 Hello, everyone, I'm Jim Garrison. I want to welcome you to this session of Humanity Rising as we convene our second of five programs on whistleblowers. And today, we're going to be concentrating on people who have been whistleblowers around the buildup of competition and military conflict with China. I want to welcome Jody Evans, the co-moderator of this program who is right now in China in Shanghai. So Jody, welcome to Humanity Rising. Thank you. And thank you, everyone, for joining us again on this week where we're going to talk about disinformation and the disarming of the discourse. And the disarming the discourse was actually created by Lawson, who you're going to hear from today. But it so well says what happens, that power and the warmongers, they weaponize your hearts and minds to be used for war and against your needs. And what we're doing is learning about that this week. So I just want to jump right into it because we have two very special guests. And they don't have a lot of time, so we'll jump right in. The first is Hale Hong, he's an international relations analyst, a writer and environmentalist who has been living in Beijing for a few years and has just come back to the United States and now is CodePink's China's Not Our Enemy Campaign Coordinator. And you got a big lesson on China's Not Our Enemy a few months ago. And then the other is Lawson Adams. He's a 24-year-old college student in Los Angeles. And two of his four years in the Navy were spent working at the NSA in Oahu, Hawaii as a Chinese language analyst. So you're going to get to go up close and personal with this whole idea of disarming the discourse. So I turn you over to these two amazing young men. Welcome, Hale and Lawson. Thank you. It's a pleasure to be here, Jody and Jim, and to all of humanity rising in this audience to honor. Yeah, thank you guys for having me. I think the stuff that we're going to talk about today is really important. So yeah, I'm excited to be here and honored to share with you. And we wanted to just get started by focusing on this idea of what is disarming the discourse. And as Jody was saying, they try to weaponize our hearts and our minds to embrace a pro or agenda, which does not reflect the interests of most people around the world of anyone. And it's really dangerous that it's happening, especially in the context of China, because the United States and China are two nuclear armed states. And we are in just a landscape full of pro-war bias. And it's important for us to call that out. So we wanted to essentially go over why we started this project. I just wanted to look at a few clips, just kind of gather to make a collage of news clips for your average China news story that you get in Western media. And you see that there's increasingly, almost uniformly negative portrayal of China, whether it's box news trying to claim that war is inevitable or positive that war is inevitable over Taiwan, whether it's Olympic athletes who have Chinese heritage just competing for the country of their heritage, that being reported in the context of Cold War rhetoric. You have the Wall Street Journal having an opinion piece calling China this real sick man of Asia by Walter Russell Mead. And this climate echoes a lot of what we saw during the 19th and 20th century with the yellow peril kind of hysteria, which never really died. And it's part of, I think, an overall trend of Ori Analystism, which really animates and afflicts US-born policy from really from our own hemisphere to Asia. So Lawson, why don't you kind of share your background? Because as someone who used to work for the NSA as a translator, I feel you have a really great insight into how this disinformation originates in our culture. Right. Yeah, so while I was in the Navy, I was taught Chinese for about a year and a half. And then I went to Oahu, Hawaii, where I worked at the NSA as a Chinese translator and analyst for the NSA. And yeah, I have a good idea of the environment and the culture that exists within the NSA at least. And I suspect intelligence agencies at large, and especially as they relate to China. And so I wanted to start today by kind of just referencing our classification regime. And it's based on three main designations. And that is top secret, secret, and confidential. And these three main designations are, in theory, supposed to indicate the amount of damage that will result to national security if the information that they designate is leaked. So top secret is supposed to result in exceptionally grave damage, secret and serious damage, and confidential and damage. Now these three designations might seem vague to people. And if they do, that's exactly correct. They are vague. There isn't any objective way to determine how much damage might result to national security if certain information is leaked. And so different classification authorities can be inconsistent with each other's determinations regarding that. But this is also assuming that information is always classified with the intention of protecting national security. And it isn't. In many cases, information is classified in order to hide embarrassing or even illegal conduct from being discovered. And apart from this, information is also classified by people who there are a lot of young people in the NSA who they don't have much training. They go through a little bit. But they're still kind of unclear on how to classify certain information. And so information that isn't even, it's not. But a large portion of it is over classified simply due to employees erring on the side of secrecy to protect themselves because they're unsure of what designation to use. And you don't want to leak something that might be dangerous. So you just err on the side of secrecy to save yourself. And so all of this kind of results in three different ways that information gets classified. And that is information that is genuinely secret that needs to be classified like nuclear codes. Obviously, we all probably agree that those things need to be classified. But then the two other ways is that information is classified to prevent embarrassment and to basically hide people's incompetence. Let's see, the PowerPoint went down. But information, basically this entire environment, prevents the public from being aware of information that is vital to various issues. And it has an impact on public opinion. And I think, worst of all, it creates an environment where there's virtually no accountability for people who withhold what should be public information because we simply don't know what's being filled. And then so the next part is, I call it the secrecy heuristic or the power of secrecy. There was a study that was titled the secrecy heuristic where basically it found that people value information that is classified more than just regular information. Even if the study had the same information, but for one group it was classified for the other, it was just regular information. And for the group that thought that it was classified, they tended to see it as more valuable, more important. And furthermore, they decided that the decisions that people made based on information that was classified was, I guess, more that they were just better decisions. Decisions that are based on classified information are better than those that are based on just public knowledge. And obviously, that isn't the case. In many instances, intelligence isn't correct. And so in intelligence agencies like the NSA and the CIA, they can use what are called strategic leaks. And we see strategic leaks in the media all the time. And these are just meant to influence the perceptions and opinions of Congress and the public because a monopoly over the flow of certain information is extremely useful. It's just like the monopoly of violence that states wield. Intelligence agencies can use secrecy like a brush and the media like canvas to paint any picture they want using misleading information. And so an example that I like to use is, you know, SEA, Office and the NSA or the CIA wants to procure more funding for their office. There's a simple way to do that. And all they have to do is just leak information into the media. The media doesn't. They're not critical of it. They run with it. And the information is meant to paint the picture that here's this problem that my office can solve. We don't have adequate funding or we're not devoting any funding to this problem. And here it is. And then the public goes crazy over it. Congress goes crazy over it. And the office ultimately gets more funding. And Lawson, also to interject, I remember you showed me a clip by a whistleblower. Do you want to cue that up actually? Yeah, there's actually that link below that box that isn't working should take you to it. Well, yeah, I think I queued it up here as well. And I think this kind of gets to what you're talking about. Yeah, here we go. Yeah, so you could probably skip to about a minute. But you said a minute in? Yeah. Either he goes with the information or he doesn't, and ordinarily or usually, the journalists would go with it. Because it looked like some kind of exclusive. And I would say our percentage of planning that kind of data was 70% to 80%. The correspondence we targeted were those who had terrific influence, the most respected journalists in Saigon, like Robert Chaplin of the New Yorker magazine, Kays Beach of the Los Angeles Times from time to time. And also he worked for the Chicago Daily News, Bud Merrick of US News and World Report, Malcolm Brown of the New York Times, and even Maynard Parker of Newsweek Magazine. We would go after these gentlemen. I would be directed to cultivate them, to spend time with them at the Caravell Hotel or the Continental Hotel, to socialize with them and slowly but surely to try to gain their confidence by dolloping out valid information, information which was true. And then I would drop in into a conversation the data that we wanted to get across which might not be true. One piece of data, for instance, that we managed to plan in the New Yorker magazine had to do with supposed North Vietnamese effort in 1973 to develop airfields along the border of South Vietnam. The reason we wanted to plan this information was that we were trying to persuade the US Congress that Saigon should continue to get a great deal of aid. Yeah, so that's a perfect example of what I'm talking about with strategic leaks. You see, you know, in very explicit detail lays out exactly how it's done. So yeah, it's a pretty dangerous tool that intelligence agencies wield. Exactly. Bill also shows a very close working relationship between the military industrial complex and the mass media. The other strategy that I wanted to talk about that the United States military and intelligence agencies use is basically throwing a stone and hiding their hand. The United States is notorious for provoking its official enemies and then, you know, portraying and suing responses as acts of aggression. And then I think that we can all probably think of a few instances in recent history where this has happened. So this was taken from a South China Morning Post article. In 2021, large US reconnaissance aircraft conducted around 1,200 close-in spying flights over the South China Sea. And this is the South China Sea alone while noting that US war planes traverse the East China Sea as well as the Yellow Sea. The Chinese military deploys fighter jets to intercept and deter aircraft approaching its airspace. However, intercepting jets occasionally approach reconnaissance aircraft rather closely, which US military and intelligence agencies characterize as aggressive and unprofessional intercepts. So when this happens, nobody really asks the question of, you know, why were our reconnaissance planes there? You know, why are we flying all along China's coast every single day? Would we be okay if China was flying their reconnaissance flights, you know, along the California coast every day? How would we react? You know, we would probably react in a very similar way to how China reacts to us. In an AP news article that I linked to, focus lies solely with the conduct of the Chinese pilot without any regard to the larger question of why we're flying along China's coast. In 2001, there's what's called the Hainan Island incident that occurred between US Navy EP-3 and a Chinese J-8 which resulted in the death of a Chinese pilot and the detainment of 24 EP-3 crew members as well as a tense standoff between China and the United States that lasted for 10 days. And I bring this up because this is a perfect example of the dangers of the United States flying reconnaissance aircraft every single day, multiple times a day, all along China's coast, which, you know, we did it in 2001 and it resulted in this really tense diplomatic crisis between, you know, two superpowers and we continue to do it. It hasn't stopped either, right? It hasn't stopped and it's gotten much more frequent. So the chances of such an accident occurring are a lot more likely. So for this current environment would be really dangerous. Can we play this? I wanna play this clip from CNN actually that talks about just how like commonplace this kind of publication has become. I actually can't hear it, I think it's muted. The Chinese fighter escort part of a regular routine. I'd say it's another Friday afternoon in South China Sea. Yeah, and so the main thing that I drew from that clip was that Navy pilots comment that, you know, to him, this is just another Friday afternoon in the South China Sea, but would it be another Friday afternoon, you know, on the California coast if Chinese pilots were flying multiple reconnaissance aircraft every single day, you know, on any given day, let alone every single day, it would be a huge deal and you can probably imagine the kind of crazy calls that would be in the media, maybe to shoot the plane down. You know, we certainly did that with an air balloon, but yeah, and then I have two pictures. One basic, oh, can you go back? I'm sorry. There are two pictures and one is basically a hypothetical that shows North Korean, Iranian, Chinese, Russian bases, you know, all speckled all along the Atlantic, Mexico and the Pacific coasts of the United States. And just kind of how crazy that seems to an American looking at a picture like this. We couldn't imagine all these countries surrounding the United States, but below it is a picture of military bases that are actually speckled all along the Pacific near China. And, you know, it's not crazy to see how from China's point of view, this is a serious threat to them, but we don't ever consider it that way. We think that it's our right to plant military bases all over the world. The United States, you know, it's never been surrounded by hostile military bases and that's not an accident, you know, and to ignore how the US would react to China if it were in a similar situation as misleading because it leaves the impression that China's behavior, I'm sorry, is somehow distinct from that of the United States and it flies in the face of our 200 year history under the Monroe Doctrine. In 1962, for example, in response to the USSR providing Cuba with nuclear armed missiles, the Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously argued to airstrike the island and John F. Kennedy Institute of Naval Blockade. And even the appearance of a competing great powers, military presence in the Western hemisphere was enough to warrant a US bombing campaign, as was the case with Granada in 1983. The Reagan administration feared the USSR would use an airport as a military base and connect Cuba and its presence of 600 military students living in Granada during social unrest was a pretense for invasion under the War Powers Act. And I bring this up specifically because the pretense for invading Granada was 600 medical students. And as we know, there are tons of US nationals that live in Taiwan. So if anything were to occur between China and Taiwan, there's a very serious chance that whoever's president at that time could use the War Powers Act and use the pretense of US nationals in Taiwan to unilaterally conduct an act of war against China. So it's a really dangerous thing that we have to look out for. And if something like that happens, we have to call on whoever's president at that time to refrain from doing that because doing so would spark a war that you can't return from. Absolutely. Everything you said, Bloxton, is very prescient too. I know you have to hop off, but I think it's really important, especially we have what right now with the United States just going guns blazing on Gaza and the West Bank, is it kind of assist Israel's atrocities against Palestine and we see American hostages being like a big part of the mythology that underlies a lot of the media reports on what's happening right now in Gaza. And with China, the unfortunate thing about this is propaganda works. I mean, if you look at this graph, you've seen, we compiled the graph when we made a presentation, Lawson Adams and I, and you can see that after the United States, after the US media has gone to target China, statistics show that it had an effect on public opinion. Right now we have really a Cold War and the underlying reasons for the Cold War that we have right now, none of it gets ever reported ever. I mean, essentially, since I lived in China from 2019 to 2023, 2022 rather, I had the chance to learn a lot from different scholars and different people in the international relations world, many nationalities actually. And one of the things I learned was basically the difference between perceptions of tensions over Taiwan within the United States and how those tensions are perceived, not only in China, but the entire world or in a lot of other countries. Because I mean, no one really understands the history of the one China policy, what it is, what does it mean to have a normal relationship with China? Essentially, it was a condition when after the Chinese Revolution happened and the People's Republic of China which had control over the Chinese mainland established ties with other countries, a condition for establishing ties was recognizing that both land masses across the Taiwan Strait, where, and specifically in Taiwan, including Taiwan, were the nationalists fled to after the Civil War, both of those land masses, the mainland and Taiwan were part of one China and this is the basis on which the USSR, Indonesia, Pakistan, countless countries, Algeria made peace with China after 1949. Except of course, the United States does not recognize the People's Republic of China or recognizes Taiwan as the seat of all of China. Both land masses across the Strait, by the way, even the United States rejected the idea of two Chinas, it was floated for a time by like career diplomats and even like different media organizations, but both Taiwan and China always rejected one, sorry, two Chinas. Then Reagan issued a bunch of assurances to, at that point, the Jiang dictatorship in Taiwan, where he was like, the US is gonna not play any mediation role now that we have normalized ties, we're just gonna keep sending weapons to Taiwan, but we also don't commit to any kind of mediation role. So there are a lot of ways blocking chances for a peaceful resolution to like, let's technically an unended civil conflict. I think it was in 1995 when President Li Teng-Kui in Taiwan, their leader visited Cornell University and Beijing opposed this and in response, the US sent warships to the Taiwan Strait, it was a big standoff. And we've seen more and more armaments since then to Taiwan under the Clinton administration, under the Bush administration. In 2006, George Bush Jr. doesn't even disclose to the UN what kind of specific weapons it's sending Taiwan. You also have the bombing of the embassy in Belgrade in 2000, sorry, 1999, which was clearly marked and it was chopped up to be like an intelligence error. It was an intelligence mistake because what Bill Clinton told Jiang Zemin of China, when it was clearly marked actually before the US bombed the embassy, that it wasn't in the embassy. It was one of the few places that pilots were told not to bomb in Belgrade during the NATO war in Yugoslavia. And this kind of instrument of China continues. Chanchi had a book called failed states where he like went into this history, right? Of the US media hyping up, China's modernization of its military. When at the same time we're expanding in Micronesia and the Marshall Islands, Australia, upgrading the Philippines to a non-NATO ally. And Secretary of State Hillary Clinton just openly claiming that like we want open access to Asia's maritime commons, but of course we're neutral, right? Kind of playing the field. You had a point where ultimately like we have this pivot to Asia and it becomes clear it's all about militarism, sending 2,500 Marines to Australia, sending warships to the Philippines. And the dispute of the China, the China Philippines maritime border disputes really flamed up in the 70s under Ferdinand Marcos senior. And now we've seen kind of an inflammation of them now that the US Mutual Defense Treaty with the Philippines is kind of being invoked. Lloyd Austin says we have an ironclad commitment to the Mutual Defense Treaty. But the thing is the Filipino network of US bases and a lot of Filipino bases themselves now, which the US has full access to, that has been a sore point for who can kind of like navigate these islands, sorry, navigate these waterways, which are very sensitive considering that like these military bases were born out of US colonialism in the Philippines. And a lot of Filipino peace activists and environmentalists have been protesting saying they don't want to be their first casualties in a war between two superpowers. And like we've known that tensions have been really getting worse and worse since Trump, but even before that, we were sending $14 billion worth of weapons to Taiwan. We kind of were testing the grounds for the trade war in 2012 when we started putting tariffs on Chinese solar panels. And of course the freedom navigation exercises in the South China Sea, which I like to call freedom of provocation exercises, which is how they essentially function because they're also protested by a lot of other countries, not just China. Now you have the situation since Trump has been president where we have the full blown tariff war. We sanctioned Hong Kong, like the mayor of Hong Kong, the former mayor Kerry Lam couldn't even open a bank account in certain contexts. We have the former White House advisor, Steve Bannon, just threatened war with China in 10 years. That was in 2017. Now 10 years from then was gonna be 2027, right? And I was in Congress recently and they were talking so openly about baiting China into a war around the year 2027 with the chances of U.S. success would be over in a war of China over Taiwan. And this has kind of talked about without any kind of understanding of the history, what it means to have a normal relationship with China, how it would devastate the entire region really. And now it's open for our leaders without question to just say engagement with China has failed, like former U.S. Secretary of State, Mike Pompeo said that when he was still in office. And Biden has actually taken the torch from Trump in way more, in almost unprecedented ways, like the AUKUS military packs, for example, where now Britain and Australia are kind of patrolling the Pacific nuclear powered attack submarines, which can be easily weaponized into actually, actual nuclear submarines, which is very dangerous. And China has become more weary of taking the U.S. seriously and trusting the U.S. After we had former Speaker Nancy Pelosi go to Taiwan, China pulled out of climate talks with U.S. diplomats, because like these provocations have a real effect, especially if we're intending to actually provoke China, clearly if you try to provoke someone, it's natural that they're not gonna take well for that. And the crisis of China coverage kind of legitimizes this. We'll talk, I wanna talk about Taiwan a little bit later, but I also just wanna focus on how this year has been very dangerous from, now Biden has even armed Taiwan under the foreign military financing program, which is only reserved for sovereign states. And again, this goes back to a violation of the one China policy, which Beijing has been opposing for so long, but it's not really seen that way in the U.S. media. And the spy bulletin which Lawson brought up, I think is a really fascinating time, because it just goes into how, I mean, you see like the BBC and CNN back on April 3rd, they essentially reported this with inconsistencies. You know, both of them said different things about whether the balloon could actually capture pictures. And it's so pervasive that I even get tripped up myself, like I just referred to it as the spy balloon, right? The Chinese, of course, said it was not a spy balloon. Meteorologists who I worked with in news said, American meteorologists said it was not a spy balloon. It was likely a meteorological balloon that was blown off course. And even after it was debunked, Reuters even kind of called in to question the validity of the claim made by like those two BBC and CNN articles. Biden couldn't even say if it was transmitting data in real time. Even after it got debunked, right? On June 29th, Pat Ryder said, yeah, it was not transmitting data in the first place. There was no data to transmit. It's like, what do they think spy means? And the U.S. claimed the balloon had signals, signal had intelligence capabilities based off the fact that it had lots of antenna, but that's consistent with lots of balloons which are made for climate research. The damage was done though. I mean, the U.S. went on a global disinformation campaign as reported by the New York Times when they said American briefings were designed to show that the balloons were equipped for intelligence. And we were essentially targeting other places like Japan, Taiwan, India and the Philippines trying to scare officials from there. And the damage resulted in Blinken postponing an already tenuous trip with China. He eventually went, but right before he kind of expanded the U.S. military's reach in Papua New Guinea, which was student protesters at the time proposed his visit. And the media went even further than Blinken. Right before he went to China, he made a speech at a university in DC and he was saying China is like our long-term challenge and use sources like Politico and USA Today when even further kind of characterizing his statements is calling China a threat. This is the kind of culture that we are existing in at the moment where China has become such a boogeyman where all you have to do is tell a scared country live going through a pandemic. So the pictures of wet markets, release op-eds about China being the sick man of Asia and people, unfortunately, since China is not really accurately portrayed can easily fall prey to this propaganda. You know, this is how war start. I mean, Politico even had to fact check the Shep administration, but I mean, it doesn't really matter because the entire media, like you have the Wall Street Journal coming out, it was, I think, Michael Gordon, who was by the way, a rock war propagandist. You know, he wrote some of the articles with Judith Miller that talked about claims of biological Asians being dispersed through drones. You know, so I'm saying conducting campaigns like that, scaring the American public to enter into a war with Iraq, to invade a country and kill up to a million or more people. And now he's kind of cherry picking intelligence leaks, intelligence information, sometimes just circumstantial evidence, you know, partially relying on conservative think tank fellows. And this has an effect and the media ends up going along when Biden takes the torch from Trump on trying to punish China for somehow being responsible for COVID-19 and the effects are clear, right? I mean, it's been debunked over and over again. Wuhan Institute of Virologies, Shier Jung Lee even shared information with Georgetown University researchers. Those researchers were thankful. I mean, Nature magazine and the WHO, so many people have debunked this over and over again, the lab leak theory, but you know, we're at a place where anti-Asian hate during COVID increased over 300%. I mean, three and four Chinese Americans feel, let's say they've suffered racial discrimination in the past year. I mean, you have CNN kind of normalizing this sinophobia, kind of back during the 2020 primaries, they asked them how he would punish China if elected president, right? And of course, in the media, rarely do you actually understand that China didn't just like let this pandemic happen and at least around the world, there's really little follow-up that's done. Like I've seen very few places reporting on how the Supreme People's Court actually reprimanded the Wuhan police for silencing Dr. Lee Wenliang, for example. And you know, you have also, I think a trend of techno-orientalism on their eyes. You have companies like Google and Microsoft alleging that China is either trying to steal our AI innovation or interfere in our elections with deep fake technology. No evidence has ever shared with the voting public, but Visits Insider, Washington Times, always take these stories at their word, take the Silicon Valley companies at their word, right? And Microsoft has a relationship with the military industrial complex. It's important to know as does Google. And you have a lot of threats against TikTok, kind of in that same fold where you don't even have data security experts, just spy sheets and politicians being quoted. And, you know, we are the situation where like defense official Kathleen Hicks is talking about watching an AI drone warfare fleet to target China. It can vary kind of dangerous place that this drives us to. And I wanted to circle back to Taiwan, actually, just because I feel it's important to talk about how the media omits even Taiwan public opinion. Does it even, you know, cover pro-unification voices or critics of Taiwan independence, people who are critical of removing Chinese history from their textbooks? And it's important to remember by the way that like officially to have relations with China, it's important to realize that there is one China that's precondition for normal relationship, which the US has hinted about leaving. And, you know, there's this New York Times article I read just like last month where they were talking about Nancy Pelosi's visit last year being in show support for the island. And it's like even the Brookings Institute, you know, admitted earlier this year that most people in Taiwan saw her visit as something that was detrimental to their own security. But I mean, we can talk about Taiwan, we can talk about, I think, the US kind of militarization of Asia, of the Asia Pacific under the US Indo-Pacific Command through the lens of understanding what the United States is doing, you know, but People's Republic of China as expected to surpass the US is the world's largest economy by 2030. And you also have the Chinese military is not necessarily easy to threaten as it was, for example, we don't live in the time where you can bomb the embassy in Belgrade and you can just kind of solve that with diplomacy easily anymore. You know, there's no where in a place where China can be more assertive and before to rightfully question US provocations. And when it comes to control over waterways, trade routes in the South China Sea, control over AI innovations, we have to question the link between the military industry complex, Silicon Valley, what I like to call the Pentagon, the Silicon Valley pipeline. And the fact that they're saying the quiet part out loud, even Representative Young Kim said we need to have more joint patrols and a Fox News op-ed. We can have more joint patrols of the South China Sea to make sure we have control over those trade routes. We need to really push back against this. We need sort of being more suspective articles of unnamed sources. Check if the media is not questioning the official US government position that's always a red flag for me. And we need to start cross-referencing what propagandists are saying with what the actual historical record is. And yeah, I wanted to say that it's really important that we discern the discourse and I wanna maybe later share a petition. We have a petition on Code Pink on our China as our enemy website where we are demanding an end to disinformation. And there's also a second petition that I'd like to share with you if you go to our latest petition on China as our enemy, we're demanding instead of arming and militarizing countries and regions in Asia we need to stop wasting money on preparing for war and start spending on a climate finance deal. So I just like to say we're in a very dangerous time the United States is fighting multiple wars and hegemony and imperialism and violence is threatening the lives of people here in the United States when it comes to anti-Asian hate when it comes to anti-Arab Islamophobic hate when it comes to the war in black America when it comes to what was happening to peoples from Latin America, indigenous people who are on this country. And we also need to push back on what's happening just around the world when it comes to US imperialism more broadly. Thank you, Kayle. Thank you so much. And just wanna thank Lawson that he was able to join us before he had to run off to school. His insight is so valuable to be there and witnessing the way we are used by information. I just wanna say right now, Code Pink activists are inside of Congress raising 25 of them raising their hands with Gaza written on their arms and their fingers are, their hands are all red saying to Blinken and Austin who are reporting to Congress asking for another $8 to $10 billion for Israel to continue a genocide on the people of Palestine Code Pink's in Congress, saying no, I'm calling for a ceasefire. So, as I said yesterday, now is the time to be engaged now is the time to be sharing information you can trust. And also just as Lawson said this is these are all imperialist violent projects. And when you read information, how does it make you feel? Does it make you feel supported? Like you have strong ground and you understand what's happening? Does it make you feel confused? Does it make you turn to hate? Does it make you hate someone? Does it turn someone into an enemy? Find out what those trigger points are and how you're being used and don't let yourself be used. And I think also as Kale was saying, these are racist projects. This is white supremacy and we're watching it unravel and be its ugliest self right now. And now there's no denying at this moment in history it is which side are you on? The side of the oppressed or the side of the oppressor it couldn't be clearer. And the thing about this disinformation is that the oppressor controls the narrative. They kind of like own the means of production of the media that you take in and therefore it owns your heart and mind. And it is only up to us individually and then collectively as a community because I wanna say individually it's too hard. It's why in these moments you have to understand the collectivity matters. What community are you part of where you're making each other smarter and wiser and where you together are laying a past a piece. And because the darkness is so big and dense and it's kind of like a magnet sucking you in it needs community. So here we are as Kale is saying this is dangerous. And everybody acts like, oh, it's just information. Well, witness this moment. This moment was created by disinformation. Why is the whole world not up in arms watching a genocide? Because some people have been imprisoned by that disinformation and have been so separated from their humanity that they think there can actually be a reason to murder babies. Think about that. That's what this information does. Disinformation weaponizes your hearts and minds to serve the violent imperialist white supremist empire that I don't think any of us here at Humanity or Raising want to be a part of but it's out there. And as Kale also, it's like it is dangerous and he's showing you these places it takes these moments of what could tip in this moment. And the United States likes keeping those moments happening all the time. So one can happen that they could use and then just move forward with violence. And I think that's what we're seeing right now with what's happening in Gaza is where can we take those moments and use them excuse for utmost violence and that excuse for war. So I wonder since we have a little time, if anyone has any questions for this amazing opportunity to have Kale with you and I wanted to open it up for questions and I didn't know Jim, if you had the first one or if we should move to the rest of the audience. Yeah, I'll come in with one while we're gathering others. First of all, thank you, Kale. That was quite comprehensive. I in particular appreciated your chronology because if you take the overall narrative you can see clearly an ongoing escalation of tensions and the utilization of the Taiwan issue as a wedge issue to exacerbate conflict, organize the other allies of the United States in the region and posture China as a warmonger in the face of which the collective West needs to defend itself with those bases. And I think that the pictogram that you use to show what it would be like if the same situation confronted the United States with literally hundreds of Chinese and Russian and Iranian bases around the United States would give a sense. I mean, the United States would be shocked beyond words if something like this happens. And when a couple of students go into Granada it's considered such an alarming issue that the president Reagan sends in an invasion. So you're really onto something. And I just commend you as a young man for taking on this issue and informing yourself so deeply and being able to share this information. My daughter-in-law is a Chinese American. And so we've been living out over the last number of years the increase in anti-Asian violence as the rhetoric against China has been increasing in the mainstream media. And it's really a forceful realization that propaganda, as you said earlier, has an effect. It really shapes people's minds and therefore their actions and their words if they believe what they're saying over the mainstream media is in fact true. So I just wanted to commend you. And I think that the question that I would pose just for your comment, what's your sense of the immediate future? I know that the foreign minister Wang Yi has been in Washington over the last three days. He's had a meeting with President Biden, Secretary of State Blinken, and apparently had a very difficult meeting with the National Security Advisor, Jake Sullivan. There's discussion of Xi Jinping coming to San Francisco in November. Wang Yi said there's many challenges yet ahead before that's solidified. But what is your sense based on what you know of the current state of Chinese American relations and sort of what's coming next? Also, Jodi would love to hear from you on this. Yeah, well, thanks so much, Jim. I really appreciate your feedback and also that question. Probably, I mean, right now in the past few months we've seen just a steady deterioration of China-U.S. relations. There are different areas of actual diplomacy going on. For example, as you said, Wang Yi's visit as well as Gavin Yusam, his visit to China, when he rode an electric car and played basketball. It was like a brief window, I guess, into kind of the way things were in the 70s and through the 90s. But I think as far as the next few months go it really depends on if there can be any headway from the Xi Biden summit, the sideline talks. If those do end up happening at APEC in San Francisco next month, then I see perhaps we can maybe, the U.S. might have to take Chinese security and ensure it's as seriously. And more diplomacy on our end might come from that. I think I kind of am a pessimist of the intellect, optimist of the will. So I'm not sure that's gonna happen, but I think it's important that the peace movement and the anti-war movement, just as it's been standing up with really one voice recently, needs to continue that great work and pressuring our leaders to reject war and imperialism. Yeah. Yeah, I wanna echo what Kale's saying about Newsom, because it's such a departure. I think I read something yesterday, it said, oh, the Chinese are gonna medal in U.S. elections. And you're just like, both sides want to kill China. They're running on it, like what meddling would they do? But Newsom really coming back and saying the whole idea, the concept of a Cold War with China or any war with China is too frightening to imagine. It's just the healthiest comment that we've seen in a very long time, except of course, Kissinger. But it's just like, as we're looking at this genocide, we have to notice how inhumane, how violent, at a level that none of us can even fathom, is the U.S. leadership, that they would go to Congress right now and ask for eight to 10 billion more dollars for weapons to murder innocent people. I mean, and when people say it's a, use the word war, which we cannot use that this is a war, this is a genocide, these, Hamas has no tanks, it has pickup trucks, and barely has any weapons. And for me, it's kind of looking at a rock all over again after going to a rock, we went to a rock before Chakanah. And I came back and I told members of Congress, I told Hillary Clinton, I told the New York Times, I told all the media, are you kidding me? You should be ashamed if you're even thinking of dropping a bomb on these people. You've stolen everything from them. They've been living under sanctions. 500,000 children have died. You've been starving them to death and you're gonna pretend like you have like might taking on the poorest of the poor, that's shameful. But no, I mean, talk about the narrative. The narrative in the United States was like, we took down this great power of, and they were building weapons of mass destruction and that they would prefer to live in the lie. And as we're watching this, just to think about the fact that four and a half to six million people died in the last 20 years on the war and terror, that we murdered, that we, the United States of America created the context for drove, funded, fueled that. That, so, all right, you could, you've been in denial, you've been in denial but right now you cannot be in denial and you cannot not recognize with the contrast of Ukraine, how racist it is. You really, really have to recognize that and it gets voided. But certainly we all saw it at the beginning of the Ukraine war, it was embarrassing and shameful and just skin rippingly horrible. But when you don't act on things, they just get worse. So that's why my belief is to act. We didn't hold anyone accountable for those four to six million dead. We'd never held Netanyahu accountable for every international law that he has broken over and over and over again. Where is the accountability and the responsibility? If you just roll over and say, I can't do anything about it, it will escalate until it reaches you. And I, you know, we've, we know that, we've seen that and it really is, it's this moment in time where you get to choose. And I know Kale and Jim are gonna be in the streets on Saturday of Washington DC. Lots and lots of people are coming from all over the world actually to be in the streets because we can't agree to this. We can't agree to this level of inhumanity and violence or we will be living in it and you have no idea what that will look like. And we're already living in what it looks like to not have acted around climate change. We're already watching way too many people die in these disasters. What have we lost our commitment to life? If we have, I'm afraid it will be taken away from us. So it's really that moment where you choose for life. You choose to be on the side of the oppressed against the oppressor. We have so many great teachers that showed us the way, had the courage. We honor their lives with holidays and, you know, books and movies, but we do that to remember, to be them when that moment arises. So yet again, this week is about the disinformation helping you come out of it. And I saw Stan asking about where do you find your news? And so it starts first with you. It starts with those questions I asked earlier. How does this make you feel? Does this make you feel wiser? Do you feel like you have more intelligence or is it somehow undermined you? Made you feel less sure, more confused, more angry and hateful? Check. So there's the moments where you check it out. Like, why do I feel this way? It's kind of like listening to Jim yesterday reading Chris. It made you feel like there was a ground under your feet. It resonated truths. Where do you feel that resignation of truth? That even though it's difficult to listen to, which was hard to listen to some of those senses. But sometimes you gotta remember the truth will set us free, but first it will piss you off. Like those moments where you feel agitated by the truth, because it somehow disrupts some stability you've been standing on that might not be so strong, that might be a packet of lies. And then find those voices out there that have been shut out of the media. You're gonna have to go to the corners, but why are they in the corners? Because they have been shut out. When somebody's been shut out, I'd check them out. You don't have to always believe them, but if they've got a following and people that you respect are listening to them, check out and see what that does for you. How does that make you feel? Be part of a community where you're debating these ideas or you're having a conversation. Because we've lost that capacity to have conversations and really explore these ideas with each other. I mean, right now we are living in a lot of confusion. I'm sure there are so many layers to what is happening right now. Geopolitical, regional, you know, like there's layers and layers and layers of history, of greed, of need, of hate. Don't get locked in any of them. Try to be in the layers of them and understand the complexity that you don't have control over, but you do have the control over how you respond. That is what you have control over. Don't let the information use you. Don't let it turn you into a monster. Because right now to be in agreement with a genocide means that you've agreed to be a monster. You've let go of your humanity. And it doesn't mean that you have the right to get angry at anyone because of that. I mean, if anything, I would open up my heart to how lost they are. And then be available with some information that might serve them. And if it doesn't, it has nothing to do with you and everything to do with them. So here we are. Peace is who we are. Humanity is what we are striving to serve. Here's your chance to be engaged like never before, I don't know, in my lifetime. So tomorrow, maybe Jim, you could key us up for what to expect tomorrow. Yes, first just a quick comment on your remarks, Jody, which I think are so important. And to Stan's question about sources, there are sources out there, but you have to look for them. And I suggest Chris Hedges, who is one of the most respected journalists of our time. I suggest Seymour Hirsch, another extraordinarily respected, decorated, they've won Pulitzer Prizes. I suggest Jeremy Sacks, the economist at Columbia University, Jeffrey Sacks, excuse me, at Columbia University, John Mersheimer, University of Chicago, if you want a great analysis of the delusions of US foreign policy, John Mersheimer, who's probably the most respected scholar in international relations. So the truth is out there. It's just, it's not gonna be available to you on CNN or MSNBC or Fox News. So you have to take responsibility to look for it elsewhere. But once you start to track, for example, there's a Greek guy named Alexander Mercurus, who is the best single daily commentator on what's happening in the world that I personally know about. I basically get my noons from the people that I've just named, but I would add Alexander Mercurus, go to the Code Pink website. There's all kinds of good stuff on Code Pink. There's lots out there, but you've gotta sort of get up off the couch and turn some channels on your TV and search. And then the other thing I would say, so we're taking in what Jody's saying about genocide. I read something today that I found shocking that in the last seven days or so, in the last week, on Gaza, the Israelis have dropped over 6,000 bombs. That's the equivalent of what the United States dropped in an entire year in Afghanistan. And Afghanistan is 180,000 times bigger than Gaza. So if you think that thought that in the last seven days, 200,000 buildings have been damaged or destroyed. Over 200 schools have been damaged or destroyed. Nearly 40 mosques and religious facilities have been damaged or destroyed. One third of all the hospitals and health facilities in Gaza have been completely destroyed. And what emerged in the news today is a concept paper from the Israeli military calling for the complete elimination of all 2.3 million people from Gaza into Egypt. So we're talking about a mounting pressure that we need to be not only informed about, but as Jody and Kale are talking about, we need to be willing to get out on the streets. And people are coming out on the streets by the hundreds of thousands, over 100,000 recently in London, all over the Middle East, in India. And even in the United States, you're not gonna find it on the mainstream news, but it's out there. And I would just, again, one of the reasons why we partner with Code Pink is because they're out there and go to the Code Pink website. They list where you can go, not just in Washington, there's gonna be a big march in San Francisco, Los Angeles. So just go to codepink.org. But this is one of those moments, everyone, where you need to be either part of the solution or you're part of the problem. Eldridge Cleaver was right. And so I'm gonna be on the streets in Washington, DC with Kale, and hopefully tens of thousands of others just in Washington this Saturday. But it's important that we all take in the magnitude of what is happening in Gaza right now because this is genocide and ethnic cleansing at almost an unprecedented level in our lifetime. Tomorrow, we are going to turn our attention from whistleblowers around the Chinese issue to the issue of unidentified flying objects and what is now called unidentified anomalous phenomena. And we're gonna be hearing from Danny Sheehan, who has been the general counsel and legal counsel for the great whistleblowers on the UFO issue. He was also the general counsel for Daniel Ellsberg in the New York Times. And probably a half a dozen other whistleblowers. So when you talk to Danny Sheehan, he is the guy who when the whistleblowers are hauled up into court, they call Danny. And he is one, is my recollection, he's won every case because he knows how to speak truth to power having been educated at the Harvard College and Harvard Law School and is one of the most brilliant, intelligent, legal minds of our time. And so tomorrow's an opportunity to listen to Danny Sheehan on really the courage of the whistleblower and his experience in defending whistleblowers over the last 50 years. So that's tomorrow here on Humanity Rising. So, Kale, thank you and thank Lawson and Jody as ever. Thank you so much. And that'll bring us to a close. You're all welcome to the after session chat. You'll see the link in the chat box. You received it in your Zoom reminder. Then we'll see you all tomorrow here on Humanity Rising. Thank you, everyone. Bye for now. Thank you, Kale. Thank you.