The Highwire with Del Bigtree - INFORMATION TSUNAMI

Episode Date: May 5, 2023

Biden Lifts US Travel Mandate After ICAN’s Legal Challenge; Jefferey Jaxen Reports on Major Shakeups Happening in Mainstream Media, and Fauci and Teachers Union Head Trying To Rewrite History; Bombshell Autism Study Under Attack; Spellers Screens Tomorrow on TheHighWire.com!Guests: Aaron Siri, Esq., Cindy Nevison, PhD., Mark BlaxillBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/the-highwire-with-del-bigtree--3620606/support.

Did you notice that this show doesn't have any commercials? I'm not selling you diapers or vitamins or smoothies or gasoline. That's because I don't want corporate sponsors telling us what to investigate and what to say. Instead, you're our sponsors. This is a production by our nonprofit, the Informed Consent Action Network. If you want more investigations, more hard-hitting news. If you want the truth, go to Ican Decide.org and donate now. Good morning, good afternoon, good evening.

wherever you are out there in the world, it's time to step out onto the high wire. Well, we have been riding an amazing wave here, not just on the production of the show, which has been fantastic, and I'm an amazing teamwork in it, but legally all the legal wins, I mean, just a couple weeks of getting to announce

that we've returned the religious exemption to Mississippi, just absolutely massive. But, you know, right along those lines this week, you know, the question would be, what really happened here. Now, we're going to be talking about the travel ban. And when you think about the travel ban in America, we have been like aligned with China somehow on how restricted we're going to be to, you know, foreign travel coming in without vaccination. And we were one of the last holdouts. And just as, you know, President Biden started announcing that the pandemic was over, but still

we're hanging on, still we're hanging on. Regulations hanging in there. We've talked about Novak, Joukovic and not being able to play in sports here in America. Well, last week, you know, we saw a really sort of disconcerting statement by the CDC. This is how that was mentioned in the Daily Mail. Another jab to face to the face of common sense. CDC sticks with COVID vaccine requirements for travelers coming to U.S. a policy that's had no effect on transmission rates. That was just April 28th just last week. In an announcement, Thursday, this is last Thursday. This is last Thursday. for disease control and prevention, update the policy rather than dropping it. The U.S. will allow travelers that have received at least one vaccine dose on or after August 16th

into the country. The CDC says this is because many who have received a one dose since this date may have received a more protective bivalent shot. Forget about any of the science behind that or whether it's protective or not if you've been watching the high wire. But there it was. We're going to hold on to this restriction. We're not going to let anyone that didn't get the vaccine into this country. Well, we have had so many of you reach out to I Can, Informed Consent Action Network, the nonprofit that makes this educational program the High Wire possible, saying, I can't get my, you know, my relatives can't visit. There's so much that we were missing out and with our families, or I can't leave the country and get back in in all of these issues. And so we decided

to bring a lawsuit. In fact, fund a lawsuit. We are not the plaintiffs in this lawsuit, but we did get directly involved with suing over this issue. Who's the government? Who's did we sue? Let me just be very specific. We sued Joe Biden Jr., Rochelle Walensky, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Alejandro Mayorkas, Troy A. Miller, and the United States of America. That's right. We were serious about this. And so to just sort of lay out the timeline, you know, this was beginning of April that we launched this lawsuit just last Thursday. They're saying the CDC and obviously talking the government, we're going forward. We're going to keep restrictions. locked in, but there was a deadline for the government to respond to us. That deadline in which

which if you do not want this case going forward and want to get it thrown out or whatever it is, you have got to respond by this date or else this is going to court. What was that date? That date was May 1st. Why is that important? Because instead of responding to our lawsuit on May 1st, instead, this happened in the news. The White House is ending one of its final COVID-19 vaccine requirements next week. The White House announced it will end its COVID-19 vaccine requirements for international travelers. Travelers into the United States won't need to prove that they have a COVID vaccination. The COVID vaccine will also be lifted for Canadians crossing into the U.S., allowing for cross-border travel to be easier. Starting on May 12th, the vaccine restrictions will be lifted.

That's when the COVID-19 public health emergency is set to expire. Experts say it's a sign. The administration believes the U.S. is moving past the pandemic. Most notably, this policy prevented international tennis star Novak Djokovic from participating in the Miami Open. I think it may be the right time to relax mandates, although I have mixed feelings even about that. But now these policies, some of the last vestiges of the federal government's emergency pandemic powers, will finally come to an end. There you have, it's finally coming to an end. This is the official statement by the White House that came out. It says the Biden administration will end COVID-19 vaccination requirements for federal employees,

contractors, international travelers, head start educators, and CMS certified facilities. Now, there's no way of knowing actually whether our lawsuit is the reason that they finally broke down and did what was obvious to the rest of the world. But we think we might have had something to. At least I do. Anyway, I wanted to talk to our lawyer, Aaron, Siri, just about this case and what was behind it and the teeth that we brought into it. So I'm joined right now by Aaron Siri. Aaron, awesome to have you on. Good to be here.

Now, look, I know that you're always, you know, you're always clipping my wings and saying, look, Del, there's only certain things that we're allowed to claim. We can't claim. So we can't claim a victory necessarily here, though I think the coincidence is pretty obvious. But what was the heart of this case for people that just want to know? what were they facing and what were they going to have to respond to on May 1st? So on May 1st, the day the government had to file an opposition to a motion seeking an injunction with regard to the travel mandate. If you saw, you know, when you put on the screen just now, a number of other vaccine mandates that the president is now going to be rescinding, A lot of those are already enjoined in other lawsuit.

So, you know, he's dropping mandates for things that already have been enjoined. You know, our understanding is that with regards to the travel mandate, they were going to revisit whether or not they were going to extend it on May 11th. May 1st is, frankly, in some ways, arbitrary the fact that they came out and decided to just drop it on that specific date. There was no deadline that we're aware of that required a decision point on that date. obviously there was the need to fall in opposition to the injunction that we filed challenging the travel mandate which i have to say you know we have won a lot of lawsuits now against the government fda cdc nih h health and human services we're getting to be quite a pain in their ass and i don't think they like giving i can

any more victories i will say it seems to me that they had very little footing here and just didn't want another headline. I can wins another lawsuit against government the United States and illegal restrictions, basically. But the climate that we're in now, this was insane that we've even waited this long. You had Biden saying months ago that the pandemic is over, yet still didn't really want to open up for some reason. We now know officially that the vaccine didn't work, didn't stop hesitant, I mean, didn't stop the infection, you know, couldn't stop transmission, which was really brilliantly laid out in a case that we brought up last week. In the case of New York State, their federal workers there. And the judge there basically said that because this vaccine

doesn't stop transmission or infection, there's no difference between a vaccinated or an undefined vaccinated individual in the workplace. Here it is exactly. Being vaccinated does not prevent an individual from contracting or transmitting COVID-19 as of the day of this decision. CDC guidelines regarding quarantine and isolation are same for vaccinated, unvaccinated individuals, the petitioners should not have been terminated for choosing not to protect themselves. In that case, I think they awarded them back pay and their jobs back. But this is similar, right? I mean, was this sort of how we were going to argue this as far as travel, that, you know, you have a product that you're arbitrarily saying everyone needs to take, but doesn't actually achieve

any end goal that makes any sense? Well, I think the fact that the vaccine doesn't prevent infection transmission shows some of the ridiculous nature of the and the illogical nature of the vaccine mandate for travelers. But sometimes what's logical and what makes sense is not always the best grounds for a legal argument. In this instance, the ground that we proceeded on was the fact that there were all types of exceptions in this travel mandate. For example, the 10 to 12 million estimated undocumented illegal immigrants that come to the United States that are currently residing here are not subject to having to get a COVID-19 vaccine mandate.

But if you're trying to come here legally, then you are subject to it. That's obviously does not make a lot of sense. The other part of it is that there are all types of exceptions to get around the COVID-19 vaccine mandate, but even if you're coming here legally, but one exception that didn't exist, and this really where it made the mandate infirm, is that if your convictions did not permit you to get the COVID-19 vaccine, then that wouldn't have worked. If you believe that, you know, and without getting in too much legalese, that is a founding principle of this country, the idea that you should be able to live your life by your convictions,

and that wasn't accounted for in this, and that made the law infirm, we argued. And we've had a series of cases under those same principles that we've been successful in. And so we were very confident that we'd be successful here. And I think the government, we've litigated against now numerous times on this similar ground, hopefully appreciated that as well. I mean, you're talking about really, it's similar in some ways to the Mississippi case where we return the religious exemption there that has been gone since 1979 based on the fact that you can't have a secular protection and not have religious protection there.

And in that case, really brought up because you had Walmarts open and churches closed, that's sort of lost in courts across the country. So there's this sort of, you know, in many ways, this COVID pandemics really pushed our laws and our understanding of our rights, especially religious rights, to a place that really hasn't been argued. I don't think quite this way for quite, you know, for decades. If not, when we think about 1905 and Jacobson versus Massachusetts. So a lot of power now to this conversation about your religious.

and conviction rights. Yes. And just so that your audience fully appreciates this, when we say religious beliefs, it doesn't mean organized religion. In fact, the Constitution says the state shall establish no, there's something called the Establishment's the Constitution. Government's not allowed to be involved in defining what is or is not a religion. So it's not about what religious group you're involved in, whether you go to church on Sunday.

It's about what you believe, what your religious, your convictions are within the religious, that are some form of religious nature. And in many ways, you know, when this country was founded, people understood that to mean when they thought of their convictions, they thought of the beliefs that guided their lives, that led them to choose what they do day in and day out. And in many ways, we've kind of lost a little bit of touch with what that means legally, I guess, or vernacular, I should say.

But it's far broader than what people think of when they think of a religious exemption. It is the ability to live out your life pursuant to your conviction. convictions. If your convictions, your deeply held beliefs are that this vaccine are not appropriate for you that they'll, you know, affect your immortal soul, for example, then the government should not be able to make you take that. And if they're giving exemptions for other individuals for secular reasons, they have to honor it for religious reasons. It shows that there's no health imperative. Yeah. Well, I mean, you've been amazing on that breaking ground and achieving things that we were told was impossible when you and I started working together. This was very

exciting. I want to turn the page now to a headline that came out of Texas, I believe it's just two days ago. Really exciting news from the Attorney General in Texas. Here's the headlines, Texas Tribute, Attorney General Ken Paxton to investigate COVID-19 vaccine makers. Paxton launches investigation to gain of function research and misrepresentations by COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers. He tweeted out himself about this. breaking, we are launching an investigation to gain of function research and misrepresentations by COVID-19 vaccine manufacturers. This is huge. I mean, to me, this is really big. Obviously, we've been watching Rand Paul and some of these conversations going on in these hearings in the

federal government, gain of function. But I think more specifically, it seems like he's really targeting these executives and, you know, Moderna, Pfizer, Johnson, and Johnson for making false claims, possible fraud inside of their trials. But have you had a chance to look at, you know, what he's investigating here? Yeah, absolutely. He's investigating the claims that were made by these pharmaceutical companies with regards to gain a function, the efficacy of their products, as well as misconduct in the clinical trials, which is very interesting.

And I assume that that in part is based on reviewing some of the documents that have come out regarding the clinical trials. Let me put it this way. You know, for any other drug out there, there are pharmaceutical companies that put drugs out that hurt people all the time. It happens. Drugs hurt people and they get withdrawn from the market. What makes I believe this product unique is that they use the claim that it was safe and effective

to mandate it to take away people's individual and civil rights. That made the claim of safe and effective, not just a medical, issue, but it made it a civil rights issue. It made it an individual rights issue. And I think that it's part of, I have to imagine, it's part of what's really drawn the eye or so many politicians and attorney generals at these companies focused on this product because they use those claims to take away those people rights. And it wasn't like these companies just sat idly by and just let politicians go about their business and just mandated. They were direct participants. They have lobbied. They've been part of funding various groups that lobby.

legislative houses around this country and on the federal level to help push, promote, and enact those mandates. They wanted to come after us, take away our civil and individual rights, and it's about time. The Attorney General is focused directly back at them and hold them accountable for what everything they said about the safety and efficacy of these products of American people. You know, we do a lot of work. We are very litigious, as I say, more litigious than I ever planned on being in my life, constantly bring lawsuits, FOIA requests. But, For those of us, like, what is the difference between the type of case that we can bring with ICAN, these civil cases that we support?

Sometimes we're just funding. Obviously, there's plaintiffs and people involved, and we're just there to make sure that the case is held up. And thank God for our sponsors that make this happen. But does an AG have more teeth? Is there, first of all, it sounds like an attorney general is allowed to, you know, demand an investigation and get, if you will, discovery without even bringing a case yet. Is that right? is he allowed to say, hey, I want this, this and this to decide if I'm bringing a case,

whereas we only see things if we can get a case in the court, get it through, you know, being, you know, their paperwork and any rebuttals coming back. So what is the difference between attorney general's case and just another, you know, constitutional attorney like yourself? The Attorney General has powers that are far broader than any private attorney like myself and other attorneys out there. They have at their disposal all of the criminal code that exists in Texas. Okay.

For example, I can't prosecute somebody for homicide, for negligent homicide, even if they knowingly and recklessly and purposely put out a product and might kill somebody, for example. I can't prosecute somebody for various, you know, types of battery or based on putting out again, something that a company knows would hurt people. Or even consumer fraud claims, there are certain consumer fraud. claims I could bring as a private attorney, but the grounds and breadth for which many attorney generals around this country can bring claims are far broader. Let's put it this way. As the law stands right now in this country regarding these products, because of the PEP Act immunity,

I cannot, and most, and civil attorneys around this country for the most part, are unable to sue Pfizer-Moderna to hold them accountable in the normal course, which is what? Sue them for the injuries that their product is causing to Americans across this country. Can't do that. So, but the one thing the prep act does not do, it does not preempt criminal laws. So the attorney general, so in the normal course, the attorney general has broader powers to begin with. But in this instance, the attorney general really has even, I mean, the delta is even larger because most of the normal ways we'd hold a company accountable, state,

laws with regards to product liability laws, design defect claims, you know, misrepresentation claims. We can't bring those under the PEP Act. We can't even do any of that. But the Attorney General's hands are not tied if he proceeds on a criminal basis. So yes, he has a very broad ability to bring all kinds of claims. He obviously is going to have to use the Texas criminal law. But, you know, the heartening part about this I understand is that obviously, as we're aware, In Florida, there's been a grand jury convened. And I believe there are a number of other attorney generals around the country or not yet public, but I believe are also going to be launching investigations of a similar nature soon.

Wow, really exciting stuff. And when I think about this and I think about, you know, what we have contributed, when you think, you know, whether it's the V-Safe data and the work that's done there, you obviously were the lead attorney in getting the Pfizer data released, you know, 75 years, FDA tried to hide that data. You got that released. And so for all those reasons, there's a lot of tools. There's a lot of information already in AG Ken Paxton's hands to work with to really dive into what happened in these trials. And so, you know, to see this all coming full circle, I mean, it's got to be exciting, you know, just for the work that you're doing. I know we're tickled

pink over here at ICAM, the highwire. Yeah, look, we've got no tell. I think we have about about I believe we've crossed a thousand FOIA requests. I know there was a at least an internal email at my firm about that. A thousand requests in behalf of I can. And those documents, that has produced, as you pointed out, the SAFE document, the VSAFE data, which, and not only the data, but it shows some of the internal documentation about how they were going to design it and how they seem to, they chose to design it in a certain way, and we've gone through this,

to purposely avoid being able to make it useful to show harms. Or the thousands of Fauci emails, of course, as you might recall, long ago, that we obtained on behalf of ICan, and I believe it was the opening part of the whole opening monologue on a Tucker Carlson episode, and obviously made the run of the mill. BuzzFeed got some of the documents, and ICAN got some. It seemed like the media was a little more comfortable talking about

how BuzzFee got documents, but they don't want to mention it. And it was the ICANN documents, the media across the board was talking about in some instances, in many instances. And obviously, there are thousands of other documents. I could tell you, I mean, as you know, there are lots of different investigations going on in which those documents, you know, various actors have reached out to us for those documents and we put them together in packets and provided them to make it useful in many other contexts, in many other forums.

Just kind of leave it at that. Amazing. Well, you're doing fantastic work. I want to let everyone know that we have just put, you just gave a keynote speech at Dartmouth and we put that up on the website, everybody. You know, it's rare that you really get to see Aaron Siri let loose and give a perspective on the law as it pertains to the vaccine issue. This was an incredible speech.

But at the heart of it, what was it that you were trying to get across in this keynote speech? You just gave it, Dartmouth. React 19, which is a group that was, you featured on your show before, it's comprised of about 30,000, I understand, seriously injured individuals from the COVID-19 vaccine. And they had this event. And they asked me to speak at it. And it was hard to say no, I normally don't do those, but I did there. And what they, I think at the heart of what I was asked to address was effectively, how could it be? How can it be that these government officials, the medical industry that all told us, hey, go out, get this product, pushed us to do it, went and we, you know, these 30,000 people, obviously not folks who had issues with vaccines beforehand.

And if they did, they wouldn't have gotten the vaccine. It's always ironic to call people or injured by vaccine, you know, any pejorative with regarding the vaccines because people who get issues with vaccines, they don't take the vaccine. These folks trusted their health authorities. They trusted the federal authorities, trusted medical organizations. They got the shot. And after they did, they went back to these same organizations, these same institutions, the same institutions that told them, go get the shot.

And they went to them and they said, hey, I'm hurt, I'm injured, help me, oftentimes I'm pleading, crying. And there's no help to be had. In fact, to get the opposite. So often insult added to injury. And so I think that a lot of these folks just can't understand how can that be. And my whole talk was about how COVID-19 vaccines did not just fall into a vacuum. They fell into a very well-established paradigm in this country that has developed for over 40 years around since since 1986 with how vaccines regulatory economically are treated. COVID-19 vaccines fell into that exact same regulatory free market force model. And that is what my talk is about is to help people understand contextually how it could

be that they're not these 30,000, these folks, and this is just one group, 30,000 seriously interviewed how this cacophony of Americans calling out, crying out for help across this country can be so callously ignored by our medical establishment and by health authorities. And that's really what I want to tell them because to fix a problem, you first have to understand the problem. To understand the problem with COVID-19 vaccines, you've got to start in 1986. Well, fantastic. Aaron, you're doing such great work.

People, if you want to also see, obviously we're covering all the work that we're doing here and I can, but Aaron's got a great substack. You should check out where he's writing about these things, injecting freedom is the name of that substack. You're writing some great articles there and what we're sort of uncovering as we go along. You know, Aaron, I just want to say congratulations to the team again. The Mississippi win was huge. Whether or not we were the official death nail on this travel ban, I certainly know that we're having a part of all this. And then, you know, Ken Paxton has just some amazing, amazing tools and information in his hands now to really wreak havoc on this.

this injustice has been taking place in the federal government a lot because of the work that you're doing. So I'm just so proud to be working with you and just keep up the good work. It's amazing. It's really amazing. Thank you, Dell, and obviously thank you to ICANN because most of that work, almost all of that policy work, would not be possible without ICAN support. So really thank you. I appreciate. Take care. You're back to work. I know you're busy. We've got a lot for you to do. All right. So look, for all of you that are out there that have been supporting, I can donating to us, you get to really pat yourself on the back every time we have these

announcements, massive, massive announcements, you know, winning cases that, and it's all built. What you have, if you haven't been watching the highway from the beginning when we started back in, you know, 2017, then you haven't seen how these little wins that many of you were supporting then that just started sort of building this foundation that we could use as we moved into bigger and bigger cases. Now we're seeing these explosively gigantic cases. So for all of you that have been donating with vision, seeing where we're going, man, this is a moment you should really be excited and congratulating yourself. And for all of you that knows somebody that was donating and you're still sitting there, why don't you go and thank them for the work that they've done to protect your

constitutional rights and start pushing back, we now have the wave and the energy on our side. But please, for those of you that are just watching sitting back, you know, armchair quarterbacking this, It's time. This is the moment. This is your moment. You got to get involved. There's so much we want to do that we're waiting for because of the funding's not there. So we're asking for $23 a month for 2023. If you can do more, that's great. If you've done well, life, awesome. If you only want to, you know, give us a cup of coffee or a piece of bubble gum every month. Every little bit counts. But I want you to feel what it feels like to be a part of our network, the informed consent action network. This is what it's all about. We're truly not just bringing you this incredible show and the news and the truth that's out there when everyone else is lying to you. We're fighting on your behalf and making a difference in our world. Thank you to everyone that allows me to get up here and gloat and allows me to bring lawsuits against Joe Biden and the United States of America. Pretty awesome. All right, I've got a huge show coming up.

We're going to get into the heart of, you know, one of the topics that brought me here to begin with. When I made the documentary backs, some of you don't even know where I started here, left my job at the CBS television show, the doctors to make the documentary backs. At the heart of that was this rising prevalence in autism and what the CDC did and did not know about it and the fraud that they committed to try and hide it. Well, now a really important study has come out about the prevalence and what the cost is going to be to those of us that are citizens in the United States of America and our health care system. I'm going to be in studio with Mark Blacksul and Cindy Nevison. They're just waiting in the shadows right now to come out. Two people had been at this for a very long time, but a brand new look at how we should be wrapping our heads around this.

But first, it's time for the Jackson Report. All right, Jeffrey. What do you got for us this week? Del, we all need to have a big conversation about where artificial intelligence is going. You're right about that. Because let's face it, it's been fun up until now. You have your maps. They give you some alternative routes when there's an accident.

You have automated text message responses, even Siri, voice-operated virtual assistance for your iPhone. But we're at a demarcation line now where this safe, helpful fun is rapidly showing something different as it moves into the future. And the latest person to give one of these warnings is Jeffrey Hinton. He was head of Google's brain research development. He received something called the Turing Award. It's like the Nobel Prize for Computing. He retired from Google so he can speak and warm people about these things. And obviously, he's very qualified for this.

So let's look at the headlines here. This was just this past week. Godfather of AI, that's we're calling him. Jeffrey Hinton quits Google over killer robot fears and regrets inventing tech that could destroy us all. And he says in there, I console myself with a normal excuse. And wherever we heard this before, if I hadn't done it, someone else would have. He told the New York Times. So right now, he's saying, as far as far,

as far as he can tell, artificial intelligence is not more intelligent than people, but it will be very soon. And he warns a bad actor is getting control of this, directing this, dictating where it's going in parts of society and leading society in ways, places we don't want to see. And remember, just a month ago, there was a letter assigned by really luminaries in tech and AI in a lot of places warning about this. They're calling for a six-month pause in the development of artificial intelligence. This was the headline here. Tech leaders urge a pause in the out-of-control artificial intelligence race. They were warning about AI systems reaching human competitive intelligence, obviously, and beyond. And they're saying they've seen just in the last few months these out-of-control

like AI labs just racing to develop these technologies, even more powerful and more powerful and not really understanding if they can control them or predict where they're going. And, you know, with that lettered. It's amazing, you know, just as I sit here, and we've all been watching this, that we are not watching like just immediate gigantic hearings inside the United States, inside our government, send as Congress, whoever, saying, wait a minute, these aren't just, you know, a couple of, you know, nobody's out of no, like the heads, the designers, the ones that built these things are coming to us and saying, my God, I think we made a mistake, we made a mistake, you got to stop us.

You can't believe what we just built back here. and it could kill us all. I mean, it's really, really shocking. And to just have a bunch of, you know, in some ways, you know, leadership that's just like, whatever, you know, if we're not going to take the people that invented this technology seriously, then who are we going to take seriously? It's imperative that guard reels be put on this. And that letter that was signed, Jeffrey Hinton wasn't on that letter, but because he was still working at Google at the time, but, you know, the ideological overlap. there, you would assume that he would be on that letter. But someone else has emerged, once again, tech entrepreneur Elon Musk, and he's obviously warned about this for about a decade, and he's been in the mix as well, obviously with Tesla,

but also with NeuroLink and the satellites in space and all of these things. He's had his finger in a lot of this stuff, but he's doing the circus recently. He was on Bill Maher, and he had some things to say about this future of AI development. Take a listen. All right.

With respect to AI, I, I just think we should have some sort of regulatory oversight. So for anything there's a danger to the public, if it's sort of aircraft, cars, food and drug and whatnot, we've got some regulatory oversight, like a referee, essentially, and making sure that companies don't cut corners. So I think that since, if one agrees that AI is a potential risk to the public, then there should be some regulatory body

that oversees what companies are doing, that they don't cut corners and potentially do something very dangerous. And if we don't do something, lay out a scenario for me in the next two, five, ten years, if nothing is done, because we're very good at doing nothing, especially when it comes in the way of profit, and this is a big profit engine now for companies, they're going to want to just compete with each other. I mean, there are people like Ray Kurzweil who doesn't think it's a problem at all. Actually, Ray Cozweil's prediction for artificial superintelligence is 2029.

He's not far wrong. Right. But he doesn't think it's a problem, whereas people like you and Bill Gates and Stephen Hawking thought think it's a problem. Yeah, it depends. If some people want to live forever or for a much longer period of time and they see AI as the only way to digital superintelligence is the only thing that can figure out how to get them to live forever, I think Cozweil is in that category.

he would prefer to have AI, artificial general intelligence than not, because he can figure out longevity. I mean, there's a lot to unpack that we've talked about. Some of it, a lot that's driven by these people that somehow want to have this dream of uploading their consciousness into the computer so that they can go on to live forever.

And then I just, then my sort of being brought up in church and my dad being a minister, just when you think of people that are trying to just circumvent God and nature, what could possibly go wrong? And that's, you know, I just keep thinking, lest you shall surely die. It feels like that's what these people are warning us about. Like, we must stop this or we could all die. Yeah. And you have that, you have this like biblical overlay on the top of, you know, what we all know from the vaccine conversation. Yeah. Huge profit margins, really little oversight, if any, can't see the manufacturer. And then you

put that on top of it. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's, you can see the dire need. So he's, he's giving some common sense warnings there, if you will. But listen to them just last month on Tucker Carlson. And this is probably one of the most important interviews I've ever seen on artificial intelligence as far as a warning is concerned. It's very direct. Take a listen. All regulations start with a perceived danger and planes fall out of the sky or food causes botulism. I don't think the average person playing with AI on his iPhone perceives any danger. Can you just roughly explain what you think the dangers might be? Yeah, so the danger, really AI is perhaps more dangerous than, say, mismanaged aircraft design or

production or bad car production in the sense that it has the potential, how a small one may regard that probability, but it is non-trivial, it has the potential of a civilizational destruction. There's movies like Terminator, but it wouldn't quite happen like Terminator, because the intelligence would be in the data centers. Right. The robot's just the end effector. But I think perhaps what you may be alluding to here is that regulations are really only put into effect after something terrible has happened. That's correct. If that's the case for AI and we only put in regulations after something terrible has happened, it may be too late to actually put the regulations in place. The AI may be in control at that point.

You think that's real. It is conceivable that AI could take control and reach a point where you couldn't turn it off and it would be making the decisions for people. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. No, that's definitely where things are headed. For sure.

I mean, that's an uncomfortable interview. I don't know about you. I just was speaking at an event in Mexico and coming back across the border now. You step up and there's just a camera that looks in your face. I don't have to show my passport anymore. I don't have to show my ticket or anything. Thank you, Mr. Bigtree, you know, maybe a couple questions you're on your way. And then I just think, my God. I mean, you know, we're talking about like tracking systems. They've already

got facial recognition. All of this already exists. So that means now every camera I'm walking past, and there's been movies about this. We're now in that space. Imagine they just say, the government gets paranoid or says, hey, let's just have AI monitor everybody. Now every camera, tracking everywhere you go, every decision you make, and then what are you programming the AI to be doing with that information? And I remember, you know, there was a quote, one of the few by you've all know of Harari, who we've talked a lot about. I'm probably, I mean, I'm just paraphrasing here, just came to mind, but he said, you know, this, this, this moment, the singularity, this moment in which the computer apparently is going to recognize itself. This guy, Ray

Kurzweiler's been at the head of like this discussion for a long time. I think they were saying 2040. It sounds like now Elon Musk is saying it's more like 2029 and he's really close to it, but then have a consciousness. It will then once it recognizes itself, now it's a conscious entity. And you've all known of Harari made the point that, you know, I'm not sure that I agree that intelligence marks consciousness, but he said, imagine an intelligence beyond anything that we would be able to compete with, but has no consciousness or no conscience. that perhaps is even more horrifying.

And that has stuck with me, that thought. And this conversation has moved very quickly. It wasn't, you know, 40, 50 years ago, really people are warning about this. 2013, the University of Oxford did a research study in a white paper, and this was called the Future of Employment, 2013, so 10 years ago. And it says, according to our estimates, around 47% of total U.S. employment is in the high-risk category. We refer to these jobs at risk, i.e. jobs we expect could be automated relatively soon, perhaps over the next decade or two. So we're here, Del. It's a decade. And now let's see what the headlines look like. This is just over the past week. This is Goldman Sachs predicts 300 million jobs will be lost or degraded by artificial intelligence.

Now, IBM, another headline, IBM is to stop hiring for roles that can be replaced by AI, nearly 80,000 workers to be replaced by automation. And even writers in Hollywood. Just to clear that not 80. Oh, I'm sorry. Yes. Thank you. 8,000. Writers in Hollywood facing the same thing.

We have the Hollywood writer strike right now. Hollywood screenwriters don't want robots taking their jobs either. So, you know, Jimmy Kimball is crying himself to sleep tonight because he can't create his own content. And he doesn't want AI doing it. And his writer sure don't want to be out of work. So that's going to be an issue there as well. But there is one person who loves AI. There is one person who's pushing it on the kids, so to speak.

This is Bill Gates, our old friend Bill Gates, from the pandemic fame. Here's the headline for him. Bill Gates says AI chatbots will teach kids to read within 18 months. You'll be stunned by how it helps. He's at a conference, and this is some of the things he said. He says, quote, at first, we'll be most stunned by how it helps with reading, being a reading research assistant and giving you feedback on writing, said Gates. Then he says this, if you look, if you just took the next 18 months, the AIs will come in as a teacher. and give feedback on writing, said Gates.

And then they will amp up what we're able to do in math, which is, you know, really kind of a golden achievement for AI is the solving problems through math. The writing is easy because they have this database of vocabulary. But the math thing is kind of this piece. But he said, yeah, 18 months, probably be solved at that point. So it should be good. Just let the kids deal with that, put them on them. And we've seen all the studies with Facebook and increased social media use, how it really

hurts kids development, leads to depression. So how is this going to work when you just unleash AI on children for their learning development? Got a question. It totally. And it goes to, I mean, you got to hand it to this guy. He really knows how to make a difference in this world. And that difference always being the children, get to the children, and they change the world. And so let's just have all of our children belly up to AI. I think the question Elon Musk would probably follow up was, okay, great. It teaches us to read. It starts advancing our math. And then it realize this to itself, man, these humans really suck at this when you think about it. We're far better. And what is the use of teaching these people this anymore?

We might as well just handle it ourselves. And one of the quotes from, I believe in that Tucker Carl's interview, certainly, you know, that Elon Musk goes on to say, well, you know, I hope they being the AI, find us interesting because if they don't, then we're just a nuisance. And boy, is that a horrifying thought. Absolutely. And so that's why that AI development, the future of artificial intelligence, is really one of the biggest conversations right now in the world. Another one is the future of speech, of communication, free speech for that matter. And that brings us to the next story.

The American media landscape is rapidly changing right now. It's underneath everyone's nose. It's not too obvious, but there's a lot of big moves happening within the past couple weeks. And we're going to go through that right now and talk about what that possibly means. So everyone probably has seen by now. Tucker Carlson is out at Fox. The headlines have been all over the place.

And we're not going to go into speculation here because there's a lot of people saying they know why he's out. There's a lot of reasons floating around out there. But he is no longer on Fox Network. His show is no longer being produced. He and his producer are not creating content. So where he ends up, nobody knows. And that's an interesting thing because he's been, you know, since 2005, he was at MSNBC started tonight with Tucker Carlson since 2016, one of the most highly rated news shows since then.

So that is a huge gap that's being left. And we've watched the trajectory of this man over those years and his reporting and, you know, his really intelligence on world views. And this is a person who's been in the media most of his life. And it's interesting because just recently, just right before he was let go by Fox, he did an interview with some younger guys. And this is what he had to say about really his journey. Listen, I've spent my whole life in the media.

My dad was in the media. Like, that is a big part of the revelation that's changed my life is the media are part of the control apparatus. Like, there's no. Yeah, I know, I know, because you're younger and smarter and you're like, yeah. Yeah. But what if you're me and you spent your whole life in that world and to look around and all of a sudden, you're like, oh, wow. Not only are they part of the problem, but I spent most of my life being part of the problem defending the Iraq war. Like, I actually did that.

Can you imagine if you did that? What do you think? What is one of your biggest regrets in your career? Defending the Iraq War. That is it? Well, I've had a million regrets not being more skeptical, calling people names when I should have listened to what they were saying. Look, when someone makes a claim,

there's only one question that's important at the very beginning, which is, is the claim true or not? So I say, you know, you committed murder or you rigged the last election before you attack me, as a crazy person for saying that, maybe you should explain whether you did it or not. You know what I mean? Yeah. And for too long, I participated in the culture where I was like, anyone who thinks outside

these pre-prescribed lanes is crazy. Is a conspiracy theorist? And I just really regret that. I'm ashamed that I did that. And partly it was age, partly was the world that I grew up in. So when you look at me and you're like, yeah, of course they're part of the means of control. I'm like, that's obvious to you because you're 28, but. I just didn't see it at all, at all. And I'm ashamed of that. Isn't that what the media tries to do, though?

It's their only purpose. Right. They're not here to inform you. Really? Even on the big things that really matter, like the economy and war and COVID, like things that really matter that will affect you. No, their job is not to inform you. They are working for the small group of people who actually run the world. They're their servants. They're their Praetorian Guard. And we should treat them with maximum contempt because they have earned it. That last line, we should treat it with maximum contempt because they have earned it. I've said the same thing. Not only, you know, as I look at, you know, how do we bring to justice upon the crimes of Tony Fauci and Francis Collins and these people that foisted a fraud upon us when, and I think committed treason by blocking the investigation of gain of function inside of China in all of it. But behind all of that are these news networks. that literally help them block it, refuse to ask the most obvious questions any journalists should have, so they're complicit. They're complicit. The propaganda is complicit. So every death in the blood

of those that have died should be on their hands. And with AI, if they don't cover AI appropriately, start demanding that people wake up to this, but go along with it because that just happens to be running, who's running the commercial at the break and telling you what you can and cannot say, it's horrible. But it's dying, right? I mean, I think what we're here, here to state is that this mainstream media and this propaganda machine is floundering and gasping for error. And I think instead of kicking it in the lake and letting it breathe, maybe we should just throw it in the cooler and grill it on the barbecue. And Carlson says something. When someone says something, the only thing that should matter is, is it true or not? And that's something we've

really prided ourselves here at the high wire. One of our mottoes is the truth as we find it. This is what we're going to report to you. And that's what we've been doing. And I think that's what really matters. That's what people are really looking for. It's just this honest open debate at this point. And so, you know, to go further into these headlines here, CNN, not immune from this either. Don Lemon, popular anchor there. He's out. Don Lemon says he has been fired from CNN. So again, we'll hold off on the speculation, but that's what's going. Maybe different. I don't really consider him a truth teller, but certainly it's a sign that that network is trying to find something people care about because they don't seem to like their anchors at the moment. So I mean, absolutely. And remember

crashing and burning of the CNN Plus. They tried to do this subscription-based thing and just pull that whole thing. But now we talk about whole networks. Now, we go beyond just the anchors. BuzzFeed News, the headline BuzzFeed News, which dragged media into the digital age shuts down. They've been going since 2006. So that's a big story. And our friends at Vice News, they announced they're going bankrupt.

They've been around since 2013, around 2013. And unfortunately, they are just. not be able to pay the bills here, you know, particularly anti-vaxxers were a great word for them. They really love talking about the divisive end of the wokeness conversation, very biased in their reporting on medical freedom, and they're going to be shutting their doors very soon. And just in honor of Vice News, let's go back and just check out some of their greatest hits, some of the articles. Del, you might mention this.

You've been great friends of mine for some time now. They sure have. And if you do a search on their website, if you just type in the word anti-vaxxer, you know, that ignorant, prejudice word that just has, you know, hidden suffering and neutralized people trying to tell their stories, you're going to see over 6,600 entries of the word antivacters that they use. And they're using it not in a nice way. And here's one of the headlines. Anti-vaxers think it's time for political and legal revenge. There's you, Del. And it's not so much legal revenge as you saw with Aaron Sear.

It's more of a reckoning. It's more of a squaring up of reality at this point. And they've been reporting on some of your goings on since about 2016 when you brought out Vax the film cover up the catastrophe. Here's the headline here following Outcry, Robert De Niro Yanks, anti-vaxing film from Tribeca Film Festival. And remember at that time, no one's seen the film. None of the reporters writing these had even seen the film because it hasn't even been screened yet. So they're telling people not to see it. It's anti-vax film.

And that was one of the big contentious points. I remember seeing you on an interview for the first time and going, who is this guy? And what is this documentary? Because this is electrifying. And these people are hopping mad. And they haven't even seen the thing yet. So let me just say to advice out there. You've been, you've had me in your crosshairs for a long time taking pot shots.

Every time you've had the opportunity trying to bring this work down, we've grown. And thank you to all of you out there. They've shared our information. You recognize the truth. And you've made us a booming success. But to all of you out there, Vice, just know that I know that you know, that I know that you know that I want. And you know what? Vice was there for some real key moments of purposeful disinformation.

One of those was when Joe Rogan had COVID, and he's mentioned passively he was taking ivermectin. Joe Rogan is back from COVID and shilling for ivermectin now. Remember they were saying he was taking a horse dewormer. And then this one that did age, well, right before the vaccine, the COVID vaccine, was pushed out and the mandate started. Weiss looked at their crystal ball and their infinite wisdom of journalistic integrity, and they wrote this article. Headline, anti-vaxxers are terrified the government will enforce of vaccine for coronavirus. There's just being outrageous and, you know, conspiracy theorists.

The government would never force this product on everybody without their having a right to body autonomy. Yeah. That didn't age very well. So let's move on. We have kind of the journalistic space, if you will, the media space, the news space. Now we move on to something, dare I say, a little more sinister. So let's start with Joe Biden. He was at the 2023 White House Correspondents Association dinner, and he had some interesting things to say about the press. Take a listen. All right. Let me start in a serious note. Jill, Kamala, Doug, and I and members of our administration are here to send a message of the country and quite frankly to the world. The free press is a pillar, maybe the pillar, or free society, not the enemy.

Thomas Jefferson wrote, you all know this quote, Thomas Jefferson wrote, we're left to me to decide whether we should have a government without newspapers or newspapers without a government. I should not hesitate to prefer the latter. All right. Wow. Wow, I mean, just such deep and profound words from our president of the United States. What's interesting and what struck me about that was he is talking about how important free press is, how important, you know, really the First Amendment is. And, you know, one of his digital leads at the White House, when they had an excess of vaccines, no one was taking these COVID vaccines.

They had ordered them all. They had paid for, you know, hundreds of million dollars. They paid for this and the development of them. And no one was taking these. So their head digital lead at the White House wrote this to Google who oversees YouTube. And it was about vaccine hesitancy. And he says this. As we move away from a supply problem toward a demand problem, we remain concerned that YouTube is funneling people into hesitant and intensifying people's hesitancy.

We want to be sure that you have a handle on vaccine hesitancy generally and are working toward making the problem better. This is a concern that is shared at the highest. and I mean highest levels of the White House. So we can see there that reporting on, you know, stories of vaccine injuries, stories of maybe the vaccine not being effective, stories of natural immunity, this stuff is all going to create vaccine hesitancy. And you had the highest, and I mean highest levels of the White House saying you can't do that. And so people may say, well, that's just one email.

But thanks to Matt Taibi, journalist going through the Twitter files, giving us the back end of what he called and, the censorship industrial complex. We can go to this Twitter thread here, and he shows the back end of this. And what he's looking at is the virility project. And that was something out of Stanford. We reported on that.

It was like this seven-month pilot program that was a plugin for Twitter. And they use that as kind of their censorship dog whistle. These people, this Varelli project, would give them these weekly reports and say, this is misinformation. You got to look at this. And so if you go to Matt Taiby's Twitter account, He has a Twitter thread of all this.

You can read this. But you can see one of these internal emails. And it says, even true stories that cause vaccine hesitancy are, you know, thrown into this. They need to really be wrangled. They really need to be censored at this point. So we see the word vaccine hesitancy. But behind the scenes, these things are being weaponized. And both Matt Taibi and American author Michael Schellenberger, who's been really out front blowing the whistle on how dangerous this stuff is, they did a congressional

hearing and really gave all of their information out there. And Michael Schellenberger put a congressional report for it. It's a 68 page report. You can read it. You just go right to here. You check that out. But it's a testimony to Congress. And it shows in great detail, you know, basically an effort by the U.S. government intelligence and security agencies, the health agencies to wage basically an information warfare against the American people. It's that serious. And so behind the scenes, you have this censorship industrial complex that has been erected in the shadows, but really out front now, we're seeing legislation, not just in the U.S., but around the world that is trying to curb speech in a lot of different ways.

So here in the U.S., it's a lot of different flavors. We have the Restrict Act. This is going through legislation right now, going through the voting process. It's not yet law, but you go to Reason Magazine, and they have a great write-up on this. If you want to get to know about it, says the Restrict Act would restrict a lot more than TikTok. So this came about because TikTok, it's a Chinese-based app, and people are worried about the, you know, security risk that poses with data mining, surveillance, spying. But the problem is they wrap that kind of social, popular problem into this gigantic bill. And the bill has such broad, open-ended language that it's very concerning because it allows, it talks about foreign, basically foreign adversaries.

And that's where the bill is aimed at. But the problem is it allows the Secretary of Commerce to designate new foreign adversaries. Well, I mean, in a world where we get what appear to be fake foreign advocacy, I mean, adversaries like Russian disinformation being thrown about by politicians that proved to not have been Russian disinformation. But here, again, it's just like, well, if we can label it, then we can wipe it out. And honestly, you know, this is how this works, right? TikTok's scary. say like China we know they're mining our information their TikToks different than ours certainly

you know you want a government to step in and protect us but it just seems like they let these things you know get you know way down the line then they try to scare the heck out of us through the propagandized media which is crumbling down around them and then say our solution is we're taking control of the internet for you no no no no no well hold on a second that's not what we were asking you to do We didn't ask you to take over our lives and become some authoritarian dictator. We just said, why don't you make some rules for these companies so that they can't take all of our data, but that's just not how this works. They use this as a way to just grab even more power and control over our lives. And they don't want anonymity.

So this bill has the potential to criminalize the use of VPNs as the virtual private networks that people use to disguise their identities online. And it also has implications for cryptocurrency and Bitcoin transactions because those are anonymous as well. So it's so broad that all of this is baked in there. And you know, the concern was TikTok. And they could have just said, look, if there's sensitive government devices, you're not allowed to have TikTok on that. That could have been a bill. And they otherwise would have left people alone to make their own choices. But that's not what's in here.

So it's this broad sweeping thing. Americans really need to pay attention to this because it has bipartisan support, really make your voice heard. and if they're going to pass this, at least they can whittle this down to what it was supposed to be originally. But we've also over in the European Union, we've reported on this over the last, you know, year is the European, the EU Digital Services Act. That's, that's in effect now. It's affecting all the big tech companies across the EU and their services there. That, just an overview, is basically putting the onus on the big tech companies to police their speech on their platforms with huge, huge fines, like 6% of their year. revenue fines to do this. So it obviously is going to lead to an over-censorship because they don't

want to get these fines. But one of the things that just happened has really been in the headlines here is a hate speech law that's going through legislation in Ireland. This is one of the headlines here. It says why we should be concerned about new hate crime legislation. And let's take a look at this thing. Let's get down to the nitty-gritty. This is called the incitement of violence or hatred and hate offenses, is Bill 2022. So they're using the word hate, hate crime. So we're seeing, again, a different angle here. Now it's not so much big tech.

It's actually the language itself, the context of the language itself. And in the bill text, it says this. Now, it talks about a person. If a person basically prepares or possesses material that is likely to incite violence or hatred against a person or a group of persons on account of their protected characteristics. So it's up for interpretation, obviously. protected characteristics. Way too much. It is likely to incite based on who, based on some paranoid person, some overly sensitive person. I mean, where does this stop? If I, you know,

discuss the issue we did this last week on the high wire saying, look, you know, should we, you know, have this entire transgender and gender reassignment surgeries and things like that, the people that are pushing this for some people, that's not what we want our children to be educated on. Does that mean I've called out the educators? Does that mean I'm inciting violent? I mean, who's to determine? Well, you definitely pointed out a group and made people angry at them. Right.

It ends all news as we know it, really. It could. Absolutely, it could, especially on certain topics. And the topics, again, it's open-ended, it is broad. We're talking the gender conversation, sex, religion, disability. Race and all of it. Yeah, absolutely. So we'll go back into the bill here.

and here's where it gets beyond scary. It says, the person shall be presumed until the contrary is proved to have been in possession of the material in contravention of subsection one. So that means they are presumed to have that material to use it for hate and to incite violence unless they can prove they didn't. So guilty until proven innocent. Written in black and white. Wow.

The exact opposite. Yeah. Wow. Amazing. Yes. So this is where it gets to your point about reporting, you know, really just stifling, if not killing, reporting, and news. So it talks about how it's communicated.

A person shall be regarded as communicating material to the public or a section of the public if the person displays, publishes, distributes, or disseminates material, shows or plays the material. So forget about showing videos. Makes the material available in any other way, including through the use of an information system to the public or the section of the public. An information system is anything, Dell. That's Twitter, that's Facebook. That's your phone.

You send a message, you send a meme, a video to a group of people, like a telegram group. That's an information system. And so what are the penalties here? Not a couple dollars fine, a couple hundred dollars here and there. We're talking 12 months to five years imprisonment. Criminal fines. I mean, beyond hefty here. And so Ireland has something to say about this.

In Ireland, they have something called a consultation. So they allow a consultation of the public to get a voice on this. This is kind of like when the FD. has that 30-day window for the public to make comments on a new regulation or a new law. So this is what recently happened. Headline, hate speech consultation received mostly negative responses. It says a total of 73% of respondents to the government's consultation. 2,627 individuals total did not support the government's plan to ban hate speech.

Many of them argued that the only way that speech should be, you know, restricted or whatever is through credible threats. incitement of violence through credible threats and there's already laws against that in ireland in the us in the u.s in the uk we already have laws in the books on that so going beyond that for kind of an interpretation of this is it is really dangerous and that's where we bring back in michael schellenberger he's been watching this he sees this and he wrote this article just recently a couple days ago world on cusp of woke totalitarianism has government government's act to end freedom of speech and he has this warning There has been no moment similar to this one in the roughly 30 years of widespread public internet usage in Western societies.

Officials have introduced these policies mostly in the dead of night with little publicity or outcry. There has been a virtual blackout of what's happening by mainstream news media corporations with many appearing to support the new laws. As shown with the Twitter files, the censorship industrial complex is as much about discrediting accurate facts, true narratives, and content creators who threaten its power while boosting the ones. that do. And that is where we're at right now. Just like the AI conversation, the free speech conversation is just as important right now. We're sitting right in the middle of it. Absolutely, really, really important stuff and decides whether the high wire exists in the future and the work that we do. You know, if facts that speak out against an idea, you know, hurt your feelings or, I mean, when you think about what our founding fathers said,

Like we're supposed to be able to say whatever we want about our government officials and the policies that they have. Ter them, you know, like discuss our problems with them. If we lose that, it's over. It's just absolutely over. We now live in, you know, communist China, Soviet Union, however you want to look at it. And the whole world is looking at this now. And in a world of laws, if those laws pass, we wouldn't be able to do what we're about to do right now. So there's been two reactions from public.

public health officials that have quarterback the pandemic response the last two or three years. Those two responses are you either apologize to the public, say we screwed up, say we can do better, let's look at what we did wrong and let's do better next time. Or you gaslight the public and say, we never did that, Trudeau, Fauci. And now we have a new addition to that Hall of Shame, Randy Weingarten. She is the head of the president. I'm sorry, she's the president of Americans Federation of Teachers. And she was. was in Congress recently. Take a listen. All right. I'm sorry, Congressman Raskin. I'm just, we spent every day from February on trying to get schools open. We knew that remote education was

not a substitute for opening schools, but we also knew that people had to be safe. And maybe it's because I live in New York City. I live near a hospital. Every other minute there was a ambulance. There was terror. Our members were terrified. Others were terrified. And what we were simply looking for was clear scientific guidance. And when we couldn't get it, we did it ourselves. And we worked with doctors and we worked at others. That's an Academy Award performance. It's amazing. Wow. So passionate and sensitive. Just open your eyes next. time. So Wine Garden actually bravely appeared, I guess, on CNN. And there was a great interaction. After that hearing, she appeared. Check out this interaction. All right. We don't know each other,

but speaking on behalf of millions of American parents, I have four at home. I had to teach them at home. My wife had to teach them at home. I am stunned at what you have said this week about your claiming to have wanted to reopen schools. I think most, you'll, you'll find that most parents believe you were the tip of the spear of school closures. There are numerous statements you made over the summer of 20, scaring people to death about the possibility of opening schools. And I hear no remorse whatsoever about the generational damage that's been done to these kids. I have two kids with learning differences. Do you know how hard it is for them to learn at home and not in a classroom that was designed for them? And for you to sit in front of Congress

in the American people and say, oh, I wanted to open them the whole time. I am shocked. I'm stunned. I'm stunned. And there are millions of parents who feel the exact same way. It's exactly he took the words out of my mouth

when I saw this. Like, you have got to be kidding me. And, you know, it's, and again, you know, we've had videos running on these people. The fact that they think they can get away with this. Absolutely. And you noticed Weingarten in the Congress hearing said ever since February. So in February, the CDC releases new guidelines in February

of 2021 to reopen the schools. So she claims ever since February, before February, forget about it. But let's listen to some of the clips of her after that CDC announcement. Let's see how hard she tried to get those schools open. Take a listen. Certainly in light of these CDC guidelines, everyone is asking when and how are we getting our students, our children, back into those classrooms full time. Full time is going to depend upon what's going on with physical distancing and what's going on with the variance. Why not trust the CDC's guidance?

We have to figure out in all these schools right now, which have been set up for six feet physical distancing, how this is going to work. Yesterday's announcement by the CDC is really great news. Why not tomorrow? I mean, literally, why not tomorrow? If 90% of your teachers are vaccinated,

if we know what we know now, Why not just go back to school in person tomorrow? Well, frankly, 97% of the schools are open for in-person learning. Not five days a week. About 60% of them are. It's amazing when you see, you know, the news actually doing its job, and you realize there, you know, the only mistake that she made with the teachers' union is she's not buying enough commercial time on mainstream media to have them fight for her point. And by the way, they're all parents saying, I cannot spend another day trying to teach my child. math. It's not what I'm designed to do. I'm trying to run a network here. You know what I mean?

So why can't I get my kids back to school, especially if the CDC just said it's time. And after we'd given billions of dollars to the school system in order to open up, and she just sat on that and just kept playing this cat and mouse game, just outrageous. I mean, again, one of those people that you just want to just sort of walk out on the plank right now. right or walk out of the room when she's talking and let's not forget you know her back and forth is one thing but let's go back to may 2021 new york post internal emails showed something very interesting during that school opening of the cdc this was a headline back then powerful teachers union that's hers influenced cdc on school reopenings email show and it says in there in at least two instances language

suggestions offered by the union were adopted nearly verbatim into the final text of the cdc document With the CDC preparing to write that schools could provide in-person instruction regardless of community spread of the virus, Trottener, this is Kelly Trotner, senior director of health issues at AFT, argued for the inclusion of a line, reading, quote, in the event of high community transmission results from a new variant of SARS-CoV2, a new update of these guidelines may be necessary. That language appeared on page 22 of the final CDC guidelines. So you see Weingarten go out and say, well, we can. got to see what happens with these variants. Oh my gosh, the Omicron variance super dangerous.

So she was leveraging the literally the language that the AFT had added into the CDC guidance that the CDC allowed, which is a whole another story. But let's go back to some white. And when we look back at it, we cover this a lot, but just talk about the tail wagging, the dog, the fact that the scientific body was answering to the teachers union and how the science would be handled across this country and in our schools. It's just embarrassing for everybody involved at the very least. Right, right. You know, a highly lobbied group of taking money from, you know, people you don't want to be writing these opening guidelines. So let's look at some of the, just a quick, some of the headlines of Wyngardner throughout the last couple of years. Here's her Twitter post. Actually,

we can hear directly from her words herself. She says, huge. Judge strikes down Florida's school reopening order says unconstitutional to require brick and mortar classes this month. requires safe school reopenings. Thank you. Then here's another one. Teachers Union considers strike over school reopenings. Here's one before that CDC announcement, 2021. Reckless, callous, cruel teachers chief denounces Trump plan to reopen schools. And the teachers did strike. And here's the headline, teachers unions test goodwill with strike threats, hardball negotiations. But, you know, what were the other countries doing? Because during one of those interviews at CNN, she said, you know, Europe, you know, Europe was doing a lot better than us, and they opened up and they had all the

mitigation techniques and it was fine. Well, remember Carl Latterbach? He was the health minister for Germany. And we covered him because he admitted on air that the vaccines, the COVID vaccines did hurt people. And they admitted that Germany didn't really have a robust system for finding vaccine injury. Those were some bombshell headlines a couple months ago. But now he's saying this about school closures, headline, we went too far with COVID restrictions, says, Germans pro-lockdown minister. He says some COVID restrictions were idiocy and lengthy school closures were an unnecessary mistake. Germany's lockdown chief has admitted.

So there we have admissions atoning to what you did. And then let's not forget gaslighting. That's right. And let's not forget Sweden that never closed the schools. Unfortunately, we're dealing with gaslighting officials here trying to do this to the public. In Sweden, they're seeing headlines like this. Sweden children suffering no learning, during pandemic. New study shows. No schools close. Can't have learning loss. No schools closed.

So congratulations Sweden. Once again, you did you did amazing job and the science shows it. Hopefully in the US here we'll get some people that are actually going to talk to the talk to the American people with honesty. I mean it's amazing. If you just take all those stories together, Jeffrey, you have AI that's wanting to sort of censor, you know, like sort of control everything. You have the technology sides wanting to censor, assuming as We've watched boss, we've watched algorithms come in. So now AI will be in control of our speech, who is censored in, who is censored out, whose voices get heard. And then you see sort of this inability to stand in the truth when it finally catches up to you.

This is a perfect storm. We're in the middle of it. And it's so important the work you're doing to sort of help us, you know, wake up the world. Really, really, really important times. Great reporting. These are pivotal times for American people and throughout the world. And I hope everyone is not only paying attention, but getting activated as well. Whatever that means in your lives and your communities, it's time.

Yeah, by the way, it's for the people, by the people. That's this government. If you don't like AI, if you want this pause, I would recommend that you call your senator, your assembly members, both the federal and state levels, and let them know. I mean, just call and say, hey, are you aware? Elon Musk and the leading godfather of AI is warning us all of very. just disastrous outcomes. I think we should listen to them. I want to know why my representatives aren't. That's all you have to do. It actually works. You know, you start flooding their phones and sending

emails. They listen. They work for you. All right. Great, Jeffrey. Great reporting. I'll look forward to, you know, seeing you next week. Sounds good. All right. Well, for those of you out there, we've been talking about, you know, you've been sponsoring and donating and making all this possible. Well, it happened. This week, May 1st, we launched the informant, our online news, magazine. In many ways, we take the highlights of what's shared here on the high wire. Some of you call it like drinking from a fire hose. Well, it's laid out for those. Many of you like to read this stuff and have friends that would prefer to read it than to see it in a video or sit down. The informant is going to be so great for all of those things. This is really a gift. We're seeing as a gift right now to all of you that support our work.

So it's going to those of you that anybody that donates. Doesn't matter how much you donate. If you are donating to us, a recurring donor, which we keep asking me a part of, then you get this online news magazine. And by the way, we're getting rave reviews of everybody that received it this week, and we want to hire new writers and expand there. All that's made possible when you decide to sponsor and support the work that we do. Again, I just want to thank everyone out there that's made this possible. You'll have a lot of fun with it. And if you want to be getting the newest and latest and breaking stories in this magazine, all you have to do is become a recurring donor at the High Wire or at the informed consent action network. Okay, from the very beginning, and a lot of

you now are watching the High Wire based on what you just went through with COVID. And your friends said, hey, you've got to check out the High Wire. I'm not seeing anyone else talk about these things, like showing us what the FDA actually wrote in the emergency use authorization and revelations and, you know, Pfizer data, were you aware of this, or the VSAFE data? Like, this show I'm watching is even, you know, suing and winning lawsuits. And I want to thank all of you that helps spread the word, but there's many of you out there that have heard, is it there something about vaccines and autism and issues like that? Well, we have covered that, but that's really where I started. I left CBS and my work on the doctor's television show to sort of dive into an investigation, which ended up being this documentary

Vaxed about a whistleblower inside the CDC that gave us 10,000 documents proving they were committing scientific fraud. When it come to discussions of causes and the prevalence of autism, well, they keep telling us, well, it's not really growing. We're just reporting it better. That is becoming a really old story. And it is starting to sound really horrifying because it keeps accelerating. It keeps going like this.

And you've been watching it just recently in the news. concerning findings about autism uptick in the prevalence of autism spectrum disorder in the U.S. New data from the CDC that shows more children than ever are being diagnosed with autism. Growing number of children are being diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder in the United States. The new study from the American Academy of Pediatrics has found that the rates of diagnosed autism and children has tripled over the past 16 years. What the CDC now finding in terms of how common. an autism diagnosis is in 2020, one in 36 children overall.

How has that changed in just two years from 2018? It was one in 44. The CDC is reporting as well that an estimated 5.5 million of American adults have been diagnosed with autism. Nearly 3% of 8-year-olds were diagnosed in 2020 compared to 2.3% in 2021. More than 1% of girls overall have autism,

predominantly it's been found in boys and certain minority groups reporting more cases of the disorder than ever before. Diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder dramatically increased in black, Hispanic, and Asian communities. Those rates are up by 30%. Where are we on the question of what's causing autism? The reality is we just don't know yet. We don't know what causes autism. That's so scary that after all this time and as prevalent is it seems to be that we still don't know. That's an amazing line.

and it's so scary that as long as we've been discussing this and as fast as this is skyrocketing, we just don't know. Kind of makes you think that maybe they just don't want to know. But look, this conversation today, we've had a lot of conversations about the cause of autism, but the conversation that we're about to have is really forget what's causing it. We know it's happening. It's being reported everywhere.

What is the cost to our society? What is going to be the damage done? What will happen to our health care system? This is the study that we're going to be discussing here. Autism tsunami, the impact of rising prevalence on the societal cost of autism in the United States. It's my honor and pleasure to be joined by two of the authors right now, Mark Blacksul and Cindy Neveson. And of course, Toby Rogers, who is also the third author on this, who we've had on this show. Couldn't make it today, but I want to thank you for joining me.

It's great to be here, though. So Mark, you know, you and I go way back. I'll be honest, when I had first watched Vaxed in the form that was in before I got involved, I remember saying to Andy Wakefield, you know, Andy, this sounds like a lot like your, just a lot of your voice in perspective, and we've got this whistleblower, are there other professionals and people out there that have similar thoughts on this? Oh, yeah, and one of the first interviews I ever did was you. I was turned on to you and you, you know, had some brilliant statements that ended up being in VAC,

so, and I've stood on stages with you. You've been deep in this for a very long time, but what about this study? What made you decide you want to sort of tackle this study in particular? Well, I'm a dad, first and foremost, and I have a 27-year-old daughter with autism, and I worry what her future will be. And I'm afraid for our country and for all the families that have children with autism. We've seen an epidemic. Before 1930, the rate of autism in the world was effectively zero. Then for a long time, it was really rare, one in 10,000. Around 1990, it started ticking up, and ever since then, it's gone vertical. The rates are still going up, and we don't know when they will plateau. And what that means is there's a generation of kids that are now entering

adulthood, and they're going to live a long life, and at some point their parents will die, and what What will happen to them? Who's going to take care of them? How will they be housed? What will they do? What services will be? And we keep flooding the world with new children with autism so that what used to be a really rare phenomenon now becomes 5, 10, 15, 20 million Americans.

We're not prepared for that. And I'm afraid about that. And so what we wanted to do in this paper was shine a spotlight on the societal impact of the costs. of this epidemic. Cindy, this is a space. You know, you are environmental. I'll let you do a lot of, you know, studies and reports on the environment, how it's affecting

human beings. So this is similar to that. But you've also done a lot of work in the autism, the two of you've written papers together. What was unique about what you were approaching in this particular study versus other studies that you've been looking at prevalence, but what was it here that you were really trying to isolate? Well, I mean, the difference between our study on the cost of autism and previous studies is that we took actual data of autism time trends. We projected it into the future and convolve that with population projections.

So we, rather than assuming that autism has always been 1% going back to older people today, we looked at the actual rates. And so we're able to do a more realistic age stratified projection. of how things would evolve into the future. Let's take a look at just, if we look at this study again, here's the headline on at Autism Tsunami, the impact of rising prevalence on the societal cost of autism in the United States. We just pulled this excerpt that just sort of gives you a sense of what this paper is about. Of course, you'll all get to read this if you're signed up to our newsletter. But our model projects a total population-wide autism spectrum disorder cost in the U.S. of 5.54 trillion

dollars per year by 2060 accounting for inflation with potential savings of 1.9 trillion per year with pursuit of ASD prevention so it could be lowered we believe these projections work against the temptation to normalize recent trends in autism spectrum disorder prevalence rather they reinforce the need to address rising autism prevalence as more than just an urgent public health concern but also as a policy question with respect to where resources will come from and and how to mitigate and prevent the worst case scenarios. $5.5 trillion per year.

Now, I know there's a lot of people that just can't think out as far as 2016, but it's literally around the corner. Many people live right now watching this will be living at that time. And I just think about we're having so many discussions right now about our financial. We're about to, you know, go into a debt ceiling crisis once again. and five trillion is a massive number, the interest alone on that. And to think that that is just for one group of people suffering with one specific health issue, I want to say, I mean, is that, how did you come to that number?

Like, how do we get there? It's simple arithmetic. You take, Cindy, you know, we develop these population projections. You do the rate, the data on the rates today. You project that forward. We made conservative assumptions about projecting it both. You take those rates, you multiply them by population projections for the United States, and say how many people are going to have autism?

And then you do, we did, and there's a literature on the cost of autism by individual at different stages in the lifespan. So we have it for children, for working age people. Well, tell me about that for a second. And then you multiply. Right. And that's where you get $5.5 trillion by 2016. When we think of cost, I mean, this is something that, you know, as I've interviewed, you know, hundreds of families dealing with, you know, autism and other, you know, neurological disorders

and things. But for a parent, and there's many, if we look at just that sort of news montage, we're talking, you know, one in 44, one in 36, it keeps going higher and higher. When we look at just boys, we are starting to crest, you know, under one in 20 boys being diagnosed, which means there are people watching the show that just heard about, that just heard that their child got this diagnosis. What are the types of costs to a family? I mean, you've done fairly well in life, but it's expensive.

There are parents that get just devastated by this. Well, the costs vary through the lifespan. When the children are young, the biggest costs are special education, which cripples something like 25, 30% of school budgets are on special education. It's education. It's lost parental. productivity. The parents, it's tough to take care of a child with autism. Often the mother is removed from the workforce. It takes the toll on the father's career. So lost parental productivity

is a huge number and medical costs. Cost is divorced too. And we look at that too. I mean, so many times, it's just so difficult that the family is tough on the fabric of the family. Yeah. And then over time, you know, the person with autism ages. And when they are an adult in the working age, period of life, it's lost productivity of the individual. So what they would have made is what they would have made in the workforce. Employment rates among, even mild adults with autism are very low. Most of these people are dependent on support, so they have to have something to do during the day. You have programming, you have residential issues, particularly when their parents are gone,

and medical costs as well. So those costs, and autistic, the autistic, the autistic, the lifespan of people with autism, there are higher death rates, usually from accidental death, drowning or things like that, but basically these are people that live a long and full life. And so someone's going to, you know, they're going to be elderly at some point and how do we deal with elderly people with autism? All of that, those are the costs. Which I mean, when I mean, we'll get into it in a minute, but when I think about this when people and this argument that the prevalence has always been the same, it's always one percent, as you said. Every studies just say, well, it's always been.

here I've always said where are the you know giant temples and and and housing for the elderly that are suffering from autism should be there be cities of them at this point at the prevalence we're talking about if everyone in you know 36 humans on this planet has had autism the whole time there you know it's just it's a ridiculous statement but you know I want to ask you because on you know when I made Vax there's obviously differing opinions on how you you know, stratify or figure out these numbers. Remember Stephanie Sennep was this MIT scientist. We brought on on, on, you know, when we're looking in Vax, and I said there, I'll never forget asking the question. It's like, well, certainly it's going to plateau at certain points. And whether it's

vaccines or glyphosate, she's really big on these other environmental issues, I mean, there's only so much that we're increasing those things at some point it plateaus. And she made this dramatic statement, no, I think it's going to get worse and predicted, you know, one and two children by, you know, I think it's 20, 32, or somewhere in there. But is that sort of, do you come to those numbers by sort of using this, that it's just, if we just map it out, it goes catastrophic? We're much more conservative than Stephanie.

Okay. You can see the curve. You showed the curve. It's an S curve. We flatten it out. We have not seen a plateau yet. We still see those dark dots. We're looking at that right now.

Okay, so what are we looking at on this? Straight up, straight up. And that supports Stephanie's argument. But our model basically, we're looking at that. we flattened it out. We did an S curve. At some point, those increases have to stop. And that's how we built our scenario.

And so go ahead. What about looking? You have a red line there. What is that red line represent? Yeah, I just wanted to point out that the symbols on the graph are actual data from the California. So the little black dots that we see going up. That is what we know for. That is what is the reality.

That's the reality. Plotting the points that we do know about this is what's happened with this. Again, that is why our model was different because we took the actual age stratified structure of the rate of autism and we're projecting it. We're still kind of in the exponential growth phase, but our choice was to model it as a growth that does level off at a certain level with sort of a logistic function. And we had different scenarios. The red line is the base case where we did, you know, it's a logistic curve.

Yeah. It's a logistic. It's definitely argues for exponential increase and that's what it looks like today. But we said no, it's a logistic curve. There's a lower line, the blue line, which is our low case. And that was a conservative estimate that allowed for the fact that when we changed over from the DSM4 to DSM-5, that maybe California became more lenient on who they allowed into their program. So the DSM, what is the DSM when we talk about that?

diagnostic and statistical manual. Okay. It's where the diagnostic criteria for autism reside. Okay, so this is where they sort of lay out all the different types of additions like one, two, three, four, and five. All right. We're on number five. But I wanted to, I wanted to mention that we already, I have, we,

Mark and I have recent data from San Diego, California, DDS. This study's done on data out of California. Is that, that's the basis. That was the basis. We already know that that low, that low case is not realistic. and that we're making assumptions that the California data represent only half or less of the total autism cases and that there's a whole other additional set of milder cases. And with the low curve, we were allowing for the fact, well, that maybe the California data includes everything now.

And that's why the numbers are increasing so sharply. But we have evidence now that that is not true. So this is what's amazing about this is you're not just being incredibly dramatic. you are literally, you put in a line that says it could be here, even though the actual numbers are skyrocketing above this, but let's just show the whole spectrum of what could possibly happen. And even the blue line is horrifying. It's really high.

The financial, you know. It flattens out at 3%, which is within 36, you know, roughly. Yeah. So because we take each of these numbers, this is for severe autism. Yeah. These cases, that's the California data. There's a scalar effect to include the mildness. cases and we multiply by two basically.

You got a couple of the graphs. Let's take a look at from this paper. Right here, we look at how you broke it down basically in the data that is coming in. When that goes into graph form, this is really shocking to look at this next bar graph. So this is how this trend has changed. We look at 2016 even, which isn't really that long ago. But what is the blue? Blue is the children.

The blue is the children. The children, 0 to 21. And so then obviously as those children grow up, then they enter this red group, which ends up being the adults, and then the green ends up being elderly. And as you're pointing out here, we really don't even have any elderly yet. Some, very few. But very few. Like they don't really make...

And we don't even have many adults. Right. And this is one thing in the little montage in the beginning. Part of the talking point is, oh, we have five and a half million adults with autism. No, we don't. Show them to us. Where are they? Where are they housed?

Where are they? What services are being provided? There is no resource being directed to elderly people or adults with autism. In 2016, more than half the population will be adults, and most of their parents will be gone. So that's the crisis. That's the impact of the tsunami. And if we actually put our fingers in our ears and say it's not happening, we won't even begin to address that issue. Let's talk about it for a second.

Let me just bring out, because you've written some great books, folks. If you haven't, you know, this one especially is such an easy read. It makes perfect sense. If you have someone that's telling you, look, it's just because they're diagnosing it better. This book, Denial, gets into that argument and beats the hell out of it very easily. And I use the reference there, which is essentially when we look at all the great diagnosticians of the world, you know, throughout time, Tourette's and all this, and you write about this.

They went into Insanus Islands. They didn't have a lot they could do, but let's go to the Insane Asylum and write up everything we can see. We've been looking at people with negative mental health outcomes for centuries. It's not as though we don't. Just started at this.

Just started at this. Leo Connor, when he wrote about autism, said, I have seen for the first time a group of children whose condition is so different from anyone we've ever seen before that I'm going to write about him. Yeah, and he has, what was it, 11 kids? 11 kids, they were all born in the 1930s.

And again, you know, and then what's amazing is these people that are fascinated by it, scientists and psychologists fly from around the world in to see these very interesting, this new thing that's popped up in these 11 kids. Leo Conner wrote a textbook in 1935. It was the Dr. Spock book of his generation called Child Psychiatry, the first textbook on child psychiatry in 1930, nothing about autism in there. Other diseases are disorders of childhood, but nothing. about autism and then in 1938 he saw his first kid that the parents took their child with

with who is clearly autistic all the way up from forest mississippi to meet the great leo connor and johns hopkins university and there we had the origin of autism so that's that brings me to really sort of the fate of this paper you got it peer reviewed you got it published um and now recently we have an email that says uh let's just take a look this email is what you received um that it's being retracted. This is, I forget who the person is that wrote this. Jennifer Hadley. Jennifer Hadley sent you this later. Basically, we are retracting your paper and you've of course written back, rebutted this, you and Toby, the three of you got together and really laid out your perspective on this. But what's their argument? What is it, you know, why did they

tell you they're retracting this paper? No good reason, to be honest. Use of unrepresentative data. Yes. Whatever that means. It's very vague. We've been fighting this for close to two years now. Okay. Because some concerns got raised.

And we addressed every single concern, but it's been a very opaque and untransparent process. We don't know. Somebody complained. The club, I think, kind of coalesced. They sort of said, how did you let this paper get out? We don't know, we're speculating, but we've gotten very scant evidence. The journal first said we're going to retract it. We want to peer review it again, and they put us...

How did it go through peer review the first time? First time. You know, peer review, you've got people, they read it, they look at your data, this is what they do, they approved it, right? Yeah, normal peer review process. The journal, Cindy and I both dealt with Jad previously. published numerous things there, and they've been very good to work with. And the first time we went through peer review, it sailed through peer review. It's actually built on some of our prior work.

But one reviewer said simply excellent. Two words. And the other said, you guys are understating your contribution to the field. So it, and it sailed through. What's amazing about this is because I know, look, I've watched this. I've watched scientists and people like yourself. You have learned to just, let me just avoid the touchy part of this conversation. Let's at least speak to the part that's affecting all of our lives.

And it just seems like such an innocuous study, just to get it out. Like this is just, let's just talk numbers. Because you're all admitting at least that this thing, the numbers are higher and higher and going up. Can we talk cost? So it would have seemed, and that's why unlike other studies that might have looked at cause, this isn't a cause. Studies just saying numbers. That's right.

But ultimately, it's this prevalence idea. It's what we're talking about, that they want to still live in this dream world of its all just been happening all this time, all the way back to Egypt. We've got, you know, entire temples filled with autistic adults. We just didn't know about it. I mean, it makes absolutely no sense. I mean, that was the criticism that they, two of the five reasons they're using to justify their attraction are that prevalence hasn't actually changed, and we haven't considered that the diagnostic criteria have changed. It means literally the same argument keeps coming around.

Mark, I mean, just to give it a sense of this, you've been at this for quite some time all the way back, you know, the congressional hearing in 2012. 2012, folks, this is Mark Blackswell speaking in the congressional committee. We grabbed an excerpt from this because it really comes down to the big problem. And we've talked about it even earlier in this show. what happens when your government is forcing a product on everybody and maybe it has a problem, you think that there may be some intervening or, you know, controlling censorship of the overall discussion. Look how well this ages. I'm sure Mark is proud of this moment. I know we are. This was 2012, congressional hearing. For a long time, we had low rates in America, about one in 10,000. Then around 1990s, something new and terrible happened to a generation of children.

Autism rates didn't just rise, they multiplied. This escalation covered both full syndrome autism and the broader autism spectrum, including Asperger's. Some people claim this isn't real, that we're just doing better diagnosing. That's just wrong. If you read the old literature, the old surveys, they looked for everybody, and they couldn't find people. They didn't miss 99% of the children with autism. It's not hard to find a child with autism. It's obvious when they're autistic.

The notion that we're just doing better diagnosing, even in the CDC studies, they're using the same methodology. So when you see those numbers rising, that's not because the methods are changing, it's because there are more cases. In the midst of this crisis, the federal agency is responsible for the health of our children have failed in their duty.

CDC's negligence has led the way. Many of us believe CDC has actively covered up evidence surrounding autism's environmental causes. NIH, meanwhile, has received the lion's share of funding, money they've wasted on status quo research, and gene studies. It's absurd to focus on genetic research in this crisis. There's no such thing as a genetic epidemic. I'll just say that in the financial world, the result of pressure to manipulate numbers to provide the answers that bosses want has a name. It's called securities

fraud. In medicine, there are similar pressures. They're called special interest politics and even peer review. And what CDC has given us is the medical equivalent of securities fraud, all to avoid the inconvenient reality of the autism epidemic. I mean, it's... Looked a lot younger back then. It's aged you a little bit, hasn't. Me too, honestly. And I haven't been at it as long as you, and you obviously are directly involved.

You have a daughter that is in this space. But to come all this way and still be up against this same censorship in control, honestly, what keeps you going in this? I mean, you're, I, first of all, it's just right. It's the right thing to do. It's a big problem. Who's going to do it? Who's going to take it on?

And secondly, probably more importantly, I worry about my daughter, you know, who's going to take care of her. One thing that struck me in that is the people that went after us on the censorship front, the retraction impetus, came from a blog post written by the, the it's called this spectrum news it's sponsored by the Simon's foundation which is one of the biggest funders of genetic research in in the country in the world so the ones are getting funded to all the studies on proving that autism is genetic which they have been trying to do forever funded by you know Simonson

Jim Simons and then also I know that autism speaks which is the biggest you know most funded autism nonprofit And they have stipulated they will never look at vaccines. They're in this genetic space. And so all this funding is going there. And can we replay? I want to replay just the last little line in this news part that I think really says it all. Can we replay that really quickly?

Where are we on the question of what's causing autism? The reality is we just don't know yet. We don't know what causes autism. That's so scary that after all this time and as prevalent as it seems to be that we still don't know. I mean, this is where we're at. They literally, and based on Vax with the movie I made, the last study ever funded looking at any connection between the vaccines and autism. The last study ever funded by the United States of America was finished in 2004.

It's a fraudulent, you know, study, how they handled it was fraudulent. That's what the movie is all about. And so when I hear doctors say, well, we've looked at that. You have it. In fact, it's the only thing that's been taken off the table and everything else you put in there has never fit, hasn't gotten us anywhere. And so we're literally like driving, racing down a highway with blindfolds on purpose. And now you try to do a study saying, well, while we're racing, it's going to cost us a fortune.

And now they'll even censor that. I want to bring up, I interviewed Neil deGrasse Tyson just a few weeks ago. And he made a statement about the scientific method. I said the scientific method is dying right before our eyes. But to get into that, let's just say what he said. The scientific method is do whatever it takes to not be fooled that something is true that is not, or that something is not true that is. Did I say that right? I get what you say.

Do whatever it takes. Does it mean get a chart recorder, get a friend to verify? Unearth it in any way possible. Any way possible. Yes. Okay, I don't care what it is. Yep. You don't want to be fooled into thinking something is true that isn't or something is not true that is.

I mean, yeah, go ahead. So the censorship impetus came from, part of the argument was undeclared non-financial conflicts of interest. It was ad hominine, ad hominum, mostly to me. Okay. For my ideological commitments, that was the thing. I don't have an ideological commitment to a cause. All we care about is if those numbers are doing what they are reported to do, is what can we do to stop it?

That was the thing they beat us up about, is our prevention scenario, so that was some hidden agenda. I don't have a dog in the fight about what the environmental cause is, but we need to find it out, and we need to beat up the people that say, oh, we just don't know. Of course we need to know. Why don't we want to find out? Why do we want 3%, 6%, 10% of American children to be disabled by autism, to leave the workforce, to be uncared for in their old age?

Of course we need to know. Of course we need to stop it. That's not an ideological commitment. That's just a search for the truth. And that's what, and shout out to Toby Rogers, who looked on. line in JAD because they have some line in there about undeclared non-financial conflict of interest. Toby went through every one of the open access articles. There was not a single one of them that declared, you know, that used, where anyone in there, an author, declared a non-financial

conflict of interest. You know, they just made that up to take down an inconvenient article. And I want to just talk about, because this is something we talk a lot about, and I need people to really understand this. The entire process of a medical journal or a science journal, and the scientific method and how it's supposed to be handled there is you have put forward a hypothesis, if you will, using the data as we know it, arguably projecting into different ways that can project out even lower lines than where we're actually at right now. You cover the gamut, which seems to be as safe as you could possibly be. You don't just get dramatic on the highest number we could possibly find.

So there should be no issue there. But the scientific method, the way this is supposed to work is my understanding is it used to be that any dissenting voice, doesn't matter if they're, you know, all fully funded to be looking for the genetic, you know, reason behind autism. They've never been able to achieve it, but that's who wants to dissent. They write their dissent, and that is supposed to be attached to your paper, stuck there, like, tattooed on you for life, saying, this has been our argument against this theory, right? And then you get to rebut it and say, well, here's our science, and here's where it's at. And that gets tagged on. And this begins this foundational principle of the science around this conversation.

And this is what is so terrifying, is that they are not sticking the scientific method in the process of peer review and this interaction in science. They're erasing it, which means 10 years from now, 20 years from now, when we try to look back at what we knew and what we didn't know and find our bearings and where we're at, certainly someone will say, well, you know, Cindy and Mark were accurate or they missed it by this much or here's why they got it wrong and the descending voice was right or the, you know, or it was wrong. Write a letter to the editor. Right, right. Publish it. Put your name on it. Right. Not a single person who influenced Springer and Jad's decision is named.

We don't know who they are. Right. Cowards. Cowards. Yeah, and I should tell a story of Mark. Mark was involved in a very similar situation in 2002 with this very same journal where somebody had published a paper that falsely said that autism was increasing because of diagnostic substitution. for intellectual disability.

Mark wrote a letter to the journal, laid out his facts for everyone to review that was published along with the original article and then the original authors were forced to concede that he was right. To their credit. To their credit. They did.

They went and looked at the data again and discovered that our, it was a group of us, but we were right. It all played out in public space where everyone could review the data. So for people to understand this, so that I understand it just, and I don't want to get in the weeds there,

but basically there's this argument that Well, they used to be called retarded. Now they're just being called out to they're doing a better job of saying what it was. Is that the basic argument? Diagnostic substitution is one of the excuses. Better diagnosing breaks down to diagnostic oversight, diagnostic substitution, diagnostic broadening. There are only three things. Oversight is, oh gosh, they were always here when we missed them.

Substitution is we put them in a different category. And that was the argument there. And intellectual disability has been pretty steady. through time. Autism rates have gone up. There are issues about co-occurrence, but the argument, and Cindy and I have written on this together, is that the arguments for diagnostic substitution don't work. But my point was just that was sort of, that was the right process, yeah, the right process. The due process way to handle it, to give, to let everyone view the data and judge for themselves and let the scientific discussion play out. In our case, we're just shut down by

anonymous critics. I think to, you know, our founding fathers, one of the brilliant things that happened is John Adams and Thomas Jefferson basically make disagreement with each other, that we have had massive disagreements on decisions that have been made in this country where it's going to lead, but we should start writing letters back and forth to each other as, you know, the historical reference so that people will know what we were arguing about and be able to define, you know, the foundation of how we move forward, where we went right, where we went wrong. That is exactly how these studies are supposed to be done. And I can't tell you almost everyone that sits in these seats that I bring in here that have done brilliant work, we are watching censorship of science

and this interaction at a level that is unprecedented. I mean, it was bad years ago when you were before the Congress. I think we're at now. It's way worse. It's way worse. They're basically locking down. And the autism problem is too big to handle. I don't think anybody can get their mines around $5 trillion a year. And they just want to ignore it and hope that they'll be gone and not in charge of dealing with it when the problems really get critical. And they will become critical. Well, whether or not, you know, I know they haven't quite retracted this yet, you're sort

of getting out ahead of it. It looks like that's the course. We will make sure that everyone in our audience has this because to me it's valuable, it is clear, you know, what you are arguing here. It's, it's, there's really no argument. and it's something we have to look at. Well, if there is, show us. Show us what we did wrong.

Right. Yeah. We asked for the same thing when Vax got kicked out of Tribeca. If there's, they said, well, there's some doctors and science disagree, what do they disagree about? And we should have the right to defend this film and where our information came from. And then if we don't stand up, fine, but we're not gonna tell you.

And that's where we live. I just hope that we don't lose the commitment from people like you that are fighting this constantly uphill battle, dragging every boat anchor you can imagine behind you, the odds stacked against you, but literally what you are showing us in this study is, you may think this isn't a part of your life, but you're going to be paying for it, and where do you think that money is going to come from? Yeah, well, you guys are doing great work too, so give the ICANN.

All right, and by the way, everyone, this is a super easy, great book, and this is a fascinating book, just sort of based on a ride through Mercury in all the places that it was in society and sort of looking at stories that maybe you would see differently if you realize how close in contact some of those historical figures were to Mercury. Mercury was the standard of care for centuries. It's outrageous. And they voiced a lot of people and it's crazy to think about what happened. Well, I want to thank you for taking the time to come in and join us today.

Really great work and we'll keep celebrating it. Keep up the great work. I appreciate that, though. You know, there's a lot that we can be frustrated about. This autism conversation has just had one horror and nightmare scenario after another, things being shut down, but there's been a massive, really breakthrough, something that is so game-changing. It's brought tears to our eyes multiple times on this show, and that is this new concept of communication spelling to communicate.

And once again, this is one of those things that is really finally. working for people and the establishment wants to shut it down, censor it and say it's not working, but it's winning festivals. This is a documentary. We're going to just show you the trailer because tomorrow we're going to be doing a live interactive screening on the high wire for everyone that wants to watch it and get to ask some questions of those in the center of it. But let's just take a look at for those of you may be hearing about it for the first time. This is Spellers. There's never any doubt in my mind when someone walks in.

to my room that they can and will spell for me, that they can and do want to learn. I'm gonna teach you how to do something new, totally know, which may feel a little bit weird at first. Autism can take you as a parent to a really dark place. The future is really, really scary. We had no real reliable form of communication, but we had to just basically guess for 20 years.

I lost hope that I would ever be enough for them. Are all the parents fools? Are we trying to live visual thinking? No. I mean, what's anybody going to gain by this? There should be research, academic literature, focused strictly, specifically on this area to help promote it. We should have all been presuming competence in our kids,

and we should have been encouraging them, telling them we knew that they were in there. It's time to shift that whole paradigm. There are 31 million non-speakers with autism in the world are locked in a silent cage, my life will be dedicated to relieving them from suffering in silence and to giving them voices to choose their own way. Should schools choose to really work with the students' strong suit, autistics will become tomorrow's innovators and leaders.

The average autistic child can read into math by age four, but can't show it? Imagine the difference we can make in the world of taught how we learn. Spellers won the Arizona, or the Phoenix Film Festival, I believe it was. We are going to have really a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity tomorrow live at 4 p.m. Central Time. We will be screening Spellers on the Highwire right here at the Highwire. We will have an in-studio audience. Several of the stars of this incredible story will be here able to answer questions. We'll be taking your questions throughout the screening online.

We'll be taking questions from our live studio audience. But folks, I don't know if you ever saw the movie Awakening's, you know, this, this movie Robert De Niro back in the day about, you know, these people that sort of came out of this sort of catatonic state, this is nothing short of that miracle. Just so many countless families that I have worked directly with over the years that thought that their child was mentally handicapped on some level, maybe had a second or third degree comprehension ability. now through this new form of communication, they are able to finally speak and let us know they've always been in there, and their intelligence level is not only perhaps normal, but in many cases appears to be off the charts. You know, we've talked to Jamie Hanley, who is in a calculus class, just, I think, two years now, since finally being able to speak for the first time.

Cade is another one. You know, they're going to university. They're getting involved in politics. This is just really, truly, one of the great living miracles that you can witness before your eyes. And this documentary captures that beautifully. So tomorrow, live, 4 p.m. Central, that means 2 o'clock on the West Coast and 5 o'clock on the East Coast. We will be live screening spellers and then having a live Q&A. to host that Q&A afterwards, and we'll keep it on our website.

For those of you that aren't able to catch it right at that time, we will keep it on our website throughout the weekend. But this is just all our way to try and help promote. They want screenings all across this country and around the world. If you know anybody that has a child that's dealing with autism, especially in this sort of nonverbal space, this is a story that you should really just grab them and say, hey, come over and watch this movie with me. You literally could change somebody's life.

That's what we try to do here at the Highwire. We are trying to make our lives better for all of us, for everybody. We're not allowing some group of people to be overlooked. Great, the vaccine program works for every, you know, for most of us. So who cares about those that are being injured all throughout this discussion today, you know, whether it's, you know, Act 19 and those trying to sort of talk about the injuries that have happened from the COVID vaccine. We're trying to stop the censorship that is going to affect your life.

The AI is going to destroy the world as we know it. Nobody else is bringing you this information the way we are. We're not afraid. And yes, I have no problem standing up for a study, a paper that's about to be retracted to say, well, Dell presented, you know, retracted study. That's right. I do because I no longer trust these systems. that are retracting and censoring.

And until you finally do figure out a way to arrest me and drag me off for telling you the truth, we will be here. And I promise you, we'll be here tomorrow with Spellers, and we will be here next week on the high wire.