we dive into key vulnerabilities in America’s energy grid, how Trump is transforming America’s energy future, the current status of the “censorship industrial complex,” as Shellenberger describes it, and his continued fight for government transparency, including around unidentified aerial phenomena (UAPs).Two years on from the publication of the Twitter Files—in which Shellenberger played a key role—where are things now?Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

It's now been revealed that the Chinese who manufacture virtually all of our solar panels, they have been installing cellular radios inside the inverters, which can act as kill switches. In this episode, I'm sitting down with Michael Schellenberger, investigative journalist, author, and CPR Chair of Politics, Censorship, and Free Speech at the University of Austin. He's the University of Austin. He's the author of San Francisco and Apocalypse Never. We dive into America's energy revolution, vulnerabilities in the grid,

and the current status of the censorship industrial complex. We saw an enormous amount of programming of people. The most extreme example of it was this idea that Biden was fine. Well, now the media is falling all over itself to talk about how they were deceived. This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Michael Schellenberger, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders. Great to be with you.

I can't help but notice that not a few days ago, as we're filming right now on the 23rd of May, that not a few days ago, as we're filming right now, on the 23rd of May, President Trump signed four executive orders related to nuclear energy. When we first met, I was interviewing you about Apocalypse Never, and I know how serious you are about energy density, of fuel, and so forth. So, what's your reaction to this? I'm thrilled. I mean, it's long overdue. I think he probably needs to go further and create a whole separate government agency separate from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which has done a good job regulating a particular technology, which is the

water-cooled reactors. But the technology is so complex, and the staff there and the regulations they have are so focused on this one technology, they're probably in my view going to need a separate agency to really take nuclear to the next level. But the big story as you probably know is that energy demand is growing very quickly and will increase even more due to AI. I use AI every day. I rarely use Google Search anymore. I believe the AI activity takes five to 10 times more energy than Google Search. I'm already being limited by my subscriptions to AI by how much I can upload, for example.

I've been uploading the recent RFK files and hit my capacity very quickly. And that's an energy capacity. And so I'm mostly very happy with where this administration has gone on energy. It has an energy abundance vision. They say energy dominance, but really what matters is just quantity. Energy is the lifeblood of the entire economy. So a nation that is energy rich is a rich nation. There is no poor nation that's energy rich, and there's no energy rich nation that's poor. So the commitment by this administration to expanding in particular natural gas and nuclear, which are the most important nuclear energies for the 21st century, I'm extremely thrilled with it. also happy to see the pairing back of these big subsidies for renewables. I was in particular concerned about a large wind farm.

Large wind projects have been trying to build off the East Coast, which we know had been hurting an endangered whale species that could go extinct if they continued. And Trump has paired that back. I think he could go a little bit further. He's allowing at least one project to go forward. But this commitment to cheap and reliable energy might be the most important part of the Trump legacy. I don't think there's a lot of appetite for creating new agencies at the moment. Yeah, fair enough. But give me the entire case of that because really, we're talking about the technology

around nuclear has advanced quite a bit beyond the technology you were describing. Yeah, that's right. So nuclear is our most complex technology. It uses obviously a tiny amount of fuel. There's no combustion. You're just splitting atoms and releasing all this heat. It's still miraculous when you think about what nuclear is. I'm not suggesting any additional bureaucracy. I'm just suggesting what Lockheed Martin at one point called a Skunk Works project. That was the name of a sort of separate place in their area. I think it was in Southern California. They just had a separate building set up to develop new technologies that would be separate from the bureaucracy, that could start fresh, fresh leadership, fresh set of rules. So it would really be a skunk works

for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. I don't know if the administration is thinking about it in those terms, but I do think that if you want to make a stepwise change in the technology, we're going to need a new regulatory commission than the one that we have. What about these technologies like thorium reactors? That's not necessarily a new technology, but it's not a technology that we're very familiar with. There's a lot of skepticism around the new technologies, and there's reasons to be. There's a long history of nuclear. We could spend a lot of time on it. But the basic story is that there was a lot of experiments by the Department of Energy in the 1950s, actually going back to the 40s, of different ways to cool the uranium and also to slow the uranium

fission process from occurring. There was particular some chemical salts that could be mixed in with the uranium that are very promising like fluoride or beryllium that could be mixed in with the fuel and sort of keep it cool so there would be no meltdown because the fuel itself would be melted. You can also use gas, helium gas or carbon dioxide gas to keep it cool. And then there's water and the water technology was developed to develop submarines and it's perfect for submarines because they're in water, and so there's never going to be a chance of a meltdown, which is caused by the lack of water.

Some people felt like that was an error in moving towards a water-cooled nuclear power system. I think they're great. They've worked really well in the United States, contrary to the perceptions that people have had. well in the United States, contrary to the perceptions that people have had. Chernobyl, Three Mile Island, Fukushima, really only one of those accidents was extremely serious. With Fukushima, it was a huge overreaction. But the water technology is the technology we know how to use. I compare the water-cooled nuclear to jet turbines, which we've had since the 1940s and 1950s. Our jets and air travel has become much safer, much better, much more efficient over time, mostly due to what's called human factors.

So for nuclear, that's still the main event. These new technologies do have promise, but there's been so much hype on them, and not recently. There's been hype on them really for decades, that I think that you just have to do both at the same time. We should continue to build the large water-cooled plants, and then we need to accelerate the demonstration and eventual commercialization of the more novel nuclear reactor designs.

So there's been so many things happening with the Trump administration, this record number of executive orders. You know, Trump declared a national energy emergency, which I frankly had forgotten that were in that situation here. Of course, he withdrew from the Paris agreement, as expected, this National Energy Dominance Council, which you referred to, and then these executive order, protecting American energy from state overreach.

And there's others, but is there anything specifically that you've noticed, and obviously you follow this very closely, that you think is particularly important? And why an emergency? Well, look, the most important thing he did is he made his energy secretary Chris Wright. Chris Wright is a real shining star from the world of oil and gas development. He's not somebody that—first of all, he's very successful in commercial terms, successful in the oil and gas business. But more than that, he has a ton of heart. He's somebody that has viewed lifting people out of poverty as his life's mission. We know that we still have a billion people in the world that are entirely

dependent on wood and dung and biomass for their primary energy source. Two billion people that still rely on it for cooking and heating. That's a brutal life. The kids have to go and gather wood from the forest. And of course, it's also bad on those ecosystems. Just giving people, people having access to propane fuel to burn for cooking saves time. It massively reduces the smoke in the village huts. He's somebody that's always been committed to that. He's been committed to bringing cheap abundant energy to poor countries. He also understands that this is, again, the lifeblood, the power of the United States is in cheap energy. And he's somebody that really knows the industry,

has the confidence of the industry. So personnel's policy and Chris Wright was a really intelligent choice by the president, the right choice by the president, who has made excellent choices for his cabinet members in general, I think. So that's the most important thing. The other thing to keep in mind is that energy is a national priority. We have 50 states. I'm a big believer in having governance be as local as possible because people know their communities best. But energy is a national priority. We are in a competition, a very serious competition with China, heavily around artificial intelligence, but not strictly, not only about that, we need to be on equal footing and be very competitive with China and with Europe and other countries in terms of energy supply. So those measures that

you mentioned are Trump making efforts to establish that energy policy has to be a national priority and And these states that come in and are blocking very legitimate forms of oil and gas development, nuclear development, that needs to end. Hopefully it'll end at the state level, but the president's measures will, I think, move things in the right direction. One of these executive orders was strengthening the reliability and security of the United States electric grid. This has become something that's been in the news multiple ways. There's been these blackouts in Spain, presumably because of over-reliance on renewables. I'd like you to

get me to tell me about that a bit more. But also, there's these kill switches in the Chinese inverters that talk about vulnerability, especially if you're very reliant on the solar panels. So unpack that for me, please. Well, sure. The myth of solar is that there's no consequences. It's good for the environment. There's no downside to it. And solar is amazing. I mean, there was a little, when you walk down here, you see little solar panels that we use outside. So of course, it's a wonderful niche technology.

The problem with solar fundamentally gets to the physics of energy. So all fuels or flows, in the case of sunlight and wind, their environmental impact is determined by the density of those fuels or flows. And so when you go from wood to coal, twice as much energy density, which means a reduction of impact on the natural environment, plus you're taking from underground rather than removing all your trees. You go from coal to oil and natural gas, another huge increase of power density. And then you go to nuclear and you're talking a million times more energy dense. And so that, when you go back to solar, you have to spread huge amounts of solar panels across

landscapes. Just go and Google search these pictures of it, anybody that loves the natural environment. You see in China, they're just coating entire mountain ranges with these solar panels, which just destroys all life underneath them. As an environmentalist, for me as a true conservationist, I find that very disturbing because you don't need to do that with nuclear and natural gas. You can significantly reduce your environmental impact. The other thing is that we know that China is making its solar panels using effectively slave labor from Uighurs who are being persecuted in China. And we know that they're using a huge amount of coal. And we know that the data that's been the actual, the amount of energy that's used to

create solar, that there's been manipulations of those numbers. They've used numbers from Europe rather than from China. So we know that solar is in fact not as environmentally friendly on the just straight pollution level as people have thought. All of that's before you get to the problems created for the electrical grid. The thing that you have to understand about the electrical grid is that you have to very carefully match supply and demand at all moments. If you have too much energy, too much electricity on the grid, you can blow out transformers and then that can lead to a whole set of other consequences. If there's too little energy on the wires, then you get the de-powering and the blackout,

the entire collapse of the electrical grid like we saw in Spain a few weeks ago. Well as soon as it occurred, it was obvious what had happened. They were at this very high amounts of solar on the system and they don't have enough inertia on the system. So what is inertia? Inertia has basically been a way to stabilize those electricity and energy fluxes on the grid. And with a traditional power plant that's creating steam or hot air to power turbines,

that's been, there's a built-in inertia in those machines so that you're not going to get those huge fluctuations of electricity on the grid. So it was obvious to everybody that knows anything about electricity that the Spanish blackout was caused by lack of inertia on the grid, which is a way of saying too much solar since the solar requires these inverters which convert the electricity from direct current to alternating current, which is what travels across the electrical wires. So the Spanish government has been dishonest in ways that are almost humorous, pretending like they don't know what caused it, whereas everybody really does know that it's due to

lack of inertia on the system, which is a serious problem that is not going to be solved by more batteries or more solar. It's something that you really require huge, heavy steel plants that are really the backbone, the foundation, not just of the electrical grid, but of the entire society. So that is the fundamental problem in terms of the blackouts. Now, in terms of this other issue, completely separate issue, which is that it's now been revealed that the Chinese who manufacture virtually all of our solar panels, both in the United States and Europe,

they have been installing cellular radios inside the inverters, which can act as kill switches. And you might think, well, that sounds like a conspiracy theory. Not a conspiracy theory. There was actually a Chinese solar company that turned off the solar panels and sent up a little message to its users saying, we've turned this off because these solar panels are only authorized to be used in certain countries, not they can't be used in Pakistan, the United States, and a few other countries. It popped right up on the monitor.

It was a huge discussion about it. So we know that the Chinese solar companies, all of which are essentially can be used as arms of the Chinese military. There's really no daylight between them. The Chinese government has made it clear that there can be viewed as extensions of the Chinese military. There's really no daylight between them. The Chinese government has made it clear that there can be viewed as extensions of the Chinese security state. They are able to switch off large amounts of solar. And if you are able to do that, then you are able to cause the depowering, unless the blackouts of the grid. How big of a problem is this? We don't know. I mean, there's been, we know that these

capacity exists in the inverters. Obviously, the Chinese government wants to continue to be able to sell solar panels to us. I think most national security experts view this as something that the Chinese could do if there was, for example, an invasion of Taiwan and the United States decided to defend Taiwan. The Chinese could potentially trigger blackouts in the United States decided to defend Taiwan, the Chinese could potentially trigger blackouts in the United States and Europe. As crazy as that sounds, that is the reality. And in fact, there's not any debate about that. That's where we're at.

And so the only question now is, how is the United States government responding to that? I haven't yet asked, haven't yet gotten answers from the Department of Energy, but we're hoping to get that within a few days, actually. Give me a picture of how is it that China achieved total dominance in manufacturing this technology? Because the United States was in Dream World. We're in dream land. Obviously, they're able to make solar panels cheaper than anywhere in the world, in large part due to the coerced labor from these Uighur Muslims who were in these concentration camps. Again, not a conspiracy theory. This has been very well reported. That's where the vast amount of solar cell manufacturing and panel manufacturing is occurring

are in those areas. We know the Chinese government has been massively subsidizing the investment on solar, precisely so they can dump the solar panels in other countries to destroy other nations' indigenous solar manufacturing. And then we've just like we've been, you know, in dream world, we've imagined that it's okay to let the Chinese manufacturer, not just solar, but I mean, we're talking drones, you know, we're talking critical military technology. I mean, imagine the country that we're most likely to go to war with or have some wars

with, whether the proxy wars or direct wars, is the country upon which we're dependent for our military technologies. So the good news is, I think there is a bipartisan agreement now in Washington that that's a huge problem. The biggest or maybe one of the biggest, of course, is the fact that most of our semiconductors, which also means then our microchips are being manufactured in Taiwan, of course, is the fact that most of our semiconductors, which also means then our microchips are being manufactured in Taiwan, so if China takes Taiwan, then we are in very serious trouble. There was a Chips Act passed under Biden. It did have bipartisan support.

It's a good thing to create incentives to return the semiconductor and chip manufacturing to the United States, but we are nowhere near where we need to be in order to be self-sufficient. So I do think it's that the hypnotic globalization that we've been under, that dream world where we just imagine that globalization is all good and obviously does deliver a number of very positive benefits. I mean, so many of our products do come from low-cost China, but it just went too far. The pendulum swung way too far in one direction, and I think we are now starting to see it hopefully swinging back in the other direction. The CCP did this with a whole bunch of very

critical industries, notably steel is one of them, but also telecom. Huawei, But also telecom, like Huawei, for national security reasons, has been massively subsidized. And there's a whole bunch of countries, I mean, think of this like 140 countries that rely on Huawei for their telecom. Well, it's incredible. And of course, there was the Congress did act to then restrict US reliance on Huawei. But then Huawei also made the solar inverters or made the inverters that are used in solar projects.

So and we just scandals kind of keep going on and on. It turned out that Huawei was sort of the main partner with the government of California in something that was called, I think it was called China SF. Or it was an initiative basically to increase ties between California and China at a time when we were doing a big solar buildout. One of the places that is most vulnerable to a potential Chinese sabotage is California because of our high dependence on solar. I think maybe the unsaid but should be said part of it is the Chinese have poured a huge amount of money into influencing American politics in terms of its

propaganda campaigns, in terms of the spending by the Chinese government directly and indirectly on the American political system. So I think that we have been asleep at the wheel for really decades, arguably 30 years or longer. The fact that just the drones example, the microchips example, certainly the solar inverters example, that ought to be a very harsh wake-up call and require some emergency action. Well, and just on another note, the other side of it, these giant transformers that are manufactured only in China right now for the high-voltage grids that basically keep the grid together. I've understood that one of them was taken apart in Los Alamos and somewhere, and some pretty things were found in there that shouldn't be in there, let's just say.

Oh, sure. Yeah, absolutely. And they justify the cellular radios in order to provide information in terms of how to manage grid electricity, and there may be some benefit to that. But there's got to be a technical fix to this. It's not clear what it will be because there are so many inverters. I think it's hundreds of thousands, if not millions of inverters in the United States. So I'm not sure what it will be, the solution, I think it's hundreds of thousands, if not millions of inverters in the United States. So I'm not sure what it will be, the solution, whether it's signal jamming or something else, but obviously that's sort of heavy reliance. Again, another reason to go to nuclear because nuclear, it was funny because, you know, the

story from since the 1960s from anti-nuclear activists posing as environmentalists is that solar would make the grid less vulnerable, make the grid more resilient, and that nuclear somehow because it was just a few big plants would make it more vulnerable. That turned out to be completely the opposite. Having these big plants really is a stabilizing factor in the grid. I mean, you can kind of, in military terms, they talk about a kind of surface attack area. The surface attack area for solar, because of the low power densities, because of the dilute nature of sunlight, are spread over much larger areas. So, you know, and you don't have to reduce, I was mentioning before de-power the electrical grid and send it

into cascading failures and blackout. Just come to think of it, because this is something that's been on my mind a lot lately,. Have you tracked at all the CCP's influence on American media, legacy media and so forth? I'm not an expert on it. I've only heard about it in part from Epoch Times and from me and you guys, but certainly it does seem like there's a huge amount of it. Obviously, the big story has been TikTok and what it's been doing. But no, I think it's a serious concern. It's an ongoing information operation. We now know that the Chinese intelligence community is by far the largest intelligence

community in the world. We know that there are a large number of Chinese spies in the United States working at all levels in our universities, in our government agencies. It's a huge problem. We do want to remain an open society in the United States. That's why it's so special, but it is clearly something that we've also been asleep at the wheel on. It's very difficult because it's like the things that make open societies, like you said, special is a good word. It's invaluable and something we want to believe in and support. It can also be weaponized against us and our being to the nth degree. That's right. It is so special. I've been going back and rereading my American history and just

relearning how special this country was, and in particular the commitment to freedom of speech. But just this commitment to self-governance, it seems like something—and remember there was a whole story in the 1990s, and I bought into it, by the way, which was the whole end-of-history story that comes out in the late 80s after after the fall of communism in the early 90s, the sense was that China and other countries would be moving towards democracy. And that is not what occurred. It's not an emergent effect of prosperity, like many people thought it was. It's not something that emerges necessarily out of modernization. It can, but it really is a foundational value. It's really got to be in the culture of the people who create

that country and the people who come after it. And we have to keep reminding each other why it is so special. It never occurred to me that we needed to continue to teach kids and to teach our kids and to remind each other about what freedom of speech is and why it's so special and why we have to defend different points of view. But we clearly do because I don't think it's intuitive. What's intuitive is to make one other people to shut up. And we see that a lot of that. That's the intuitive response. That's the base response. That's what we call fast thinking. Slow thinking, deliberative thinking is the thinking that protects freedom of speech. And you

know, obviously in a social media society, in a highly polarized society, in a highly ideological society, there's a lot of fast thinking, not enough of that slow thinking that we need in order to defend our freedom of expression. This is the perfect moment for me to mention this lecture that I watched of yours that you did about Rusty Reno's 2019 book, Return of the Strong Gods, which I kind of had forgotten about. As I was preparing for this interview, I came across this interview. By the way, congratulations on being the CBR Chair of Politics, Censorship, and Free Speech at the University of Austin.

Thank you. I mean, to add to your quite extensive acumen already, you're now a professor. It's a real pleasure. Yeah, my wife and I are building a home in Austin. We love Austin. It's really culturally and politically aligned with our values. And it's a very libertarian culture. The parts of it that are liberal are the parts of it for me that are still liberal, and the parts of it that are more conservative are also the parts of me that are conservative. So it really represents, I think, a really special place.

It's obviously a tech center. And this is a really interesting university. It is extremely, it's so hard to start a new university in the United States that nobody even thinks about doing it. This is a group of very big thought leaders, Barry Weiss from the Free Press, Joe Lonsdale, who's one of our most successful venture capitalists behind Palantir and a number of other high tech companies, Neil Ferguson, who's a truly great historian out of Hoover Institute at Stanford, they felt that we needed a new liberal arts university because of the totalitarianism

that has overtaken so many other universities in the United States. So, you know, it's a startup. I just taught my first quarter there from January through March of this year, and it was so special, Jan. I tell you, you walk into the campus and some student is playing piano and there's a big atrium and some kids are playing chess and they're debating politics and the very high premium, not just on free speech, but the students themselves, high premium on making sure that people understand both sides of every argument. The students would be demanding of that of me, are we really hearing all sides of this? We don't want to

get a single perspective. So that core value is really taking hold in the university. So I've got really high hopes for it. The first year is only going to be coming to an end right about now. I've had the opportunity to visit and interview a few key players, and I loved everything I saw. Actually, watching this lecture, you said that you expect America to basically start depolarizing in the next 10 to 15 years. That's fascinating. Before we go there, just tell me a little bit, give me a picture of what this book is about, and then I want to come into why you're so bullish on depolarization. Sure. Well, so Rusty Reno, his author title is R.R. Reno, and the book is called The Return of the Strong Gods. And as you mentioned, the book came out several years ago. It actually came out, I think,

would you say 2018, 2019? 2019. 2018. And he is an editor of First Things, which is a very fine journal that has a lot of religious inspired writings, but also a journal of politics. It's a small book, you can read it in one sitting, but I think it's the book that best describes the current moment. And what he's describing is, on the one hand, it's the rise of nationalism, the return of nationalism, most dramatically in the form of Donald Trump and the MAGA movement, also the rise of populists and nationalists in Europe. But I think he's tapping into something deeper too. He basically describes the story where after World War II, the United States and Europe

and global leaders quite understandably wanted to pursue a policy of sort of weakening national cultures, national traditions, which they had viewed as the cause of fascism and the driving force behind World War II. They wanted to weaken them and also open up countries and open up them to globalization. And that made a lot of sense in 1946, 1947, when the post-war architecture was created, the Bretton Woods agreements, the international institutions. Over time, it just went too far. You get to the end of communism and after 1990, the bringing in of China into that system with this huge amount of confidence that China would behave like European nations had and moving more towards representative democracy.

Things didn't work out that way. We saw that globalization both deindustrialized the United States. It also opened up our borders to a very rapid influx of immigration. On the one hand, the United States is a better position than any other country in the world to absorb and assimilate immigrants. Europe has had a much harder time of doing that. But even here, it just obviously you know, obviously went too far. You know, I think Donald Trump could not have been reelected a second time had the Biden administration not overreacted by opening up the borders in the ways that they did. But the strong gods just refers to

the fact that there's just something much deeper around national identity, around religious traditions, around cultural traditions that had for a long time kind of been repressed or put down and have now emerged in ways that the ruling elites don't even really understand. That's why they don't really understand the return of the strong gods. They think Trump has just tricked everybody or that the Americans somehow became fascists and all sorts of absurd things. And he's pointing out that no, there is a true American tradition. There's things like the work ethic.

There's a laissez-faire, libertarian, egalitarianism in the sense of equal opportunity, not equality of outcome, a strong sense of individualism that makes the United States distinctive as a nation. And other countries have their own strong gods, but that's what's coming back at a time when globalization imagined that it was basically going to erase the differences between countries. Culture is real. The boundaries between cultures is obviously fuzzy, but culture is very real. Now, obviously or not obviously, there can be a dark side to this. You certainly see things that Trump administration has done that I don't agree with, things around using things that students have said as the basis of denying them a green card. That's a case where the

strong gods, so to speak, trump the liberal or individual enlightenment rights, which are just weaker forces. So to recognize these strong gods is not to suggest that we should just obey them or disregard hundreds of years of the Enlightenment, we should not, but we should just recognize that this return of the strong gods, this return to nationalism, this return to tradition, the move in particular by young Americans towards Trump and young men in particular back towards a sense of masculinity, a sense of manliness even. And often, again, too far sometimes when you get a character like Andrew Tate, but can be very positive in a case like Jordan Peterson and others who are trying to elevate a sense of gentlemanliness, return to a sense of manliness, and a sense that there are real differences between genders as that need to be said. So even there you see masculinity and femininity in some sense of that there are real differences that

are not just cultural, that have some root in biology and in nature, that those things are still real and that the effort to kind of homogenize all of us and turn us all into, you know, what online people call NPCs, you know, non-player characters, people without an identity, people without a national identity, the idea that you could just sort of live anywhere, that traditions don't matter. That world, I think, has gone as far as it could. And it did have a positive impact for, you know, the first, I'd say, 50 to 60 years after World War II, but it's just clearly gone too far. And so now we're seeing that return of strong odds.

Well, so it's very interesting. I read what NPC means a little bit differently than you do, I think. And it actually dovetails to exactly my question about you being bullish on 10 or 15 years, I think you said years of depolarization. You've written extensively about the censorship disinformation industrial complex. The other dimension of it is the ability to propagandize people and effectively propagandize people. In fact, very quickly, effectively propagandize people, with some portion of the population seemingly being easy to propagandize or maybe very suggestible. I don't actually know what it is exactly, but it's very concerning. Because if you hold these

large messaging systems, you can convince a whole bunch of people very quickly that, for example, another group of people want to kill them or hurt them or do damage to them or something. But I find it very difficult to imagine when such a mechanism exists, how we can achieve and social media creating these silos of information. How we get to this depolarization. I'm excited to hear and how do we overcome that? I don't know the answer. That's such a great question. I agree with you in the sense that— Sorry, go ahead. No, I was just going to say NPC. To me, NPCs mean people who lack agency and are just kind of these people that can be programmable or something like that. A little bit different from what you said, just to be clear.

Okay, please go ahead. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, I see what you're saying. Yeah. So much to say in there. So much to say in there. I mean, we saw an enormous amount of programming of people, you know, and again, you can see it on both sides, but just to pick on the side that we're talking about now, I mean, there were millions of Americans who were convinced that Trump was like Hitler, they was like fascists, and that his supporters were fascists. You're talking about people who, literally just years earlier, the left used to make fun of Republicans for being obsessed with the Constitution, the Tea Party movement. So Republicans are often, I mean the reputation traditionally has been that the right is constitutionally literalist, meaning that they want a literal

interpretation of the Constitution. They want to go see what Hamilton and Madison wrote in the Federalist Papers. They want to go back to see how people thought about those things in the 18th century. So the idea that somehow Republicans just wanted to disregard the Constitution, I think is really wild. And this easy rhetoric turned into belief. And you can blame social media, you can blame MSNBC. And the most extreme example of it maybe was, or at least towards the end there, was this idea that Biden was fine and that anybody who said he wasn't fine was engaged in misinformation. They called them cheap fakes. Well, now the media is falling all over itself to talk about how, oh, they were deceived by the Biden family. But that was a very scary situation where you had somebody that was

not copas mentis, like, running the country, supposedly representing the United States in various crisis situations, and he wasn't entirely there. And I think social media then also played a role. It reinforced people's views. It gave them too much certainty. In particular, Twitter, I always compare it to the printing press for the first hundred years. For the first hundred years, the Catholic Church loved the printing press. They print all these Bibles and they had control of it. Well, as soon as Martin Luther got ahold of the printing press and was able to print his denunciations of Catholic Church corruption, it was game-changing. At that point on, the Church wanted to censor and literally get rid of printing presses and chase printing

presses all over Europe. My view is that Twitter, before Elon Musk bought it, was a lot like the printing press when the Catholics had control of it. It intensified existing media power. That was when you saw this cancel culture emerge, this demand for censorship. Once Elon Musk bought it, a number of things happened that were important. The first was that he allowed us into the Twitter headquarters to report on the Twitter files where we discovered not just cancel culture, biased culture, censoring people for insisting that biological sex was real, for example, but also discovering the role of the

Department of Homeland Security in creating a censorship industrial complex, the role of FBI and running an information operation aimed at convincing people that Hunter Biden's laptop was not real when it was real. And then he removed the special privilege given to mainstream journalists and extended that to other people. And so you were able to open up the debate much more widely. He allowed more, you know, speech that people disagree with, misinformation, hate speech,

and instituted a community notes model, which is a crowdsourced fact checking rather than committee expert driven forms of fact checking. So I think that's been transformative. I mean, it's incredible that it's only been a year since that famous, less than a year since the famous Trump Biden debate.

But I mean, at the time been a year since that famous, less than a year since the famous Trump-Biden debate. But I mean, at the time, a year ago, 2024, summer of 2024, the media really was in control. I mean, the media decided, once they saw Biden in the debate, the media decided that he had to step down. There's a way in which the media was the sovereign power and it was programming huge numbers of Americans about how to think about all sorts of things, coronavirus, climate change, transgenderism, race. And it was a real programming. I mean, we're not computers. We're biological and spiritual beings, ultimately. But it is easy to program people. You know, you provide certain kinds of information and certain sort of narratives. And I think that's what we saw on a whole range of issues. I think, I mean, even get further down that rabbit hole,

I mean, there's a way in which I think we knew, you always sort of know the media is biased and this person has a point of view. But I think there's a different view, which is that it was really the whole establishment was actually just programming people on how to think on a whole range of issues. And the Overton window, meaning the debate,

the window of what's acceptable conversation was so narrow, now it's much wider. It used to be that New York Times and Walter Cronkite decided what could fit and what couldn't fit. Well, the new Walter Cronkite is Joe Rogan, and he's not telling you what you should or should not think. He's just introducing many people that are way outside of the Overton window of acceptable

discourse and allowing that conversation to open up again. So I think that's why I do have hope, actually, is I do think we're in a transition from just a highly overly globalized system, overly closed system in terms of information and programming, to rebalancing a much more nationalist system with a much more open media and discursive environment. I'm just thinking about this is something you just wrote about, is these newly declassified documents, declassified by the Director of National Intelligence,

Tulsi Gabbard, basically opponents of COVID mandates, broadly speaking, being actually considered domestic violent extremists by DHS and the FBI. And maybe explain to me what these documents reveal exactly. Sure. Well, these were documents that were created by the FBI, the Department of Homeland Security, and the National Counterterrorism Center, which is part of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which manages and oversees all 17 of the intelligence agencies. To her great credit, Director Gabbard declassified these documents. And what they showed was that they were, I mean, essentially, they were making this stuff up. I mean, these were analysts who wrote this warning, essentially, to other analysts in the intelligence

community, saying, we expect people who are critical of the COVID mandates. Remember, it's not even skeptical. These are not vaccine deniers. These are people who are critical of the COVID mandates. Remember, it's not even skeptical, these are not vaccine deniers. These are people who are just saying, I don't think that we should be required by law to inject this experimental vaccine, which turned out didn't stop infection or transmission anyway,

and now we're seeing various negative health consequences. They wanted to label those people, domestic violent extremists, they set on the little alert, they go, of course we don't want this to violate First Amendment free speech rights. Well, the whole thing is based on one's free speech, one's view of vaccine mandates as a bad thing.

So what was that about? Well, when we interviewed former FBI people, including FBI whistleblowers, they said this was a predicate first to being able to censor people on social media companies. The FBI would be able to go to the social media companies and say, hey, look, you've got people here that are opposing the vaccine mandate and potentially incurring or inspiring violent action. And then also it would be a way to open up a potential investigation.

It could be the first step for an agent to sort of see somebody online, see criticism online, begin the process towards an investigation. In that article, there's a specific language, I can't remember what it was, but there's like a phase before a formal investigation by the FBI where an agent can target somebody. So it appeared to be creating predicates for both censorship and potentially entrapment. It's really shocking. So outside the American tradition. I mean, this is a country where, you know, we were inspired by Thomas Paine, inspired by the free speech movements in Europe. There was a debate, by the way, when they were writing the Constitution.

Jefferson said, representing a lot of other people too, we want a special amendment. We want a bill of rights and a special amendment protecting free speech. And Hamilton in the Federalist Papers points out, he said, the Constitution already will protect that. There's no need for it. And they said, no, we will take an extra, we'll take that extra Bill of Rights and that extra emphasis. That's how important free speech is to us. And that tradition is held. So the Supreme Court has held such a high bar that your free speech rights extend all the way up until really directly threatening people with violence,

immediately inciting violence against people. But otherwise, we're allowed to say very extreme hateful things where you're allowed to lie in most situations unless it results in you stealing somebody's money or deliberately destroying somebody's reputation in ways that has financial consequences if you can prove you know it, but even in politics, because politicians lie all the time, we allow a huge amount of free speech rights. So that just, I mean, I just think it's totalitarianism. I mean, there's no other word for it. This idea of labeling millions of Americans, essentially terrorists, domestic violent extremists, for their opposition to an authoritarian measure of vaccine mandates, it sends chills up my

spine. What struck me with it, though, is that it's not that you necessarily expect that everybody who's an opposer of mandates to be investigated, but it allows you to create a predicate for certain people that you would like to investigate. You nailed it. Yeah, no, you absolutely nailed it. If you don't have First Amendment protections, then basically, you can just weaponize the justice system. Whatever political party comes into power can just start persecuting their political opponents. To some extent, that's always the case. You want to create laws that reduce the ability of prosecutors to engage in that sort of selective prosecution. But no, you're 100% correct.

We saw with the lawfare against Trump, this thing of turning several, counting multiple with the parent hush money payments and then elevating it into a felony. Clearly that was not about what it was about. That was clearly an effort to prevent Donald Trump from being able to run for president. Similarly, the enforcement of the law against him for having some classified records in his home, even though we know Biden had classified records in his home. And then the prosecutor said, well, we can't try, we can't prosecute Biden because he's too senile, basically. The finding was he just couldn't remember enough stuff to prosecute him. So then why would you be prosecuting Trump for doing nothing differently?

And they say, well, because Trump was less cooperative. Well, yeah, but that's just how Trump is. So you're basically, they were refining they were finding things in the case of Trump to prosecute him on. That would have been what would have been opened up to many Trump supporters. I think the other thing that was going on there, Jan, was that there was an effort to,

it was basically part of a propaganda information. They call them information operations, which was to do more of those charges so that they could paint supporters of President Trump and the MAGA movement as domestic violent extremists to create this perception that your political opponents are actually a threat to democracy rather than just a threat to the power of Democrats. The other thing I want to mention, it's this media support when this weaponization happens. It couldn't happen without a considerable amount of media or some media being involved because it's almost like it validates it.

I don't know if you've thought about that. No, you're spot on. This is a theme across all of the weaponization of government. And I should say too, stepping back, it's now been a couple, two and a half years since we did the Twitter files and sort of discovered the censorship industrial complex. And of course, you were discovering it firsthand, you have the scars to show for it, of the censorship before that. But it was counter populism. It was clearly an effort, particularly after 2016, and it did have some beginnings before then, but it was clearly an effort to run a long-term propaganda campaign to paint supporters of Donald Trump as a threat to democracy and that it was the Russiagate hoax, the censorship industrial complex, the Hunter Biden laptop, it was all around creating a perception that Trump supporters were a threat to democracy, and they were somehow on the payroll of Putin, or they were somehow in control of Putin. And that was particularly important because the power of the nationalist message is that nationalism is a strong God. It's something that really binds us together as citizens.

It's our kind of core community when you kind of go, you know, family nation. I mean, it's right after family as your kind of core community. It's where you have your sense of identity and protection. And, you know, nationalism, according to Leah Greenfeld, who I think is one of the greatest thinkers on it, it's a sovereign community of

fundamentally equal individuals with a shared identity. So you can be rich, you can be poor, but we're all equally citizens. You know, Elon Musk and I are equally citizens, we have equal rights. That's the power of nationalism. So to suggest and paint a whole group of people as somehow controlled by Russians is a strategy to undermine that. And that was a strategy by these organizations that have been weaponized by a particular, I think, radicalized faction of the federal government. But yeah, I was working hand in glove with the media so that, remember, the whole Russiagate thing would start because what they would do is they would go and plant the FBI would plant stories in the news media suggesting that Trump or that there was some evidence of Russian involvement and then the FBI would cite the news media articles

to justify getting a warrant so that it's just a completely circular process of which the media is complicit and a part of this effort to demonize and to disparage and to basically spread disinformation for political purposes. You're just reminding me again, something that you said in this wonderful lecture, which I'd love for people to watch at some point. But you said there's this kind of irony that it's really kind of Trump's enemies that gave him the victory. And that basically speaks to the kind of eternal cycle of nemesis follows hubris, the tragic hero, all of it. It's just like a fascinating insight. Well, it's like a head slapping moment, right? Where you kind of go, you know, that Trump may not have been elected, probably wouldn't have been elected if they had not tried to put him in jail, and they not engaged in all the censorship against him, and made him a

much more sympathetic character. And more importantly, I think a lot of Americans, including the ones who were on the fence, felt like they needed this sort of anti-hero type, a kind of Walter White type or a kind of sopranos type figure, a tough guy, a rough guy to protect them from this massive abuse of power occurring. So yeah, I think that the left, and it was both the weaponization of government, it was also the open borders. It was also inflation, certainly, but there's a sense in which, yeah, the left were really the agent of their own downfall.

And of course, that's a very old story, as you noted. That's the story of the tragic downfall is due to hubris. Pride is the only crime, as Sophocles says in Antigone, pride is sort of the mother vice over all other vices, and it was this overconfidence. We're the smart ones, we're the experts, we're the ones that should be in charge. Trump and the MAGA people are deplorables, morally, intellectually. And I'll add another final irony here, Jan, and it comes out in this new recent book that everyone's talking about around Biden's old age and his infirmity being hidden from the public, is that by the Democrats manipulating their own internal primary process. Remember, the Democrats have not had a free primary since 2008. It's been

manipulated ever since then, first to give the nomination to Hillary Clinton, then to give it to primary process. Remember, the Democrats have not had a free primary since 2008. It's been manipulated ever since then, first to give the nomination to Hillary Clinton, then to give it to Joe Biden. By doing that, they ended up with two extremely weak characters, the first in the case. Well, I'm sorry, three extremely weak characters, first in Hillary Clinton, second in Joe Biden, and third in Kamala Harris, because if they had actually had a contest within the Democratic Party, they probably would have ended up choosing the person that was, I think, Democrats in their hearts favored, which was Bernie Sanders, who again, also represented a little bit more of that populist nationalist spirit that proved to be

so appealing, not just to the Republican base, but also to swing voters. So let me go back to that original question, which was that you see a future where things do get depolarized. Despite this ability to influence significant portions of the population, I think it's a small portion relatively, but it's still extremely significant. Tell me what you see happening. Yeah, how does polarization end? Because I don't think that things that can't go on forever don't, as they say. So I think that we're in a transition period. It is a dangerous period in that sense. I don't know if the Democrats are going to make it, to be perfectly honest, as a political party,

or I'll say it this way, if the Democrats do survive as a political party, it is gonna look very different than the way it looks now. Why do I say that? Well, just look at what the Democrats are doing. I mean, the Democrats over the last 10 years have said that the highest priority issues are racial justice, climate action, transgenderism, open borders.

Well, why are the Democrats not defending any of those things? Trump is in the process of dismantling every major part of the Democrats' agenda. The parts of the agenda that Democrats said were must-haves for human survival. They said that you had to have this really bloated subsidy policy, the Inflation Reduction Act, green energy subsidies. They said we have to be able to do these surgeries on children in order to supposedly turn them into the opposite sex, or there will be a transgenocide. They said that we have to have strict racial quotas in every single institution in society, so that every single profession, every single institution had a racial composition that exactly matched the population. These were supposedly core values to Democrats. They're not defending

them. When you saw that when Trump gave the speech to his first and only speech so far to Congress in February, sort of the State of the Union, but they didn't call it that because it's the first year of his presidency, but Democrats held up little placards, little protest placards with different slogans on them. They didn't say any of those things. They didn't talk about any of the core agenda. What about the protests that we've seen? They haven't been they've been protesting Elon Musk. They've been lighting Tesla's on fire I mean, they've lost the plot to put it mildly or actually attacking one of the technologies that they had celebrated for purely Personalistic reasons their agenda shot. They're not defending it

And now we're starting to see people like Gavin do some, you know, move away from the transgenderism. We're seeing a very weak defense of the climate subsidies. You know, no defense of DEI racial quotas, which Americans absolutely hate. I mean, it is really amazing to think about how racist, how openly racist people were in this country over the last 10 years, just openly willing to say hateful things against white people, things that were, frankly, essentialist, engaged in racial separatism. I mean, it's just quite shocking when you think about it in the history of America. So the Democrats haven't just lost politically, they have lost morally. They've lost any moral high ground that they once had, particularly when you look back

at like the Obama years when the left was maybe at the peak of its power. So then the question is, because you are going to have to have political diversity, it's a democracy, you're not going to have, you know, Republicans aren't going to be the only ones in power, the Democrats or some other party will have to emerge. What will it look like? Well, it'll probably be a nationalist party. There'll probably be a softer form of a kind of left mageism. I hope personally that it embraces things like free speech, that it is liberal in the best sense of the term,

of a focus on individual rights, probably a little bit more globalist. But nonetheless, maybe on all the things you would imagine. But I don't think it's going to look like the Democrat Party before 2024. And that gives me some hope, because I do think that it's important to have that political difference and conflict, but I also think countries, there needs to be some agreement on a set of things between the two parties. And I do think that that's where we'll be moving. It'll probably take about 10 years, but I expect it'll happen. You alluded to the fact earlier that the censorship industrial conflicts has weakened. There's actually whole agencies that were central to it, like

the Global Engagement Center, that are gone. What's the status of this censorship industrial complex? Is it gone? Is it dismantled? I'm thrilled, very happy with what President Trump has done. I mean, I'm not happy with everything he's done, but on the things that I was hoping he would do, he was stronger than I thought he would be. I mean, he comes in the first, you know, within hours of being inaugurated, he signs an executive order on free speech that should never have had to be signed because he's basically just affirming the First Amendment to our Constitution. But nonetheless, he signs that. They moved quickly to end the Global Engagement Center, which was part of the State Department, which had funded an organization that had targeted media, the Global Disinformation

Index, a little outfit out of Britain that was just smearing media and trying to basically run advertiser boycotts, trying to get advertisers to boycott perfectly legitimate, mostly right of center media outlets. They've gone after the National Science Foundation track F funding for censorship activities, misdescribed of course as fighting misinformation. But this is a very scary effort to basically pour millions of dollars into universities to develop censorship tools for social media companies. There's actually a continuation of tools that were developed by DARPA, our great Defense Department R&D laboratory.

They have shut down the, I think, the beating heart of the Sinship Industrial Complex, which were these four organizations that were all, or I think most all of them, if not all of them, were receiving or going to receive National Science Foundation money. And some of that was already happening. I mean, the Stanford Internet Observatory, due to pressure that we and others put on them. That shut down last year before Trump was elected. He's also come out, been critical of the head of the DHS agency that oversaw the censorship, which is called the Cybersecurity Information Security Agency, Chris Krebs, somebody who was involved in that censorship activity. You mentioned GARM. Also, the advertiser censorship effort has disbanded. The concern is restarting up again. Just huge success.

There's strong rumors that we will see actions to sanction the Brazilian Supreme Court judge who is behind the censorship in Brazil. And I am myself under criminal investigation under Brazil for the Twitter files Brazil. So I'm very happy to see that. We saw concerns expressed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio about the persecution and the censorship of British citizens, some of whom said some ugly things online that are reprehensible, but nonetheless should not result in two and a half years in jail, which is the situation of a 42 year old mother

in Britain right now. So I'm thrilled. Now, is it game over? Not quite, I wish it were. The censorship industrial complex has always been very strong in Britain and in Brussels as part of the European Union. The European Union has an absolutely awful law that we should all be aware of and very

concerned about called the Digital Services Act that contains a special mechanism to censor social media platforms for content that should be legal, free speech content, that they would declare misinformation or hate speech, and with a punishment of 6% of global revenues of social media platforms, which could bankrupt them because the profit margins of social media companies are so thin. So they've decamped to Britain and Europe. The censorship industrial complex really mirrors the Five Eyes intelligence arrangement where the Five Eyes English speaking nations, United States, Canada, Britain, Australia,

New Zealand have all collaborated on intelligence. They also collaborated on censorship and on really, I would call them defamation and disinformation and demonization campaigns against people, including myself, by some of those organizations who are funded by the censorship industrial complex, such as Institute for Strategic Dialogue, one of the worst actors in that space demanding censorship by social media platforms of completely legitimate and accurate information. So we should be very concerned and worried about what's happening in Britain and also what's happening in Brussels. But I do think the wind is to our backs and that's not a reason to stop fighting.

That's a reason to really continue to build those alliances. So we do a meeting every year in London, in Westminster, the did a Westminster declaration for free speech, which many public intellectuals, maybe yourself and others, journalists have signed, which opposes censorship of legal speech by social media platforms and any government pressure to do that. Australia killed legislation that would have done censorship last year. Ireland pulled legislation that would have caused censorship, you know, two steps forward, one step back in a lot of these places. There's still things that they're trying to move forward. They're often using, you know, protecting children, you know, protecting racial minorities as the excuses, but it does feel like the wind is to our backs. So I'm in a much more

positive mood than I was just a year or two ago. Your other book that I interviewed you about some time ago was, of course, San Francisco. There's been some remarkable developments in San Francisco when it comes to the realities around homelessness. Tell me about that. It's amazing. In 2022, they recalled the radical left district attorney of San Francisco, Soros, funded district attorney, because of the chaos that he created. And then last year, November 2024, they voted out their mayor and voted in a mayor who promised to crack down on the open air drug dealing and rampant homelessness. And just yesterday, he announced that San

Francisco was now a recovery first city. That's amazing. Just to put that language in context, recovery first is the replacement to so-called harm reduction. Harm reduction is an Orwellian euphemism for enabling addiction, which is about enabling death and destruction and sexual assaults and drug dealing and all, you know, murder and all horrible, horrible things on the streets of San Francisco. Recovery first elevates a proper vision of how to treat addiction, which is the main driver of homelessness, but also mental illness.

Recovery comes out of the 12-step program. Recovery from addiction is still the most inspiring vision. I mean, people, the cynicism promoted by the enablement agenda is that people can't quit becoming addicts. It's just not true. Most people that experiment with hard drugs don't become addicted. Most addicts are able to quit on their own. Only a tiny percentage of people become so addicted and so sick that they become homeless and live on the street. Those people require an intervention when they break the law, which is inevitable if they're camping illegally or using drugs publicly or defecating publicly or doing many other things, breaking

the law in many ways. The right approach is that they be arrested and offered the choice of rehabilitation or jail. That's the only thing that is proven to work. And then from there, it's a set of carrots and sticks to help people to recover from their addiction. The fact that the mayor has announced that San Francisco's Recovery First City is just a huge victory. It's of enormous satisfaction for me. It's not perfect. The Soros-funded Drug Policy Alliance, unfortunately, weakened and corrupted much of that initiative. But the fact that the city has now made as its goal recovery is a huge achievement. So I'm really quite thrilled with it. And we hope it's the beginning of the end of this awful addiction and drug death crisis. Well, and frankly, I can see why you're optimistic, because a number of the key areas that you've

spent quite a bit of time doing advocacy around have kind of come to fruition, haven't they? Or at least the beginnings of it. Yeah, it's always good to remember, I have to remind myself, that trends are nonlinear, things that feel like it's just going awful in one direction, that they can turn around. I think it's also a testament to free expression and free speech and democracy that if you can make the case and bring the evidence and appeal to basic humanity and values, that it does get through.

Most people are not radical or extreme. Most people want safe streets, safe sidewalks. They want a compassionate alternative. They don't want this thing of reviving people 13 times from Narcan and never getting the help they need. It's inhumane. It's also just completely just basically us paying taxpayer money to make people sick. Somehow nihilistic, if I may, right? Yeah. That's like the word of the...

Nihilism is a word, I see it being used more, and I think it's great because it really does describe. And nihilism, there's so much going on in that idea, but it's just a, yeah, it's a really, it's a negation of humanity, of our basic humanity, of our cities, of our civilization. I mean, if you love people, you know, if you love humanity, then you must love civilization, because civilization, by which I mean, you know, law and order, meritocracy, cheap energy, just, you know, the equal justice under the law. That's the best way to take care of people. I mean, that's just we is not, you don't need a lot of research to see that. But yeah, I mean, I think you get into places like California and people enter into a dream world. Because I always

ask myself, I mean, how do you, how can you have people that just can look at somebody smoking methamphetamine and fentanyl in a tent in their own waste, knowing that there's women in those tents being sexually assaulted. How do you permit that and still think that you're a caring person? And it just shows how ideological people have become, that they've constructed this elaborate dream world where police officers are somehow not required anymore, where we don't need law and order anymore. It's a fantasy reality made worse by the media, but really a result of our cities, our progressive cities falling into the hands of what I think ultimately you have to

call a cult. It's a kind of cult mentality that has all of the characteristics of a religious cult. all of the characteristics of a religious cult. Speaking about cults, I want to talk to you as we finish up about testimony that you did last year about UFOs, actually UAPs, we call them these days. It's just kind of an interesting area. It's something that I don't follow very much. I don't know why. Maybe because I don't deal well with mixes of fact and fiction. I need either fact or fiction. And this one is just very difficult to tease apart. But I trust your vision and your understanding. Where are we at with this? What do we know? What do we not know? Well, my testimony was pretty straightforward, which was that I don't know what the unidentified anomalous phenomena are. That's why they're called unidentified. They did

make a change and we're calling them phenomena as opposed to objects. There are reports of the government having captured a craft. We haven't seen them. On the other hand, we haven't really gotten the access to them yet. What I wanted to point out as my prop, all you really need to know is that this, well, everything in black, by the way, is covering up text. This is a, from a presentation from the UAP task force, which is a US government task force to investigate this. And I mean, why can't we know these things?

Okay, I, nobody's saying that we should be able to know secret government technologies or special sensor equipment, but I mean, potential explanations. Okay, so three hypotheses, unknown weather or other natural phenomena number two, but the first two hypotheses are blacked out. Why can't the public know the hypotheses? I mean, I think we all kind of know what the other hypotheses are, but it's so taboo and there's been so much stigma and ridicule built around it that I think has declined quite a bit, but nonetheless it's still there. But we're being treated like children, you know? So if there is non-human, if there's evidence of non-human beings on our planet, we have a right to know that.

It's our taxpayer money, and the Constitution, of course, requires congressional oversight of that. But plan of action, we can't know. The letters, by the way, just refer to different parts of the legal code that justify the censorship. But there's dozens of these documents. We know the documents exist. I reported on a whistleblower who had come forward to describe a program called Immaculate Constellation, which is essentially a very large database of many videos and photographs. Some have been released. I have heard from multiple whistleblowers who I trust, sources in the intelligence community, or contractors who say that we have very clear videos of orbs in particular. In the past, I don't know why. There's another thing we're

very curious about. There used to be a lot of disks, you know, flying saucers, and now we see a lot of these balls and circular orbs, they're called. Sure, some of them are balloons, some of them might be ball lightning or plasma. And if that's the case, then we should know that. So I think that, you know, we've had, really since World War II, this has been an issue. There was, you know, in 1952, there were huge UFO sightings over Washington, D.C. Really, the government has never stopped studying it. We don't know what else. My view is, whatever it is, including if it's misinformation or psychogenic explanations or natural phenomenon,

we should know about it. The suspicion should be around the lack of transparency. The other thing I'll say is that President Trump has promised to reveal more about this. The last big wave of UAP sightings was in New Jersey, where you had mayors reporting drones. Yes, were many of them jet planes, of course, you know, were many of them human drones, 100%. There was also a lot of unidentified anomalous phenomena. We should get to know what that is. And President Trump has promised that, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard has

promised that. We now have multiple former CIA intelligence community officials who say there's something real there. So we're all getting a little bit impatient. And I think it's, we need this administration to go further than it has. It's, we're entering into late May, and we have not had the disclosure of information that has been promised to us. We've had some, and I want to compliment the administration on some of the JFK files, some of the RFK files, but we are still waiting for Russiagate, censorship files, Epstein files, UAP files. There's a lot there that's hidden and overclassified,

and we have a right to know. Okay. Well, wonderful conversation today, Michael. A final thought as we finish? Well, no, just congratulations to Epic Times. You guys are really killing it, and you have come through some genuine persecution against your company by nefarious forces. So I want to compliment you on keeping the flame alive and fighting for free speech and for independent journalism. Well, Michael Schellenberger, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thanks for having me.

Thank you all for joining Michael Schellenberger and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I'm your host, Jan Jekielek.