American Thought Leaders Jan Jekielek

“At the age of 10, I formed a question in my mind, which was: how can you hate me when you don’t even know me? And now, for the next 56 years, I’ve been looking for the answer to that question.”
The son of American Foreign Service members, Daryl Davis grew up in many different countries and was exposed to a variety of cultures, religions, and ideologies. He became an internationally renowned musician, touring and performing with the likes of Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and B.B. King. But a personal experience with bigotry at a young age made him curious about why people hate.
“When I met this guy, he was a Grand Dragon. And he rose through the ranks to Imperial Wizard. And when he dropped out, because of this perception change and hanging out with me, he gave me his Klan robe and his hood,” says Mr. Davis.
Today, Mr. Davis has made a second career out of befriending white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and members of the Ku Klux Klan, helping over 200 of them to renounce their racist ideology.
“People ask me: Daryl, why don’t you burn that stuff? No, I’m not going to burn it,” says Mr. Davis, referring to his Klan paraphernalia. “Yes, it is despicable. But it’s also a part of our history. And you don’t burn our history: the good, the bad, the ugly, and the shameful. You expose it, so it doesn’t happen again.”
In this episode, we dive into Mr. Davis’s childhood, his passion for music, his encounters with the Klan, and the methodology he uses for helping them to renounce their racism.
“The greatest weapon to combat racism, anti-Semitism, [and] all types of discrimination is the least expensive weapon known to man. It’s free, yet it is the most underused. It’s called conversation,” says Mr. Davis.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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The failures of our COVID response and the “gender-affirming” care model have made a lot of people question science and medicine in the West.
Mihai Nadin argues that science and medicine went awry a long time ago—in foundational ways.
He’s a scholar and researcher with broad insights spanning electrical engineering, computer science, aesthetics, human-computer interaction, and post-industrial society, and he’s the author of “Disrupt Science: The Future Matters.”
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

“This catastrophic response that we faced during this pandemic will happen again in our lifetimes. The new normal is lockdown until vaccine. That is how we’re going to manage pandemics until there’s an explicit repudiation of the doctrine by public health,” says Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, professor of health policy at Stanford University and one of the co-authors of the Great Barrington Declaration.
In this episode, Dr. Bhattacharya shares his theory on what happened these last four years and the link between seemingly disparate events.
Dr. Bhattacharya is one of the plaintiffs in a landmark free speech case against the Biden administration, Murthy v. Missouri, and the co-host of the Illusion of Consensus podcast.
“The International Health Regulations and the WHO treaty are a way to essentially institutionalize this paradigm of how to manage pandemics going forward. You can’t have a Sweden next time that bucks the agenda,” he says.
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Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

“In this complex machinery, there are these things called ratings agencies ... and they put a number on how trustworthy individual publications are,” says Freddie Sayers. “If they give you a zero or they put you on the naughty list, you don’t get any advertising. Your business model is pretty much turned off overnight.”
Mr. Sayers is the editor-in-chief of UnHerd, and he recently started looking into the systems of programmatic advertising after he discovered UnHerd had been given a zero rating for trustworthiness and placed on a “dynamic exclusion list” by the Global Disinformation Index.
In this episode, he breaks down what he’s uncovered about the workings of what he calls “the disinformation industry.”
“This is taxpayer dollars flowing into completely unaccountable, self-created organizations,” Mr. Sayers says.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

“When someone asks me where are you from, I say I’m from America, because I’m from so many different places, growing up in a motorhome, but also in houses, in sheds,” says Carrie Sheffield. “There were parts of my experience as a child that I really treasure that taught me to love America. But there unfortunately was a lot of abuse as well.”
Now a columnist, broadcaster, and senior policy analyst for Independent Women’s Voice with a Masters in Public Policy from Harvard University, Ms. Sheffield grew up with seven siblings and an abusive, mentally ill father who thought he was a modern-day Mormon prophet. Always on the move, Ms. Sheffield rotated between 17 public schools—as well as homeschooling—over the course of her childhood. The glue in the family was her mother.
She is the author of the new memoir, “Motorhome Prophecies: A Journey of Healing and Forgiveness.”
In this episode, drawing from her own life circumstances, she offers some profound insights into the cultural malaise she sees afflicting America—from the rise in suicide and depression to the epidemic of addiction and isolation—and a path forward.
“We put human intellect in the place of God. And so even though we are materially better off, and even though we have economic wealth, it has come at a price, and that price is the humility and the recognition of the giver of our gifts. We’ve substituted worship for the giver of our gifts, with worship of the gifts. And any society that is ordered in this way is disordered,” Ms. Sheffield says.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

In 2021, Winston Marshall sent a tweet congratulating Andy Ngo for his book, “Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy.” He soon found himself and his band, Mumford & Sons, at the center of a firestorm.
Three years later, he’s the host of The Winston Marshall Show and co-founder of the “Dissident Dialogues” festival of ideas, which held its first gathering recently in Brooklyn in New York City.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.