Well, why don't we bring our illustrious panel up on stage here?
And I will announce them actually maybe as they're even coming up.
So to save us time, please go, please sit where you would like.
We're very, this is the freedom movement after all.
And so we've got Chris Martenson here.
You've seen him up here a million times.
Let's sit down while we do this introduction.
We've got Chris Martenson, of course,
with Peak Prosperities, the founder and CEO,
but he's also been an independent IMA board member
since 2021.
And now he's also the senior fellow in toxicology.
We've also got, we've got Jeffrey Tucker on this end.
And Jeffrey Tucker of course was our keynote speaker the other night.
He's the founder of the Brownstone Institute.
Has anyone heard of the Brownstone Institute here?
And I'm very proud to say he's also the senior economics columnist
for the Epoch Times.
He writes five times a week and apparently a lot
of people write him about the columns, from what I hear.
We also have, over here, we have Werner Mendelhoff, okay?
He is the founder of, co-founder of Freedom Council and the owner
of the Mendelhoff Law Firm, and he's been politically active all his
life, licensed in the 1990s, and he won cases exposing block grant fraud
and defending charter amendments,
and this is how he realized his calling in life.
And finally, we have Stephanie Lucretio.
And Stephanie Lucretio is the Advocacy and Outreach Manager
for Children's Health Defense, CHD.
She's also the founder of Wellness Warriors Revolution,
a movement of warriors on a mission to raise healthy,
happy families in a natural way.
So, let's start here.
We have had an amazing, okay, have you liked the conference?
Okay, really, have you liked the conference?
I learned an unbelievable amount.
I mean, I'm still trying to do just everything.
So here we are in one of our, in our final panel, and we want to talk
about the state of the freedom movement.
Okay? Five years ago, we had a large number of subscribers
to the epoch times that were into, I didn't realize it was health freedom
that were into alternative approaches to health.
This is our, this was our longest standing health section.
What I didn't know was that there was this huge health movement
that existed in America.
All sorts of people that had been, you know,
the term is mugged by reality, okay.
And suddenly you were on the other side
and all these other people were looking at you going, hey,
that's kind of weird.
What are you all about, right?
And you were like, you don't understand.
The world is not what you think.
Right? And then COVID comes along.
And, you know, the world economy is ruptured.
Society is thrown into chaos.
And suddenly, you know, a lot of us are going, what's happening?
This is Jeffrey, right, over here sitting beside me.
What is happening?
Society as we know it is over.
But these health freedom people are going, wait a second.
This is our opportunity to be heard.
This is what I realized, okay?
This has been five years in the making.
So let's talk about the state of the health of the freedom movement.
And the biggest question I have, and we've heard so much today
and so much unbelievable opportunity, the developments at HHS,
the developments with Edison, the greater openness
to alternative views despite huge, you know, pressure,
but kind of the orthodox system, so to speak.
What I want to start with, and this is a question to every panelist,
how durable is this really?
How fragile is it?
That's one side, and how durable is it?
And let's start off with Chris at the end, and we'll come this way.
Well, big question.
It kind of depends on what we mean by it.
To me, so the business I'm in, it looks like I traffic
in a lot of data, and I do.
But I don't because really data doesn't change people's minds
and that's what we're after here is to change people's minds
which means really after changing people's actions.
And so the data is the first step of that
but there's a belief system in the way
and then there's this, the new action.
So when you ask about where is the health freedom movement,
we're at the beginning
of probably the greatest mass awakening in history by numbers.
But maybe also by relative distance that we're going to have to go
because so many of our old belief systems just got shredded.
Economic belief systems, health belief systems, legal belief systems,
it's all been absolutely shredded and people find that disorienting
and here's why we talk about a window being how durable it is,
is because it's really uncomfortable
to have your belief systems opened up and challenged.
And so the typical way, because we're humans, we can't be on point
on a Humvee in Fallujah 24 hours a day for a year.
There's only so long we have capacity to wake
up to this new reality before we just start shutting it back
down again, and that's normal.
And so that's why I'm a little worried that if we don't,
when that's open you have to rush in and have a better belief system
for people to use so that they can coalesce around that.
So I'm worried that the durability is we have,
we're up against very powerful agents
who understand this process exceedingly well.
And their job is to run out the clock, keep us confused,
keep us fighting over lots of things that don't really matter
as we burn our emotional energy on that
so that they can shut this window
down again before we have a chance to get to new actions.
And so Stephanie, I know that something that's very important
to you is this idea of creating unity among these very
disparate people.
I mean, we have everything, you know, from very left to,
you know, very right, and all in one group
with this health freedom, I guess, idea, concept, vision.
But how do we?
I think that the important thing is when you're looking
at the very diverse groups that we're trying
to coalesce, whether it be our political affiliations,
our backgrounds, our professions, or where we stand
on the spectrum of all the industries
that we're fighting against.
I mean, I know at CHD, big tech, big pharma, big ad, big food,
There are issues with each of these industries
and the playbook is exactly the same.
I think the biggest problem is everyone thinks
that their issue is the most important issue
and their strategy is the winning strategy.
So the division within our movement and how people tend to group off
and are not showing up for one another,
we don't have to agree on everything.
But what we can do is unite around the things that we agree upon,
which is that we are all here because we want
to build a more beautiful world for our children.
We want to build a world where we have parental choice,
where we have the ability to, you know, be doctors and work
from the oath as opposed to the mounting pressure
of what the mainstream narrative is,
where we have the ability to speak freely.
And through our words and actions, I really feel, you know,
I always say advocacy is a ladder.
And it's like you're climbing this ladder of information
and knowledge and you meet people where they are,
but it's sort of like you extend your hand down and say, okay,
I see you.
I see that you're interested.
I see that we're having this conversation.
Let me give you my hand and from a place of non-judgment, not criticism,
give you something that will seed you along to take
that next step up that ladder.
Because the truth of the matter is they want us divided.
They want us separated.
If we were to unify around our why, which is building
that more beautiful world and we were to put our swords
down towards one another over what political party you follow
or, you know, where are you stands in the movement?
Did you get six boosters?
Did you get zero boosters?
You know, it doesn't matter.
None of that matters.
If we were to put all of that aside
and to really start bringing people into that why,
the movement has to be something that's magnetic.
The movement has to be something that people want to join.
People don't want to join people that are criticizing and judging
and disorganized and in disarray and in fighting.
That is not inspiring.
So, I think that the big thing for us is to really think
about what can we do to disseminate this and not disseminate
but like to dissipate this feeling that you have
to be quote an anti-vaxxer to be part of this conversation.
You don't.
I don't care how many vaccines someone got.
I don't care what they believed five years ago.
I mean, I've watched this journey over the last 10 years
of so many people that have been impacted losing religious
exemptions, having their kids kicked out of school,
having to wear masks, you know, to send their children to school,
watching their loved ones die behind plate glass
and not being able to be there.
Those are the things of humanity, and humanity is what we need
to go to right now.
That is the key to be able to win and to be able to continue
to take advantage of this unique opportunity.
This window will close mighty fast.
If we don't get it together, we don't link arms
across all the different movements that make up that maha,
make America healthy.
Again, there are so many issues that we need to address
in these next 18 months.
And I think that the key is to focus on the why, to be accepting,
to be nonjudgmental, and to make people really want to be
in this room with all of us.
Because we are pretty amazing.
I'm just saying.
Thank you.
So, Werner, in this sort of, you know, question of durability,
there's mounting, you know, challenges
to constitutional precedents and so forth
that obviously you're involved in and I see many others.
I got to tell you, listen, and you guys know I have a very,
very optimistic view of where we are.
I think the durability is without question.
I'll tell you why in a minute.
I started out in the 90s as a government
and corporate accountability lawyer, essentially.
And it seemed to me that we were losing slowly.
It was eroding away.
The Constitution was eroding away.
COVID woke everybody up.
Next thing I know, Katherine Hewig and I are calling every lawyer
we can to get them added to Freedom Council.
And who stood up in that?
It was the small firms, the solos.
The big firms are absent from the playing field except
on the other side defending the hospitals,
defending the governments, defending all the mandates.
You know, that's a bunch of crap with those guys.
None of them stepped up.
Not a single large firm stepped up in this entire country.
We're now up to about 250.
I wish we were up to about 250,000 lawyers.
You know, maybe a quarter of us should have stood up
because of the constitutional insult that occurred
to us over the last five years.
But that's what we are doing right now.
That's what our effort is.
If you want to ground this movement, you grounded in the Constitution.
You may want to argue about the First Amendment,
the Second Amendment, the Fourth Amendment, the Seventh Amendment.
Let's get jury trials back for crying out loud.
Let's make sure we get to go to jury if we have over $20 an injury, right?
Just think about the amendments grounded in the Constitution.
We are a new civil rights movement.
It's different than any other civil rights movement out there.
And I'll tell you how it's different, right?
When we were fighting slavery, women's suffrage,
gay rights, Vietnam War, whatever it was,
we were adding rights.
We were respecting individuals.
We were expanding freedom.
What happened under COVID?
Oh, they're taking freedom away, right and left,
as fast as they can.
So we are reclaiming the Constitution.
We are reclaiming our birthright.
That's what we're about.
And why is it durable?
I'll tell you why it's durable.
Millions, millions of people lost their jobs over this.
Millions of them.
And we heard from them every single day, all day long.
All 250 attorneys in Freedom Counsel did.
I just, there's a bunch of Freedom Counselors here.
You know, I'm really thankful for you guys to be here
because this is what we need to do is have these conversations
and I see them going on everywhere among the attorneys
and the doctors and it's great.
But I want to tell you about the millions
of people that lost their job.
No one has reported this, I think, Jeffrey, unless you did.
Or you, maybe, Jan.
There's always a basket that wins an election, right?
If you're missing any part of that basket, you lose, okay?
So I'm not putting this all on those millions,
But those millions put Donald Trump over the top
and got Biden out of office.
Those millions of people stood up.
They stood up in their workplace.
They stood up for their patients.
They stood up for their students.
And I got to tell you a loss.
We've won a lot of cases.
I don't, I want to, we've won 15 appellate cases
in the last year throughout Freedom Council and the movement.
Fifteen beautiful cases restoring the Constitution.
But I lost a case.
state actor doctrine case, and I represented 200 nurses
that were fired from Children's Hospital.
And I was so upset at losing it because I thought it was so clear.
And then they called me and they said, Warner, we want to come
and we want to have a dinner and, you know, talk about the case.
And I mean, I'm actually getting choked up a little bit
because I was like, oh my God, I just, you know,
I'm so upset at myself.
I'm so upset about the judges and the case.
And I go there, they had dragged their friends, their family.
The movement had grown.
These 200 nurses that showed up and stood
up had taught everybody they could about what was going on.
Not just about the mandate.
We're talking now, we're talking economy.
We're talking sovereignty.
We're talking money.
All these issues that you're talking about
and you're talking about in your writings, they're reading them.
They're educated and they want to get their country back.
And I couldn't believe it.
It was one of the most incredible experiences I ever had.
Okay. Well, if I may comment, and we'll go to Jeffrey in a moment,
you did mention the big firms.
There's a huge, huge legal effort right now to stop all sorts
of things, right, that have been initiated by this administration,
for example, but not just there.
So this is, and the question, that's a lot of power.
People see, you know, we heard the term unlimited money, right?
Unlimited money.
Right.
We're going against Pfizer with a handful of attorneys, for example.
But we're going against Rochester Regional Healthcare
with a handful of attorneys for Deb Conrad on the VAERS case,
which is a priority under Kennedy.
Who's coming in on those cases?
The biggest firms in the world are coming in.
Greenberg Trowring sent their key TAM False Claims Act section
to Buffalo for the argument, for example.
Guess what?
I got an hour and a half and they got an hour and a half.
When you're in court before a judge, the field is level
if you've done your business, if you've done your job,
if you've done your studying, if you've got your argument ready.
And we were ready, I'm going to predict something,
we're going to win this motion to dismiss hearing
that we had.
I think you're going to hear about it.
I hope you guys will report about it in about four to six weeks.
Okay.
Thank you.
Jeffrey, you're looking at all this from a very, from the,
from the perspective of someone who has a whole series of fellows
that are studying all of these things from very different angles.
What are the Brownstone Fellows thinking?
But each of them is doing something different.
Well, the thing I realized in 2000, well, after lockdowns hit,
is that we didn't really have a sanctuary for the people,
for intellectuals in particular, who are being canceled by the system.
And that's why Brownstone was started, was to provide this.
And at every age, there are emergencies
in which our best minds are perished and displaced.
We saw it, you know, after the fall of Rome,
we saw it in the interwar period in Europe.
But there's always been institutions that have rescued them
to preserve their ideas and give them voice and lead us
to the next stage of history.
In 2020, there wasn't really anything like that.
So Browstow was started solely really
with the purpose primarily providing that sanctuary.
And our first fellows were IV professors that were perished
for refusing the vaccine.
Tenured professors, prestige intellectuals were being thrown
out of the ivy leaves, you know.
And since then, we've taken on journalists and scientists
and dissident scholars from really all over the world.
I'm so thrilled to have provided that.
And I guess for me, I really believe in the power of ideas.
It's actually more powerful than money
and more powerful than bombs.
It's like Warner said.
One of the things that the ruling class has always
underestimated is the intelligence of the average person.
Actually.
The condescension from these people.
Just this morning I watched an interview
with Fauci from yesterday, and he's going on about, well,
you know, there's a really bad infectious disease coming,
and it's going to kill a lot of people, and it's going to pass
from animals to humans through fancy little ways and,
and we're not going to be prepared for it,
but it's going to be terrible.
And, you know, I'm listening to this guy thinking, you know,
nobody believes this guy anymore.
He's not, there is a time when people thought, well,
there must be an expert.
Well, the expert was wrong.
And he's still saying the same things.
And in this interview, he once again said, well, you know,
we're going to have to have, I swear to you, he said this.
He said, we're going to have to have social, I can't believe it.
We're going to have social distancing and plexiglass and closures
and masking when you're walking and you can take them off
and you're sitting and pass through.
And this guy, they're shameless.
But I wish I could just dismiss him as a harmless has-been crank,
but unfortunately his views are backed by a lot of money,
like trillions, you know, over many years,
embedded in the World Health Organization
and embedded all the pandemic planning of all governments
in the world, and actually still in this country.
You know, you think about it, we have some cool cats in charge now
and some high-profile positions,
but there's been no change in the laws.
What happened to us in 2020 can happen to us again.
And your litigation strategies are brilliant
and I'm so glad you're focusing on it.
At the same time, in the end, the only thing that's really going
to protect us is going to be public, the public mind,
public opinion, it's the court of public opinion.
The court of public opinion, it's the court.
The thing that's impressed me the most, I almost can't believe it,
is that over the last five years,
confidence in legacy media has plummeted.
Like people just don't believe it anymore, you know?
And that's brilliant.
I mean, think what that takes.
And by the way, I was one of those guys who used
to believe the New York Times is a credible thing.
I read it, you know, stuff.
I didn't want to believe the world was that broken,
that everybody's lying to you all the time.
And I gradually came to realize that that's a hard thing
to come to terms with, and it was painful for me.
But millions now see it.
Tens of millions around the world, hundreds of millions,
billions of people see that we're being lied to
by all the institutions we used to trust.
Governments, media, technology companies, mainstream medicine,
you know, world health organizations and so on.
Like, people are, there's mass incredulity is broken out.
And I am, I think it's implausible and brilliant,
And it's an essential step to break
down these power monopolies that have ruined our lives.
And I think that incredulity and not believing the mainstream
and then finding other sources of truth,
as they say doing your own research,
is ultimately going to save us.
I want to talk about this, you know, again, I want to stick
up to this durability fragility theme just for a moment longer.
You know, there's, for example, in this administration,
there's a number of policy issues that people are
on very different sides of.
For example, Middle East policy, for example, would be example,
or the more recent one, tariffs.
People have very strong ideas about that, right?
And likely there will be other issues, right?
And how does the health freedom movement survive?
And maybe some around health, by the way, right?
And I think we're even might be seeing that coming up.
How does the health freedom movement,
which is unarguably what, you know,
basically brought this administration
to power ultimately, survive those challenges?
Please jump in with your thought.
Go ahead, Chris.
Well, I mean, I want to echo what you were saying,
which is you absolutely can't have a durable movement that's
against stuff.
You have to clearly declare what you're for.
People will fight like tooth and nail for something.
If I said, hey, I need you to all crawl through a October rainstorm
in the mud on your knees, you'd be like, no, I'm not doing that.
Oh, hey, you're on a mudder team, and your team's counting on you,
and people do this all day long.
So that vision is really important.
So it's incumbent on us.
We have to coalesce.
We have to come together, put the wood behind one arrow,
state clearly what we're for, and it's very, this is timeless.
It always comes back in style.
It's been out of style.
It has to be rooted in truth, right?
So there's some truths that just came out.
We just, like, we all kind of got, went to sleep for a while, right?
And there were only a few cranks on the edges going, hey,
have you noticed it was one in 10,000 kids with autism,
now it's one in 32?
That's a horrifying statistic.
If you drop somebody from 1962 into that data,
they would know instantly that something was terribly wrong.
But we kind of went along with it.
But you know what?
Harming your children should be an ineluctable truth
that you're against that in a society.
So one of the things we have to be brave
about is our society got sick.
It went off the right, lost the plot.
We did some things we shouldn't have done.
We got to correct that.
So I think the durability is rooted in saying what we believe
to be true, saying it, it's always most difficult to say it
when it's hardest, right?
And we have to state what we're for.
And I think it's as simple and as hard as that.
You know, I want to say something, I think what you're alluding
to is the tendency for factionalism and, you know, breaking and division.
And we're going to be dealing with this all the time.
And just when things seem to settle down a little bit,
October 7th happens.
Just when things seem to settle down from that, we have, you know,
the trade blow up that just happened the other day.
And it does divide people.
One of the things that I really aspire to do with Brownstone is
to break down partisan barriers.
people who long consider themselves on the left
and people who long consider themselves on the right,
nonetheless agreed that we need freedom and human rights, okay?
So that was an exciting opportunity for us.
So I deliberately structured Brownstone to be,
I guess you would say, sort of nonpartisan.
I want people from different traditions together
and different disciplines together.
The whole world before COVID was structured into these, you know,
of academia is broken down into all these little disciplines
and politics was very hugely partisan.
And to me, one of the great things
about the MAGA, MAHA, DOJ coalition is that it brought a lot
of different kinds of people together into something new.
Right? But keeping that together, I think,
requires that we continue to talk to each other
and that we approach these conversations
with a certain humility, which is to say, maybe I have something
to learn from you, all right?
And that's a big step for intellectuals to take.
I mean, that's kind of hard, but I force it to happen.
I think, well, you, I don't think you've been to one
of our retreats, we've otherwise been to these retreats.
I have these regular retreats where I bring 45 people into a room
with no audience, short talks followed by conversation
and over two days.
And people who have been there have always said the same thing.
This is brilliant.
I've learned so much from everybody in this room.
I've expanded my mind.
You know, I've come in with completely new ideas.
But one of the preconditions for being invited is the willingness
to listen and to engage and to share.
We need that more.
That's our secret weapon really, humility, you know, a longing
for truth, a willingness to have conversations with others
and not be so quick to think that just because you see things
from a different point of view that I'm right and you're wrong,
right, we need that sort of civilized engagement
with each other to keep ourselves together as a community.
Well, and really part of it to follow up on
that is the common projects that we have to proceed with.
So I know you doctors need us because we're hearing from you
in Freedom Council, we have many of us working with doctors.
We need you badly.
We need you badly in the expertise to deal with the,
you know, understanding the billing, the fraud,
understanding what's happening to the patients.
These common projects are
where we literally set aside our differences politically
and otherwise maybe and we work on the project to take care
of the problem that's in front of us.
So the more common projects that we recognize and work together
with each other on, the better.
I am a First Amendment absolutist, okay?
I don't think there's a way to recover
from an emergency without getting to the truth.
And the only way you get through the truth is dialogue
and conversation.
So you've got to have that.
It tests your ideas.
So, you know, we've all been siloed into our little groups.
We need to break that down, have our common projects,
and have these conversations.
I think asking questions is really important.
You know, everybody has an answer and I feel like half the time
when you're talking to somebody, especially when it comes
to a politically charged topic, the person's not even listening
because they're already formulating their response
to prove you wrong.
And if we can't have a conversation
where we're open to listening,
because that's what this movement has been.
It has been a decade long journey of opening minds
and changing hearts.
And we've been through some of the darkest times that I can COVID, watching children
be kicked out of school.
I mean, these are really awful things and they should be binding agents.
They should be the ability for us to have these conversations and ask about your experience.
And I think one of the best things that we can do when we're in these tense conversations
is to go back to the why and to share with people why whatever it is that you feel so
passionately and strongly about means so much to you.
Because when you can break down, coming from the perspective of trying to prove wrong and
shoot facts at people, it disarms them.
And then they're more open to hearing whatever it is you have to say.
And I love asking questions.
We were at a Prego Expo a couple of weeks ago, and we were definitely out of the normal
health freedom ra-ra group that we're normally in that come over to the table and love children's
health defense and our work.
And I watched the different reactions of people coming over, seeing the publications and the
flyers, and some would even walk over to us, like they would just literally make an about
face and go to the next table.
And then there were some people that would come over and immediately were very triggered
by the information on the table.
And one of the things that I found to be really, really successful, especially for these moms
that are carrying babies, is to say to them, you know, did you know that a couple of hours
after your baby is born, if you don't specify otherwise,
that baby is going to be given a hepatitis B vaccine.
And many of them pause and just listen to me, what do you mean?
I'm like, it's a standard operating procedure in most hospitals.
You have to specifically say that you do not want this.
Why does it make any sense for a baby unless the mother has hepatitis
to get this vaccine that is for a sexually transmitted blood-borne illness?
and I could see wheels turning, and they would grab the flyer
and they would walk away.
And I just kept it very basic and very gentle
because these people are triggered.
You know, there is a certain cognitive dissonance
that is happening right now.
It's almost like a small child throwing a tantrum, la, la, la, la.
I don't want to hear what you have to say because when you think
about from the perception of some of these people, doctors,
and I'm sure that there's people in this room
that have either administered the COVID vaccine injection
because they were told it was safe and effective
and it was going to help or they took it
because they were told it was safe and effective or coerced,
losing their job, all the things
that were happening during those times.
If we come at those people with judgment
and criticism pointing fingers and we're right,
we're on the right side of things, that is not inspiring.
That is not going to get people to come to the table
and have this conversation.
So I think asking questions, being curious,
and really being empathetic and compassionate,
that people have gone through horrible, horrible things,
losing family members, losing their jobs, losing their homes.
If we can come from compassion and empathy, I think that that is the key
for this movement to not only grow but to continue to thrive
and we will be an unstoppable rebel force.
I have no question about it.
Yeah, yeah, and I'm glad you brought it up that way
because when I was trying to figure out how to talk to people
who were really pro-vax, ultimately I fell down a rabbit hole
that was very fruitful,
which was learning anti-cult deprogramming techniques.
And I'm not kidding, it sounds humorous, but it's not.
And the way you deprogram someone from the cult is you don't put them
in a van and take them out to the desert
and beat them until they're ready to believe your way.
You have to ask them the unanswerable question and it has
to rattle around in their own brain, right?
So you might say, oh, hey, Pete,
I see you joined this interesting group where you took a vow
of poverty and chastity.
Why is the guru driving off with your girlfriend in a Rolls Royce?
Just let it hang.
And because it'll rattle.
It's brilliant.
You have to do that.
to ask those questions, like why am I opting out from a VaxB?
Why am I not opting in?
What is the point of this, you know?
And because it is, they're living
with extraordinary cognitive dissonance right now,
because they have an incoherent landscape of belief systems,
and it's ripe to be dismantled.
I think that we need to say a special word of congratulations
to CHD in particular.
It's interesting to me to hear you talk.
We all have a kind of a frame of references.
You keep saying for 10 years, for 10 years.
I tell you, 10 years ago,
I had no clue what was actually brewing or why this happened.
It's true I've been writing about pandemic planning
and the possibility of lockdowns, but the relationship of that
to the pharmaceutical industry and the underlying corruptions
that the CSG has been focusing on was,
I was completely blind to it.
So thank God you guys have been working as long as you have.
Thank God for you.
Yes.
You know, this is another thing, too.
CHD has been smeared for all those years,
and you never let it stop you.
You just kept pushing and pushing and pushing
because you knew you were right.
And that is a beautiful inspiration.
And it was funny when I started Brownstone, I said,
well, it's very good you're doing Brownstone,
but the most important thing is that you have nothing
to do with CHD?
She is. Well, that didn't last long, right?
We quickly linked up, and I'm so proud to be working with you.
And really, I'm grateful for the donors of CHD.
I'm grateful to the sacrifices that you've made all those years.
And now we have IMA.
Epoch Times, my God, you know, where would we be without you?
you know, and throughout this whole thing.
It was all.
There was only one paper willing to talk
about the underlying truths of this thing, you know, at the time.
And now I'm so proud.
I mean, it's, you know, I have this dream job
of writing a daily article for this glorious venue
that has always been so kind to me.
And not once have you forced me to go to any meetings,
which I can't believe.
You know, what kind of job is that, you know?
But anyway, we do need to recognize the sacrifices
that so many have made for so many years past,
prior to this moment, and the sacrifices
that people are making today.
This idea of investing your time, your talents,
and your treasure in the cause of truth.
That is the only way forward.
Without that, we are doomed.
With it, we have hope.
So I'm so grateful.
For all your work.
And yours.
That deserves a hand.
Yeah.
Yeah. Let's build on this.
We've heard over the course of the weekend,
these are the numbers that I've heard.
There's 30% of people who are all in.
Right? 30% who are very difficult to reach at this point,
and about 40% which may be movable.
Let's just work.
I don't know if those are the real numbers,
but let's work with that, okay?
A number of us have been smeared quite a bit over the years
for standing up for the truth, you know, irrespective of the cost.
And this is, this kind of presents a challenge
because that makes it harder to reach that 40%
because there is this idea that Jeffrey just mentioned,
that while there's certain people
you don't really want to be associated with, right?
This is the kind of stuff that keeps me up at night.
Even the way the media work today, right,
is basically people will pay
for having their preconceived notions validated, okay?
And even if you don't want that business model,
even if you don't want that business model,
your marketing team is telling you hey we got to do what works and that's what works. Right. And so you can see there's a
whole bunch of media out there that are that are doing exactly the stuff. But meanwhile what we want to do as everybody
up here on the stage and hopefully everybody here wants to do is reach that 40 percent that are not readers yet. Right. Or
and might be thinking, hey, I don't trust these guys
because I've heard bad things or, you know,
I don't want to read anything that has a CHD associated with it
for, you know, the same reasons.
And social media, as amazing as it has been to help bring some
of us all together, at the same time silos people, right?
And the New York Times people sit in the silo.
They don't even know there's people over here talking
to each other, right?
So I feel like solving this problem is central to success,
essential to the durability of the movement,
and successful to ultimately what it really wants is
to help share this information with more and more people, right?
And COVID was massive in this, right?
It shocked, it changed a lot of people's minds and some
of them are up here on the stage even, right,
about all sorts of things.
How do we solve this problem?
And I know we're not gonna get the final answer here,
but how do we start to solve this problem?
A real world example.
So within CHD, we have our EMR coalition.
And when we first started having conversations
with our EMR coalition, our director,
who was a very good friend of mine, Miriam,
was like, do not mention the word vaccines on this call.
These people are not on our side with vaccines.
This is a singular issue.
we need to stick to the issue.
So we didn't, we very gently sort of cautiously
proceeded forward on these calls.
And there were many people in that space
that would not get on the call simply because we were CHD
and we were anti-vaccine.
And while we shared the same belief system
that EMRs are harmful, they're causing issues
with our children, we could not go there.
But the thing that I will say is that getting on these calls
and having conversations around the issue
that we agreed upon, which is that we need
to mitigate these towers just popping
up outside people's windows.
We need to get laptops out of our children's schools
and AirPods out of people's ears.
Those conversations and building on what we had in common,
it began the relationship of those folks knowing, liking,
and trusting CHD and respecting the work
that we were doing in that space.
And that became the bridge that brought them over.
So now that we're on these phone calls,
there are people who two years ago wouldn't look our way.
And we have our 704 No More initiative
where we have coalitions of probably
over 50 different organizations from all walks of life
that are linking arms with us on this issue.
And they are now open to the conversation about vaccines
and questioning because they're on the list.
They're getting the Defender.
They're watching CHDTV.
They're getting to know the, quote, vaccine moms.
And, you know, at the end of the day, the vaccine mums,
when the EMR coalitions fall short, those donors are the ones
that are helping to fund efforts that are creating those results
in the area that they feel is important.
So it is very possible.
You just have to meet people where they are and not force.
You know, this movement has taught me patience.
I was never a patient person.
I always wanted everything three days ago.
And going through these last 10 years for me specifically being
in this movement, but I know it's decades for so many,
and seeing how much patience, persistence you have to continue
to move with and, you know, getting rejected, hearing the word no,
and being able to just embrace it, it teaches you that humility,
and you keep coming back to it.
You know, there's another point that's implicit
in what you're saying here.
Now, the thing about CHD, and it's true with the Epoch Times
and so much of the work of IMA and so on, is you never want
to condescend to people, right?
You just tell the truth, even if it's complicated,
even if it's subtle, even if there's several layers
to the onion, you have to explain.
You presume that people are smart, and you're not there
to manipulate them, you're not there to market to them,
You know, to presume that people are intelligent and say things
as true as you can possibly say them.
And I think that's its own, that's compelling.
You know, over the long term, that you develop a trust sense
with your readers.
Brasso has published some of the most complicated work.
early on we published a list of like, you know, 225 studies on masks,
you know, detailed scientific studies.
And people used to tell me nobody's going to read that.
It's like, nah, you know, we're going to do it anyway.
And this is what we do.
We publish, you know, long, rather complicated articles
that's sometimes challenging.
And people say to me all the time, well, you really need
to be on TikTok.
Well, I don't know.
And here's where the organizations come together though.
You know, the work that they're doing and the work
that they're publishing provides quick references
for us in the litigation.
I use Brownstone for quick references on stuff
because I've got a morass of information I'm trying to deal
with, those articles help clarify the ideas
and help us understand what stories we're telling
in the courtroom.
This is how ideas work, right?
I mean, the beautiful thing about an idea,
and it's the key magical thing about an idea,
is that it's infinitely malleable, infinitely reproducible.
And for that reason, it's more powerful than anything physical,
any money, any bombs, any military might.
An idea is enough to change the world because it contains
within it this magical property.
You know, one of the strangest things going on in academia today,
We run a group called Repair, and part of the funding,
I was just talking to our accountant over here about this,
and she was a little puzzled.
She said, why are we paying all this money for open access?
I said, well, you can't believe it.
But the way academia works right now is they close it off.
She's like, okay, we'll publish it, but we won't let anybody see it.
But if you want people to actually read it, then you have to pay us,
and then we'll let it be open access.
So we have to pay fees for things to be open access, but my rule
on all this stuff.
It's like uncompromising.
I think we all feel this way.
Our goal is to get the information out there, right?
Not to keep it hidden, as scripture says,
hidden under a bushel or whatever, but to get the word out.
So we do everything open access.
All of our books are published in Creative Commons.
And people come to me, are you out of your mind?
I mean, you realize that somebody could take your,
the text that you're publishing and put out their own version of it
and get rich, and I always say, gosh,
I really hope that happens.
That would be glorious.
I mean, it gets it out there even more, you know.
That's wonderful.
So openness and a desire to spread the information is,
and CHG has always done this, and I am amazed it does this now,
too, is our secret weapon, you know.
That's absolutely true.
I put most of my stuff out for free.
Quick origin story.
when I started reporting on COVID-2020,
it only took about eight months
and I lost my business partner, my business broke up,
I lost my retirement fund,
and I had to start over in some respects
because I wouldn't stop talking about ivermectin.
I just said, no, I can't do that.
So we've known since the time of Cassandra,
telling the truth is not exactly a popular thing.
Everybody on this stage has taken slings and arrows
and bullets for it.
But what I know having done this through COVID
and I've been doing this 20 years on a variety of subjects.
Here's what I know.
When I come to a conference like this, there's invariably one
or two people who come up and say, you know what?
You really helped me at a critical time.
And I wouldn't know that unless I came to this conference
and they had the stones to come up and the pear to come
and tell me that, right?
But please do because it's important.
Here's the thing.
It connects to social media.
We are reaching a lot more people than we know about.
Yes? I guarantee you for every person who comes up and talks
to me in person, there's 100 who haven't had the chance or didn't.
And we have to always be aware of that.
And it's a hard thing to carry because, you know,
you need your feedback from the world.
But I know this personally.
We reach 100 times more people than we know about.
And that's the idea of getting those ideas out.
That is really powerful and important.
I'm sorry to interrupt again, but, you know, it occurs to me
that people don't understand the story of epoch times.
I'm going to tell it really quickly if you don't mind.
Is that okay?
You can't believe this, and now I'm slightly regretting going
out about Open Access.
Yes, Epoch is a paid publication, but it's the best,
I don't know, however much it costs, whatever that costs,
the best money you'll ever spend.
But here's a remarkable story.
Epoch used to be fund itself
through the third party social media.
Facebook was very friendly.
Everybody was open.
Remember the days when we thought digital media was going
to be our key to reaching everybody and fund everything. Well one day Epoch and I think it was after Colbert yet right. Right. About
that time. I don't know what you're going to say. Well when they show when you were when you were you were shut down by
Facebook. Oh no. So so that was. Yeah. I'm trying like around the same period 2019 2020 20. Yeah around. Well so the biggest
hit was advertising. We weren't. We stopped. So we were. OK. If I may. OK. At one point in our history we were the number
two advertiser on all of Facebook. You can imagine that. Right. It was up after the Trump campaign by the way. Right. And
so we were a key. We were covering the story. You heard of Russiagate. Familiar with that. Well we were just kind of
reporting normally on this insanity that the president
or the elector was a Russian agent.
And we got in big trouble and there were all these hit pieces
and we were smeared and anyway they cut off our addresses.
And the reason we were spending so much money was
because it was a great way to drive subscriptions.
You were a subscription publication before.
We had to do a rapid shift, right?
Okay? And this was a beautiful part of being a kind of a start-up mentality.
It should have been written up in every magazine.
Basically, in the period of basically four months, we switched
from advertising to subscriptions because we had to.
A lot of sleepless nights, right?
It was a lot.
It was insane.
And I can't even.
It was a miracle.
I mean, I think it was a miracle.
It was a miracle.
They tried to shut you down.
They tried to close Epoch Times.
Yeah, yeah.
And you fought back to become the fourth, am I allowed to say that?
Yeah, yeah.
The fourth largest newspaper in America.
Yeah, by paid subscribers.
Yeah. Jeffrey, that's, thank you.
But part of the reason, to be fair, and I'll just finish with this
and we'll talk a bit more about health freedom,
is the Chinese Communist Party has been trying
to destroy us for 25 years.
So we're used to someone trying to destroy us, okay?
So we had, we developed all sorts of methods
to avoid being destroyed.
We were just really shocked and frankly saddened and disillusioned
to see Americans and others doing that, being involved
in that sort of thing themselves.
Yeah. Why don't we go to the audience for a few questions?
Let's see where this takes us, okay?
This is perfect.
And this is the best question ever, okay?
Many of us here want to know how to help.
What can we do?
Yes. This is, by the way, to the question of durability,
this question is what makes the durability happen, in my opinion.
Okay? So let me start.
Please, let's do it.
All right.
Our website is freedomcouncil.org.
So go there.
If you want to serve as an expert or have ideas and want to help out
on some of these types of cases, we need you badly.
Like, you know, I'm not a doctor.
I don't deal with medical billing and EPIC and all this stuff.
I mean, our UC case, we may get the entire EPIC database
for the UC system, 260,000 employees, okay?
I think they had $43 million visits last year in their hospitals.
I need someone who can analyze that right now.
Other freedom counselors have employment cases, medical cases.
They need expertise, they need radiologists,
they need epidemiologists, they need heart and lung people,
they need, you know, and that's the fight we're in too with the doctors
that have been stripped of their board certifications
because those certifications are important for us.
That's where we want to help you because those certifications are
critical for you to serve as an expert for us in the courts.
And I actually think that whole deal with the experts should be,
you know, it needs to be addressed.
You guys, some of you are familiar
with the Daubert standard and all that.
We need to address it because just because a board comes in
and takes a license or a certification doesn't mean
that person can't serve as an expert in my mind,
but the courts don't see it that way.
So we got a real problem and we need to defend the doctors
and the nurses in their licensing issues.
Yeah.
But we, we, I'm just telling you,
we need your help in every way.
I went over them certainly earlier.
The other area that Freedom Council works in, you know,
this VAERS program is very interesting.
I talked about this case, the Deb Conrad case briefly.
Kennedy wants the VAERS program to work.
And I got to tell you, when Kennedy filed his petition
to pull the shots, you know what they said,
and the FDA said in their response?
They said, oh, we have the VAERS program.
That's what gives us the data.
They suppressed VAERS.
That's why Deb Conrad is suing.
They should fire her over that.
She's one of the most rewarded person in the country.
That case has so much follow on, I can't even tell you.
And you may know about this.
You may be able to help with this.
Every single hospital, every single provider
of the vaccine violated the law.
Not just civil law, criminal law.
It was a crime what happened in Bears.
So we have attorneys that we're working with, so everybody's aware
and can work on these cases if possible, if they want to.
But we also need the information from you and from your organization
so we can proceed with the fight.
I think everybody needs to recognize what their magic is.
That's where we're most powerful is
when we can actually do what feels very natural.
so if you're a doctor, having conversations with your patient,
telling them what informed consent is, giving them information
so they can make decisions from a place of power.
If you're a parent who has a vaccine in your child,
sharing your story from your heart,
giving people your reason why you do what you do.
If you're a fierce advocate, finding opportunities
to have conversations in random places, whether that's making
up a phone call, I do it all the time.
I'll pick up the phone and pretend that someone has called me
and I will have a whole conversation in a very public place
to incite someone to ask me.
I deserve an Academy Award, I'm just saying,
because I'm really convincing.
What about humility?
What about humility?
Yeah, with humility, yes, of course.
But it does work, and people will be like, wait, what happened?
You said someone was injured by a vaccine.
What vaccine?
And like, you have this whole conversation,
and it's a seed that's planted.
What that person will do with that information, I have no idea,
but I took an opportunity to plant a seed.
And I think that that's really what each and every one
of us should leave here present to.
Every conversation, every piece of information, every handout,
every critically thinking question that we ask,
it plants a seed.
And we don't know when that seed will bloom
or if it will ever bloom.
But at least we know that we're doing everything
that we possibly can to wake up the people who are not yet awake
and to keep people who are awake engaged and present to the power
that each and every single one of us has inside.
So when you leave here and you're in those moments
where you're having uncomfortable conversations, I want everyone
to look around, the people behind you, next to you, to the left
and to the right of you, because we're the future of this movement.
We are the leaders of this movement.
And we need to lead by example, we need to inspire people
and remind them that courage is contagious.
And when you are supposedly on the fringe,
which we're really not anymore, I mean we are a major movement
and that is progress, but we still have work to do.
So it's not the time to sit back and let Bobby or anybody in HHS
or the administration do it for us, it is the time to roll
up our sleeves and to really commit to changing hearts
and mines as a daily method of operation, rinse and repeat over
and over again until those fruits of our labor are seen
in real time, and it will happen.
Where are you?
Yeah, I want to say something about something
that you guys are doing.
They have a regularly scheduled EMR call, and that call,
we've been on there, and it is a very helpful call.
It's helped provide experts to some of the cases that we're doing.
But we need, and we have a lawyer call with Freedom Counsel.
We had for a while, we had a third Thursday call.
And we need to revive that.
And this is where you guys can really, really help.
Because we've got to revive the third Thursday call.
That was between the doctors and the lawyers.
So we get the doctors, when I shouldn't say just doctors,
all healthcare, everybody's welcome.
But we need this medical legal call so that we're talking to each other.
You guys are an early warning system for us about what's coming down the pike.
And we might be an early warning system to you based on the problems
that we're seeing in defending medical personnel.
So that call actually critically needs to be revived.
And I'm just going to announce it right now.
We were doing it on third Thursdays at, wait, what date is it?
We were doing it third Thursdays at 8 o'clock.
I hope I'm not in a plane today or whatever it is,
whatever date it is.
So, but we're going to, we need to revive that
and get our third Thursday going again.
So that, it's just that feedback, that conversation,
it's an idea generator.
And we need that, we need your ideas.
We need your ideas too.
We need to have the, you know, maybe we just invite Brownstone
into third Thursdays too.
You know, it's PM.
We did it.
We worked around the doctor's schedules.
Here what we were told is noon is not good.
Do it at the end of the day.
So we're doing it.
And then we had a little bit of a conflict as VSRF.
So we tried to do it a little bit later than VSRF.
So 8 PM is when we were doing it, Eastern Standard Time.
And that seemed to work out pretty good.
But I hate to say it, I dropped the ball a little bit.
but I promise not to do that again.
Before we get a word from, what's that?
Well, we have an x basis too, that's a different, yeah.
Before we get a word from Jeffrey and Chris to finish up,
I think I've asked, I'm getting four more minutes
because our clock is winding down here.
I wanted to share one thing which is incredibly powerful
and I frankly don't get to share about often enough,
this changing hearts and minds one by one.
It's an incredibly powerful thing and there is a precedent, okay?
So many of you are familiar from reading Epoch Times
that Falun Gong practitioners have been persecuted in China
for 25 years now in the most horrible ways.
They've been demonized and they're, and, you know,
arguably even in a genocidal way.
And there's a debate on that, okay,
but it's crimes against humanity for sure.
What have they done in response?
One by one, millions of people going
to their fellow countrymen saying,
no, we're good, decent people.
No, actually, it's the Chinese Communist Party that's the problem.
Actually, here are the realities around us, around communism,
around the glorious history of China.
And to this day, over 400 million Chinese have quit the Chinese
Communist Party as a result, okay, of this daily activism
by individual people.
So this is real.
Like this changing hearts and mind one by one, incredibly powerful.
Let's jump to our two gentlemen as our clock winds down
that we have left here.
So what can you do?
I'm gonna ask you to take care of yourself first.
So let me tell you about the other part of my role
in life very quickly with peakprosperity.com.
What did we learn from COVID?
Those who were forced to take the shots did so
because they did not have financial freedom.
They were gonna lose their job.
And that's a big forcing function.
So I spend a lot of my time helping people achieve
and understand what financial freedom is.
I look at markets.
I look at the economy, things like that.
I also believe in resilience.
You saw that in the farming piece.
Resilience works like this.
You can't say I want a resilient country.
You know, that's not where it starts.
You have to have a resilient individual
who makes a resilient household.
And a group of those become a resilient community,
which becomes a resilient state.
It's fractal and it starts at the beginning.
You cannot ask for, be part of a big resilient healthy culture
if you aren't that same thing yourself.
It's an impossible request, so don't make it.
So everything I do at peakprosperity.com is lots of, it's context.
We need context.
I think that's what we're finding right now, the big divisions.
We have different context from our fellow people out there.
So we have to A, share context so we're having the same story
with each other and sharing the same data.
But then information without action, it's just anxiety.
So everything I do is about how to ground those two pieces,
going from information to action, but it begins with you
and your own personal resilience.
So that's my ask.
Become personally resilient because we are
about to enter an economic, I might be wrong, but I'm not confused.
We're about to enter a really strong economic typhoon in its coming.
And those actually are more damaging to people's health
than almost anything else we've encountered.
All right.
Well, I have two comments.
And the first very obvious one
about your own financial commitments,
all these organizations need support.
Without that, we're all toast.
None of us were ever on the USAID payroll.
So we've been unaffected by that, you know.
So that's, you know, we're Brownstone City
on 250 fellowships that we need to offer, we can offer
because there are limits of resources.
These are canceled scholars around the world
that are desperate for help and community.
And it's been heartbreaking on one hand what we can't do
and we've had solace in what we can do.
You know, that's what emergency times are like.
You do what you can.
The second piece of this speaks to a word you said a little bit
ago, and it's courage.
You said it in passing, but we need
to think about what this means.
When the lockdowns happened, I felt very alone, and when I began
to kind of ask around how come other people aren't speaking
out, they all said the same thing, we're afraid.
Not just afraid of SARS-CoV-2, but afraid of being canceled.
Afraid of losing their income.
Afraid of being fired, shut down, jeered at, made fun of, and so on.
And it really struck me.
I thought, you know, if everybody's afraid, we're going to head straight
to the world of Anthony Fauci really quickly, you know.
And then, what I remember
with the Great Barrington Declaration happened,
when these three doctors came in, we put it together, you know,
there was a sense of excitement about what we were doing.
But I'll tell you something else.
All of us knew that we were going to pay a terrible price
for what we were about to do.
We knew it.
We knew it.
But, you know, there just comes a time when you,
you have to ask yourself this question, what am I here for?
What am I supposed to do?
Just to comply and play it safe all the time and go along.
And then what?
Then we're dead and that's the end of the story?
Or do we want to make a difference with our lives?
And if we want to make a difference, I promise you,
it's going to require you take some risks, powerful, dangerous risks
with your reputation, with your income, with your lives,
with the things you love to stand up for truth.
It is not easy.
If it were easy, more people would do it.
Almost.
And think about it.
And this affects me very powerfully.
I think about it all the time.
Almost all of academia failed.
Almost every paid, tenured, fancy-pants professor whose vocation it is
to say less truth.
Did not. They shut up.
They complied because they were scared.
They suck.
Sorry.
But some stood up and they changed the world.
That's the way it works.
Moral courage is the most powerful thing we have.
Giants fall, leviathans fall, states collapse.
The history is fundamentally changed by a handful of people
with moral courage and the willingness to say the truth
when it matters the most.
That is what you can do.
You can do that.
And that is going to change everything.
Just before we finish, okay, because we really need a huge round of applause for this, but
just before we do that, let's do, where do we find out more about everybody's organizations?
Let's start with Chris.
PeakProsperity.com is my main website.
Also Peak Financial Investing is the other business I have and Twitter X, obviously,
at Chris Martinson.
I tweet way too much.
So.
You could find us on ChildrensHealthDefense.org and I also encourage you to go to CHD.TV for
some really great programming.
Again we're at FreedomCouncil.org and on Twitter it's at Freedom underscore Council.
That's with an SEL on Twitter.
You can find my firm at Mendenhall Firm on Twitter.
Brownstone.org, and I write daily for Epoch Times
if you are not a subscriber, like today, subscribe.
And yes, theepochtimes.com for Epoch Times on X at Epoch Times
if you can spell it, at Jan Jekielek.
Okay, let's give everyone a massive hand for this panel.
Thank you.
Let's give a hand to the Independent Medical Alliance.
Independent Medical Alliance.
You
