The Hubris of the Elites and the World Economic Forum’s Radical Vision to Transform Society—Jordan Schachtel

“Within our ruling elites, the idea that personal autonomy could be important—they obviously reject that immediately. They had no concern for the rights of the individual whatsoever.”

The elite ruling class is increasingly influencing media coverage and seeking to transform the way we live, argues independent journalist Jordan Schachtel.

We discuss the many illogical narratives and policies that emerged around COVID-19 these last two years and the World Economic Forum’s radical vision for reorienting society.

“They want to take away our rights, decide what food we eat, decide where we can travel,” he says.

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Below is a rush transcript of this American Thought Leaders episode from Jul 19, 2022. This transcript may not be in its final form and may be updated.

Jan Jekielek:
Jordan Schachtel, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Jordan Schachtel:
Thanks for having me on Jan, appreciate it.

Mr. Jekielek:
You first came to my attention way back when you published a piece about basically people calling, saying that the virus had come out of the Wuhan lab as racist, and this was something we were writing a lot about at The Epoch Times. And you had a piece in the examiner calling coronavirus, Wuhan virus, isn’t racist, but China wants you to think it is. That’s exactly what happened. And I there were a few people that were actually noting this, of course, including us, because we ourselves were being described that way by the regime. So let’s start with that story. Okay, because you’ve been one of these people that’s been writing about Coronavirus in a very thoughtful way from the very beginning.

Mr. Schachtel:
So I noticed that there was a lot of media interest and not, in the way that we discuss the coronavirus. Immediately they wanted to get their narratives in order… And I think that it was definitely foreshadow. It was a sign of things to come, and it wasn’t just the Chinese government that put up a fight. It was the US legacy media that claimed first, that describing it as the Wuhan virus is racist. So if you notice that today, even I’m guilty of this myself, the vast majority of people who talk about COVID-19, just say, COVID, coronavirus. If you call it the Wuhan virus today in 2022, it almost seems like you’re making a political statement and you might be making a political statement, but the history of viruses, whether it’s Ebola or something like that, Ebola refers to, I believe an area in Africa, Lyme disease, it refers to, I believe the area where it originated.

So it was a common practice for the virus to be labeled from where it originated. And we were told when it came to this pandemic, that it was totally unacceptable and racist to note the Chinese origins of where the virus came from. And while it was uncontroversial a week before the coronavirus was announced, it suddenly became controversial, racist, xenophobic. It showed the current state of our media environment where, if you do not adhere to the party directive, you are a troublemaker. You are a bad person.

Mr. Jekielek:
And that’s actually very interesting because even in China itself, it was described as the Wuhan virus at some point before the official dictate came down and that was changed. Now, what I find so fascinating about this is that the Chinese Communist Party was really able to play to the biases and ideological framework of the US establishment media, so to speak, and just create this almost in an instant, right? Is, this what you saw?

Mr. Schachtel:
It seems that, so my background’s in foreign affairs, it seems that American policy makers and Americans who work in foreign policy, aren’t so much aware about the internal media and governance dynamics of foreign adversaries, but the Chinese government is very well aware of how our media operates. Our ruling class, our corporate interests, same with the Russian government. And they seek to expose these weaknesses in society and the Wuhan virus narrative. They were able to shut that off with little effort. I remember there were these big, New York Times, Washington Post stories, CNN, MSNBC, the narrative went out, it was racist. No one was going to call it the Wuhan virus or China virus, or The Epoch Times has almost been, I think, alone in your coverage. And continuing to make sure that we don’t forget about the Chinese government’s potential involvement in the origin story here.

Mr. Jekielek:
Well, yeah, no, so exactly. So we called it CCP virus and that way it’s definitely not racist, but unquestionably, there’s a Chinese communist party connection here, whether or not it was a lab leak, which I think there’s a preponderance of evidence that would suggest that that’s a very likely scenario, we don’t know for sure, the evidence has been destroyed. But at the very least there was no shutdown of travel with people who were infected with the virus. In fact, there was calls of all sorts of people being racist, all sorts of governments being racist for suggesting that you might stop Chinese who might have the virus from traveling, if you recall that, so the CCP is very tightly connected with this virus unquestionably.

Mr. Schachtel:
There was this amazing moment on social media very early on. I think this may have even been before the two weeks to stop the spread moment where in New York City people were accused of being racist against Chinese people because they stopped going out to dinner. And that meant there was a decline in service at the Chinese restaurant. So all of these New York City healthcare officials prior to this lockdown ideology were saying, please go to eat at these Chinese restaurants. We’re going to support our Chinese neighbors, basically implying on the other side, that if you are worried about this issue, you’re racist. And, it’s amazing that only a couple weeks later, these same officials who told everyone to go into the streets and eat and dine at all the restaurants that you’d like, which I think was good advice-

Mr. Jekielek:
So this is my point. I actually agree with you. I was on board with that. This is actually a good idea. It’s ridiculous to blame the Chinese restaurants for the virus, that makes no sense, right? But then something happened.

Mr. Schachtel:
Yeah. And then you had the lockdown insanity, but it’s interesting to go back into the archives of a February 2020, and then a March 2023. And you think like what the heck just happened? They were just telling everyone to go celebrate in the streets in defiance of the virus. And now it’s, you are locked in your home indefinitely or for two weeks.

Mr. Jekielek:
And it’s really interesting, right? Because the state of knowledge about the virus did not change so dramatically to create that a shift. And I mean, you’ve been right. You were writing about this early on. So what really happened?

Mr. Schachtel:
I think this demonstrates the amazing amount of hubris that our credentials so-called elite class operates with. I’d say there’s still a lot that needs to be learned about the trajectory of this virus. The spread, the mutations, the treatments, there’s just a lot we don’t know, but our expert class claimed that they had it all figured out. And I rejected that very early on. And that’s basically, that was my fundamental critique. I wasn’t saying that I had the answers and they didn’t, or they didn’t have the answers and someone else did. I said, if we’re going to take these dramatic steps and lock everyone in their houses, there should be some kind of burden of evidence. And there really was no demonstrated evidence. And it was just a panicked response that turned into a two year nightmare.

Mr. Jekielek:
And as we know now, I didn’t know this at the time to be perfectly honest, I hadn’t thought about pandemic guidance much. But this type of policy was something that was most really respected experts, certainly the UK government, they had clearer guidelines saying, don’t do this kind of stuff because of the cost is so high and there were these standard pandemic measures, which definitely didn’t involve this thing. So what happened? Hubris happened, this is what you’re saying, right. But everybody seemed to unlock step. And I mean, including some well, meaning people such as myself, I wanted to do my part to stop the spread in two weeks. I’ll be honest with that, right. That’s what I was thinking. People want to help society play their part, do a good job, whatever, at the same time the messaging was in lockstep. And this is the establishment messaging. So how did this happen?

Mr. Schachtel:
There was a lot of confusion and fear early on. And we were in a unique time in 2020, where for the first time we were able to just sit at home and still live our normal lives. I mean, the advent of Uber Eats, Uber Eats is only like probably six or seven years old, the whole work from home, Zoom, Skype Culture. It’s a very new phenomenon. Prior to the COVID era, this remote work was not something that was really being advertised outside of Silicon Valley, Miami, little bit of New York, but the conditions had been created to allow for this system to be put in place. So this was the first time in history where we could actually respond to a pandemic without obliterating society overnight. There was still tremendous damage done, but the people, the ruling class were able to operate normally.

And they used the lesser people with the middle income and struggling individuals who had to stock shelves at grocery stores, deliver people’s food, keep the supply chain moving. These were all in-person jobs, but this managerial elite class could get away with bringing that risk level down to zero. And I think there’s this combination that some were genuinely afraid and some saw this as an opportunity to completely rearrange society as they see fit. So there was just these, and I think that there’s an important ideological factor here too, within our ruling elites, that the idea that personal autonomy could be important. They, obviously reject that immediately. They had no concern for the rights of the individual whatsoever, and as I talked about this burden of proof for all of these radical measures, they really demonstrated no proof to impose the insanity.

So when you have a ruling class that doesn’t care about individual liberty, they’re more likely just to run rough shot over your rights and think that they know better than you on how to control your own movements, your own health and your own personal decision making, which just went out the window entirely.

Mr. Jekielek:
Well, but as you mentioned, right, there was a whole group of people. So this is, let’s call it the laptop class. I’ve heard that term. But there were other people who for various reasons, you’re in the essential industries like in journalism the way I kind of lived, the-

Mr. Schachtel:
We’re non-essential.

Mr. Jekielek:
Well, no, but so my life didn’t change that much because I lived close to work, our workplace didn’t force everybody out. Anyway, it was very easy for some people to transition into that and not entirely think about all the ramifications, but there’s this whole group of people that you just talked about that actually has to keep society running, society doesn’t function without a really large group of people doing all these things, stocking shelves, doing delivery, farming. I mean, you name it, right?

Mr. Schachtel:
Yeah. I think that just speaks to where we’re at today as a culture where we go to the grocery store, we see the meat section and we just buy our dinner. We cook it. We don’t think really twice about where it came from. All of these elements in the economy, all these decisions had to be made, transportation-wise, agriculture, that there’s all these elements of the economy that were ignored to supposedly fight a virus using these ridiculous tools that didn’t even work. It showed me that the ruling class is uniquely unqualified to be in power and in such a prosperous, robust nation of 330 million people that for me, it drove home that there needs to also be an ideological revolution in the United States. And I think the trajectory of folks that have been in a slumber for quite some time, they saw what was going on with the lockdowns.

And they were just shocked that the government would do this to us. So they start thinking, what else are these folks like Fauci and Francis Collins is with the NIH, these top administration officials, what else are they not telling me the truth about? So it was this great. I think on the reverse side of things, COVID was this great red pilling of people who wanted to wake up to the possible idea that they were essentially living inside of this ruling class controlled simulation. And they want to now break out of this and live a life free of constant government intervention. It’s unfortunate that it had to take that moment, those two years of insanity for them to see reality, see that this corporate press is a bunch of ridiculous propagandas that have this radical worldview. But I think more people are awake in this country than ever before.

Mr. Jekielek:
You’ve been cutting your teeth basically as an independent journalist, you’ve been using the substack model, by the way, I really enjoy your substack. I encourage people to visit it. Tell me quickly the-

Mr. Schachtel:
Dossier.substack.com.

Mr. Jekielek:
That’s right. There’s someone to follow. I really like it because you’re an out of the box thinker. You were thinking out of the box back then about these things. Later you were one of the early people. This is another thing I noticed where you observed that. Basically there was this bait and switch in the vaccine deployment. Briefly tell me about that. And there’s many other things I want to talk about. So in your journalism.

Mr. Schachtel:
So I noticed early on when these vaccines became FDA approved, that the FDA was also still authorizing emergency use authorization doses of both Pfizer and Moderna’s mRNA shots. And I started researching the FDA and CDCs website. I noticed that they said that there was going to be a delay, even though these shots were approved, that they had all these emergency use authorization doses, and they were going to get rid of them first before the FDA approved version comes out. So months and months go on and there’s still no, Comirnaty is the Pfizer one, Spikevax is the Modena FDA approved version. They’re still not making their way to pharmacies, doctor’s offices. So I start to kind of looking into it further. And what I found is it seems that these companies have no intention of releasing these products to the public. And I reported that they are both completely unavailable to American citizens, and that remains true today, if you want the FDA approved version.

So not emergency use authorization, you cannot actually get it in the United States and immediately Snopes, the so called fact-checking organization, they did a fact check and said, it was false. And the information is not false. You can’t get the FDA versions of the vaccine. And in addition to the Snopes fact-check, USA today used the Snopes fact check to say that I was spreading misinformation and also labeled my story false, even though my story is true and can be easily verified by anyone, there is no FDA approved version of the vaccine available in the United States. It’s a ghost vaccine. It’s totally bizarre. And I think that legal experts should really look closely at that issue because it’s very strange. Why are there two separate products? Why is only the EUA version going to market?

Mr. Jekielek:
Well, the suggestion would be, I mean, what I understand. Okay, and correct me if I’m wrong here, that these are basically exactly the same product. The only question is the legal envelope in which they live, right. And the legal envelope is a lot more, let’s call it flexible in the Emergency Use Authorization version. I.e, there isn’t a lot of liability there, right? Whereas in once you’re approved, well, there might be more rules you have to follow. To me, that would be the thing that people should explore at this point.

Mr. Schachtel:
I can’t find another explanation. Why are there two legal entities for the same formulation? It doesn’t make sense at all. And now we’re two and a half years into this thing. The, shots have been around this in the same formulation since January of 2021, even December of 2020. So it’s not like they haven’t had the time to get this thing out to market. The Pfizer shot was approved almost a full year ago. The Moderna more recently, but it’s very clear that Pfizer and Moderna are deliberately not bringing these products into the market.

And they have very close connections to the US public health regime and the government. So there seems to be this cartel situation where they’ve agreed on doing this, but outside of the reach of the press, maybe someone could eventually FOIA that information successfully, but there’s this collusion between this pharmaceutical cartel and big health in the United States. There’s only two manufacturers for COVID vaccines in the United States, Johnson & Johnson just quietly stepped back. No one knows why that happened, but they have enormous power over these government institutions. And that’s with the consent and help of, I think folks like Fauci and the CDC director and the FDA director.

Mr. Jekielek:
I want to pivot a little bit here to some other things that you’ve been covering. There’s a lot of power concentrated in multilateral organizations, for lack of a better term. And we saw that in the WHO, how much influence WHO can have, how easily the Chinese Communist Party can co-op some of these organizations, you’ve been looking at the World Economic Forum and this is kind of a nice segue, because you have a piece about how to get in, right? You need to be triple-vaxxed, you need to be narrative compliant, you need to pay over a hundred thousand dollars and you’re in, right? So that’s interesting, right? So what is it that you found here?

Mr. Schachtel:
So people who are unaware what the World Economic Forum is. In my view today, it has become the chief, it’s like a think tank for the ruling class. So if you’ve heard the slogan, Build Back Better, Great Reset, the infamous, you will own nothing and be happy line. Those are all narratives that came from the World’s Economic Forum. The World Economic Forum is enormously influential because it’s the place where these rulers, elites come to share all of their ideas and decide on these bumper stickers. And the World Economic Forum is a radical I think climate focus organization, they’re like very scorched earth. They want to take everyone’s property rights, make you eat bugs and [inaudible 00:21:11] and remove all the cows and all the healthy things from society. And to have this managerial elite class completely control everything in society. This is an enormously influential organization.

They hold an annual confab in Davos where they go and meet and share ideas. And it’s a very exclusive club. You cannot get into the club unless you apply for membership, organizational membership, very costly, most organizations on the private side. So these are big corporate sponsors, will pay anywhere from 60 to $600,000 once they’re accepted. And remember, this is like a narrative policing organization, similar to the ESG movement or some of these big movements that if you are allowed in Davos, you have already conformed to the Davos agenda, which is very smart. What’s interesting in those articles I’ve been publishing at the Dosier is the media collaboration. And that the media is also, whether it’s a New York Times, CNN, Reuters, Wall Street Journal, they’re paying hundreds of thousands of dollars to the World’s Economic Forum, so they can be part of this annual meeting.

So they can interview the CEO of BlackRock and Bill Gates and Albert Bourla of Pfizer and whatnot. So they become complicit in this agenda because they are now partners and members to the World’s Economic Forum. And it just speaks to a totally broken and corrupt press that we’re dealing with today. And I think we’re definitely operating, there are people who operate on the inside who are part of that insane agenda. And then there are real journalists who operate on the outside and want to actually speak truth to power, who don’t want to go to these cocktail parties and confabs in Davos, which costs, which only people of wealth and status can even get into. And it just breaks all of the rules of traditional journalism. So I find the World’s Economic Forum to be one of the most prevalent threats to a free society today because they are very good at gathering the elites, getting them to agree on one set or a couple of particular narratives.

I think it’s very clear what their agenda is. Klaus Schwab, the president of the World’s Economic Forum has written four books in the past two years. And it’s always the same message. It’s always this, you will own nothing and be happy thing. So he wants to co-op corporations into this green new deal, this green transition stuff, this ESG compliance and government partners, he has been leveraging the COVID situation to also try to radically transform society. This builds back better, great reset stuff that they have been trotting out. This is all about radically reorienting society. And what’s interesting is that Schwab in his books singles out American society, especially Americans who believe in individual liberty and personal freedom. He views these people as the greatest threat to his organization’s agenda. And I think that’s an enormous badge of honor for the Americans who oppose this stuff.

It’s very much a collectivist outfit. They want to take away our rights, decide what food we eat, decide where we can travel. If you recall these Australian lockdowns where they set up a radius where Australians were allowed to travel, what they were allowed to do, go to the supermarket, what they were allowed to… What kinds of socializing they were allowed to do. This is the dream for these folks of the World’s Economic Forum, and they’re openly endorsing it. So for me, what I saw with half these lockdowns, that to me is a form of human enslavement. They have no rights and it, and it showed to me the importance of being an American who stands for individual Liberty and the importance of advancing the Liberty movement. And even the importance of something such as like gun rights in America.

I think one of the reasons that it frustrates, these European and just global elites is that we have this dang thing called the Second Amendment, and even our federal government, like they know that they’ll have a tough time pushing us around in Florida and Texas and places where a lot of people take seriously, their right to self defense and their right to protect against an authoritarian government. And America seems to be one of the few places in the world left, where you can defend yourself with those rights. And one of the reasons why Australia and New Zealand and Canada and the UK, which have a similar cultural heritage to the United States, one of the reasons why they just totally went along with that crazy COVID agenda, where they stole everyone’s rights overnight is they really had no means to defend themselves. And the government knew that.

Mr. Jekielek:
So people have criticized this, you will own nothing and you will be happy. And the response has been to this and actually multiple other policy ideas, policy recommendations. It’s been precisely that, oh, this isn’t our, we’re endorsing this isn’t what we’re saying has to happen. These are just some ideas we’re looking into the future, that this is what we’re about.

Mr. Schachtel:
The way I think about it is that’s their defense. But similar to that, I just had a recent conversation with epidemiologist who said the same thing about her profession and the next thing you know is COVID happens all of these virologists, so-called public health experts. They’re supposed to be in this advisory role. And next thing these like county, federal, state directors are responsible for shutting down society. So very quickly, they go from the advocacy to the direct action approach. And that’s when these folks are telegraphing, what they want for society, I think it’s way more than an advisory role. They are actively working on installing these type of regimes and governments. And they’ve had a lot of success.

Mr. Jekielek:
It’s really interesting what you were saying about media paying huge sums of money to participate in Davos, to be able to cover it, I guess. I keep thinking back to Walter Duranty, to the New York Times premier reporter in Russia and basically covering up the hold for the genocide, this forced starvation of Ukraine and saying everything was great.

One of the theories as to why that happened that way is that when you went in, there was a cost to being able to be there, to be able to have all the access, the cost was, you’re going to cover things the way we like, and this is the same kind of deal that many Western media have done, for example, to cover communist China on the ground, so to speak, I’m not saying it’s exactly the same thing, but it strikes me kind of that way because there’s this cost of doing business, in this case, there’s the cost is financial, but are you saying that they’re not going to cover this stuff straight up? Because of this sort of financial incentive, maybe it doesn’t that actually give them the ability to do that because they paid the money.

Mr. Schachtel:
Of course, I think they also shared the same view, but what you discussed with China or another country like Iran, a very authoritarian regime when you are a Western reporter entering that country and reporting on the regime, you should know the ground rules. And what is interesting is that a lot of these press outlets that have reporters there, they don’t seem to, it would be nice. At least if they edited a disclaimer, like, hey, we can’t really criticize the IAT to, or we can’t criticize DJ P or else they’ll kick us out of the country. And now here’s our report, but there is no disclaimer, and it, I think it’s a similar thing with what’s going on in the World’s Economic Forum. And I had to report this. It wasn’t really out there that these media organizations were partners to the World’s Economic Forum.

They paid enormous sums and similar to the COVID reporting situation, they reported on COVID as if like these lockdowns, these masks were absolute truths and they report on the World’s Economic Forum, It’s like it’s just some non-profit that cares about the environment and forget about that whole like hyper political agenda they have, that’s not a big deal. So they have zero interest in my view, in reporting the truth of what exactly is going on with these NGOs, with these very, very political extremist organizations in part, because there’s that conflict of interest with financially, socially, but also I think because the American media today, a lot of these people just very much agree with their politics.

Mr. Jekielek:
So here’s the thing, okay. With the World Economic Forum, it doesn’t have any power in itself actually, right? There’s no executive power at the World Economic Forum or is there,

Mr. Schachtel:
But I think they prefer it to be that way. So they could just kind of influence people in the shadows. The interesting thing about the world’s economic forum is they didn’t have much of a social media presence, and this has been a recent phenomenon. And I think it’s actually a tactical mistake, I guess, with the advent of proliferating social media, more and more people are realizing like, hey, why is Joe Biden, Justin Trudeau, Jacinda Adern, and Boris Johnson, why do they keep saying the same exact thing?

Like what’s going on here? Who is responsible for getting all of these talking points? And then like you trace a lot of it back to this guy, cloud Schwab that keeps talking about this green transition and the World Economic Forum, but they don’t have any official power, but they have certainly made the context and have done the groundwork to get connected with these governments with very powerful corporate interests and to drive an agenda of their choosing through them and to leverage conferences like the world economic forums, annual Davos retreat to do that. Recently I saw Dr. Robert Malone actually published. I think he got a bunch of researchers working on this. There’s just an astounding number of people that have been involved in these, world economic forums. So at the very least they’re I guess influenced by the way of thinking. And, it is very much across the world, it’s remarkable. Actually. I had no idea there was that they had so many such a reach into almost everywhere.

Yeah. I didn’t know much about it either. That’s one of the things that COVID really opened my eyes to. That there are a lot of nefarious organizations that we just rode off. And part of that was that very few journalists were willing to take this on. And the ones that did had already been disenfranchised, written off as crazy conspiracy theorists. I mean, imagine if you had warned that in January of 2020, that the entire world was going to be shut down for two years, people would label you a nut job. But of course that’s exactly what happened in most of the world. So I think it is, it was an important lesson in being very open about the possibility that there’s all these global shapers and that there’s a lot of important people working behind the scenes that are part of this club of elites.

And we very much don’t get access to them. And the press that we have that gets access to them, they don’t do the job in reporting on them. So that’s how something like that happens when we find this situation where maybe the World Economic Forum or the WHO exposes a little bit too much of their influence. And we’re like, whoa cloud, Schwab’s, talking about having World’s Economic Forum, influence people in the top cabinets of foreign governments that have nothing to do with his Switzerland based organization. Like how is Justin Trudeau’s deputy? Like she has an official board position in the World’s economic forum. And you have all of these global shapers and World Economic Forum, young leaders that seem to be put on this pathway to political leadership. I think Jacinda Ardern who’s the prime minister of New Zealand was one of these people.

He had so many of these folks that were groomed from an early age to become politicians that were going to set this common agenda. And those of us like in independent media, or if you’re advocating for individual liberty in the political space, I think my side was caught very off guard by this, that we didn’t even know that there were these networks and maybe some people did, but it’s time to definitely raise awareness about these networks and the power that they possess. You you think of your country just has like this one person, one vote, and that’s really it, but systems of government are complex and subject to corruption and intrusion, and definitely worth continuing to report on those avenues.

Mr. Jekielek:
So how do you pick your stories? I mean your own man, right? You can cover whatever you want.

Mr. Schachtel:
So I specifically try not to cover something that I feel has already been covered extensively. I think that’s what my audience likes. I try to take a unique approach to every single thing that I write, because otherwise, like why bother, is my view? I’ve never been a click bait guy. I think that’s why my audience appreciates me is that I just simply find something I think is important and interesting. Take my time with it and try to be as fair and objective as I can. And I don’t claim in my journalism that I’m some type of like neutral arbiter of truth. Like I come at it from my perspective. My perspective is very clear.

Mr. Jekielek:
So people will come to seeking perhaps being interested in your perspective. And so what is that?

Mr. Schachtel:
I’d say prior to COVID my backgrounds in foreign affairs and foreign policy is very focused on that. My politics were probably like traditional right of center. And now I’ve come to prioritize liberty, especially I’ve become much more interested in monetary policy. I’m a big Bitcoin advocate. I think it’s essential that we do what we can in society to separate the government from having a controlling interest over our wealth. You saw this when they printed $6 trillion over the last couple years, I think that Nancy Pelosi, Joe Biden, Mitch McConnell, and Kevin McCarthy should be nowhere near our wealth. And it’s definitely changed my view substantially going through this pandemic crisis, I am even more skeptical of government control than ever before. So that’s where I’m at much more. I lean very heavily in the direction of individual liberty.

Mr. Jekielek:
What’s it like today being an independent journalist?

Mr. Schachtel:
It’s interesting because there are positives such as you can write everything you want, but you don’t have an editor. So you got to do more work. I like similar to an entrepreneur’s mindset where you are entirely responsible for your work. I like having complete responsibility over my product. You don’t have to worry about if you’re getting into the journalism space, if you’re writing your own thing, that your editor’s going to create some crazy headlines, some click bait headline or whatever. It’s really cool. And I think that’s where the future of this space is moving towards smaller, more maneuverable journalism interviews. I really am encouraged by the demise of these giant corporate press institutions that are just so corrupt that they need to go. And I think that these big tech organizations, Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, they are artificially inflating their reach.

And I think once those avenues, those big tech avenues are targeted, folks like the New York Times, Washington Post, I think they just have no chance. Because I think the smarter more interesting writers interviewers, they’re all elsewhere now, you don’t attract the best talent by conforming to certain narratives. The best talent I think just has their own narratives that they want to explore. So I’m very encouraged by the developments in that space.

I remember, I didn’t know much about The Epoch Times until 2016, the Trump Russia fiascos going on and your publication did better work than anyone. And The Epoch Times came out of nowhere and had all these interesting journalists and staff. And that was one of the reasons that got me thinking, maybe I should go independent and just start my own thing. But I think that again, like all of the more interesting work comes elsewhere. I think there’s still the beltway elites that read the Washington Post and the financial executives still read the Wall Street Journal in the New York Times. So it influences the elites, but I still think that the future of journalism is elsewhere, for sure.

Mr. Jekielek:
You know, so as we finish up, it is very interesting how there’s a whole movement that has been building over the last however many years, especially during COVID. And there’s been many times that I’ve heard people saying wow, there is this obvious kind of ruling class or elite class. And, and also it’s very obvious that they have no business making the rules based on what’s actually transpiring, because of them I have keep hearing these types of directions. So where do you see this set of emergent, I guess, movement going, because you’re suggesting there is one, right?

Mr. Schachtel:
I think we’ll get a taste of it in the United States in these upcoming midterm elections, I would expect to see a lot of these folks swept away. Fauci famously said that he’s not going to serve under Trump again, or probably any Republican president. So I think we’ll see the political results of COVID mania show its face in elections. But with this decentralization movement, whether it’s online or whether it’s through the press, I think it’ll pay dividends, not just through the political process, but through our local communities, lots of states, counties, local areas realized the dangers of allowing bureaucrats to do whatever they want. So maybe something as simple as not having an appointed public health expert to run your county, but make that person elected, make them accountable to the people who they serve. I think through democratization, decentralization, through getting more involved in our communities, that’s really the ticket to personal freedom.

And through other strategies, you had Ron DeSantis who took it upon himself as governor to protect the rights of kids to not have to wear a mask. So sometimes you can just have the state governor try these interventions. And I think one of the great things about America’s Federalist system is that the states for now still have a lot of autonomy and you can still do even from a lower level, there’s a lot you can do in your community to protect your rights. And I think that COVID has activated a lot of once non-political just kind of like going through their days in this simulation, it’s activated a lot of people to realize the necessity of protecting their liberties, that they need to have be active stakeholders in this process.

And they can’t rely on some bureaucrats to keep them safe and protected. Like there is no such thing as that. You need to be personally responsible for the defense of your community, your own health. And I think that’s really, to me, the lesson learned, and that’s why I’m optimistic about it because I see, although some of it is anecdotal, the evidence of so many people online or even on TV, like saying much more interesting things than they did in the past. Just kind of being part of this giant blob. So I’m very encouraged by that.

Mr. Jekielek:
Well, Jordan Schachtel, such a pleasure to have you on.

Mr. Schachtel:
Yeah. Thanks again, Jan. Appreciate you having me.

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