“If you allow people to say, ‘Oh, declaring an emergency means that rights don’t apply,’ then there’s going to be lots of emergencies.”

With the spread of Big Tech censorship and lockdowns of the unvaccinated, are elements of China’s internet firewall and Orwellian social credit system now spreading to the West?

In part two of our interview with Robert Destro, former assistant secretary of state for Democracy, Human Rights, and Labor (DRL), we discuss the state of human rights in the United States and the rest of the Western world. Destro is also a law professor at The Catholic University of America’s Columbus School of Law.

Previously, in part one of this interview, we discussed human rights atrocities in China, from slave labor in Xinjiang to state-sanctioned organ harvesting of Falun Gong practitioners.

“You have to stand up against tyranny. Otherwise, it will eat you alive,” Destro says.

Related Coverage

PART 1: China’s Communist Leaders Are ‘Traffickers’ Selling Human Organs—Robert Destro on ‘Genocides’ of Uyghurs, Falun Gong

Below is a rush transcript of this American Thought Leaders episode from Dec 11, 2021. This transcript may not be in its final form and may be updated.

Jan Jekielek: What are you seeing? What are you seeing here on the ground? What are you seeing in other liberal democracies around the world right now?

Robert Destro, Ph.D.: Well, one of the things we’re seeing is the weakness of institutions. We have to have strong institutions. And one of the part of the genius of the framers of the constitution was founded Federalist 51, where they said, first, we divided up all the power between federal and state, and then we divided it among branches. The whole idea was that so you have places where you could go to complain. The idea was that the people who would protect you were the ones who were closest to you, starting with your family and then moving upwards, right? We have a decentralized understanding of how you protect human rights. In any country where it’s centralized, if those institutions fail, you’re done.

“Many societies have been constructed around this idea of clean and unclean. That’s what we did. And it’s grim. It’s brutal. It’s anti-modern.”

At the Brownstone Institute’s inaugural conference in Hartford, Connecticut, we sat down with Brownstone founder and president Jeffrey Tucker to discuss vaccine mandates, the devastating consequences of lockdown policies, and his vision to create an intellectual sanctuary for free discussion and scientific inquiry.

“Shutting the schools, closing the churches, sending SWAT teams into rural Texas bars to arrest people for drinking beers—they did all these terrible things. But once they invested so heavily in this population-wide experiment all over the world, now you have a problem, right? Because you’ve got a ruling class that’s not going to admit error. So that’s when the lies began. And the lies have not stopped. We live in a world of lies,” Tucker says.