Trillions on pills, not prevention: The chronic disease cover-up



For decades, the government’s dietary guidelines have dictated what Americans eat, and surprise, surprise — we’re sicker than ever.

Today, 60% of the American population have at least one chronic disease, and roughly 85% of the nation's $5.3 trillion annual health care spending goes toward treating chronic diseases, such as diabetes, hypertension, high cholesterol, obesity, heart disease, and cancer.

We know that the number-one factor in chronic disease is poor diet, and yet the government has long pushed the very highly processed foods that make us sick, while promoting pharmaceutical drugs as the magic answer.

For example, it’s not uncommon to hear the government debate how to lower insulin prices.

“You can just eliminate the need for insulin by just getting people off the one macronutrient that causes blood sugar to spike, and that is carbohydrate,” investigative science journalist Nina Teicholz told BlazeTV host Nicole Shanahan on a recent episode of “Back to the People.”

“The current thinking is: Don't restrain yourself — eat the cake, eat the bread, but then you have to cover it with insulin. How about just don't eat the bread, don't eat the cake, and reverse your condition?” she asks.

Nina expresses frustration that such a simple fix — one that would save us “almost a billion dollars a day” and “reverse other chronic conditions” — has been so impossible to push in the public square.

“Nobody discusses this. It's like a taboo subject,” she laments.

Nicole agrees. “No, we have a president [Joe Biden] and a senator, Bernie Sanders, standing together hugging one another, talking about reducing the cost of drugs. … There’s not a single politician out there that is charting a path for people to get off of drug reliance.”

The duo reflect back on the disappointing White House Conference on Hunger, Nutrition, and Health hosted by the Biden-Harris administration in 2022, which Nicole helped raise funding for.

Sugar — perhaps the biggest contributor to chronic diseases — wasn’t even mentioned.

“What came out of that [conference] was a huge amount of investment in the fake-food sector. It was fake protein, fake seafood, more fake meats, fake dairy, fake eggs. Those are ultra-processed foods that replace natural whole foods,” says Nina.

The other result of the conference was “a total doubling down on the dietary guidelines, which have been shown to not work.”

Nicole was hopeful that the 2018 Farm Bill, which governs agricultural and food programs, including farm subsidies, crop insurance, nutrition assistance (like SNAP), and rural development, would "[support] farmers who are producing really great, clean food,” but sadly, the Farm Bill has “made virtually no progress” when it comes to health.

“If anything ... it's added protections to the agrochemical businesses,” she laments.

Further, “SNAP has grown so enormously and without any restrictions or caps on how SNAP is spent. Soda remains the largest single item that consumers purchase with their SNAP benefits.”

Why is the government so resistant to moving toward the simple adjustments that would reverse chronic diseases? As Nicole and Nina see it, it's obvious: “Pretty much every member of Congress is supported by the pharmaceutical industry.”

“They make profits when people are unhealthy, not healthy,” Nina says frankly.

To hear more of the conversation, watch the full interview above.

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Faith in the age of science: Why God still matters



Once an outspoken atheist, Stanford bioengineering professor Annelise Barron was deeply influenced by Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens — before rediscovering God through personal tragedy and the limits of science.

“I lost someone super close to me in a very shocking way to suicide two and a half years ago. And because he had killed himself, I suddenly became super anxious — like, is he in hell? You know, because this is what you vaguely hear, like, if you kill yourself, this is a cardinal sin,” Barron tells BlazeTV host Nicole Shanahan on “Back to the People.”

“So I started researching it and reading the Bible, and I just, you know, had an incredible revival of my own faith based on thinking about that question,” she explains.


And when Barron began hearing the testimonials of other believers who survived tragic circumstances that science couldn’t explain, her faith deepened further.

“What’s astonishing is, like, from one moment to the next, if you ask for help in a sincere way, you ask for healing, it can be given. And whether it’s an addiction or a disease or, you know, a habit that you’re not happy with — so I am just 100% certain that God is real and that He does love each one of us,” Barron tells Shanahan.

“All He wants from us is to be in closer relationship with Him. And I think it’s extraordinary how that can help your personal happiness,” she adds.

Shanahan couldn’t agree more, explaining that the healing she’s “found in full faith of Jesus as savior” can’t be replicated “through any other bioengineered mechanism.”

“I believe that,” Barron agrees.

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Poisoned patriots: The Camp Lejeune tragedy the government ignored



Camp Lejeune was a Marine Corps base in North Carolina where Virginia Robinson dedicated 25 years of her life to working and raising her family — unaware that they were drinking, bathing, and living with poisoned water the entire time.

But the government knew, and despite the sickness that plagued the inhabitants, they never told them.

“I had three cancers I was fighting at one time,” Robinson tells BlazeTV host Nicole Shanahan on “Back to the People.”

Robinson not only had three cancers at the same time, but she also survived leukemia, colon cancer while pregnant, and two separate diagnoses of breast cancer. And she wasn’t the only one in her family affected.


Her husband passed away in 2014, her daughter followed shortly after, and her father was diagnosed with Parkinson’s. Another daughter of hers was born with a spinal tumor and died young from bladder cancer.

All of them were exposed to Camp Lejeune’s water.

“What kind of levels of toxicity were in the water? Was it trace amounts or were there periods where there were large dumps and increases of contamination?” Shanahan asks.

“There was dumping involved, because there’s some videos. I don’t know where they’re at. My brother told me about them because he’s been doing a lot of research about this, and he said there was sites where there was trucks going on base and dumping from the laundromat,” Robinson explains.

“We’re talking about levels, Nicole, that are 10 times, 30 times, 50 times, 150 times EPA limits. We’re not talking about trace amounts of these chemicals. We’re talking about, as you would expect, the kind of amounts that are causing way elevated risks of a whole host of conditions,” she continues.

And unfortunately, when Robinson has gone to the government for help, it has turned her away.

“I have no doubt that they caused your cancer, your pain and suffering, the deaths, just horrific lives, right? Because they’ve done it to millions of Americans through faulty vaccines,” Shanahan says, adding, “I don’t know if there is justice in this country or we have a real justice system.”

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Veteran reporter EXPOSES the corruption of modern journalism from the inside



Veteran journalist Paul Bond is breaking the silence on what really happens inside major newsrooms — and it’s not comforting for those who want to believe that there are still objective journalists out there.

“If we don’t have journalists that say, ‘I will be an objective journalist, not an activist,’ we are a communist country,” BlazeTV host Nicole Shanahan tells Bond, who has some bad news for Shanahan.

“Problem is, we have lots of people who say that; they just don’t mean it,” Bond warns. “I mean, if you ask the people who work for the New York Times and the Washington Post and Newsweek and Time and MSNBC and CNN, they will tell you, ‘I’m an objective journalist.’”

“I’ve met some that are good, and they’re hard to find,” Shanahan agrees.


“It’s hard to be a trusted journalist,” Bond says, “because you’re dealing with others with other agendas. And, you know, sometimes somebody at Newsweek or at the Hollywood Reporter would reach out to me saying, ‘Hey, we’re writing this piece on so and so, and we know you have a relationship with them. Can you get a comment?’”

“I’ll reach out for a comment, and they’ll give me a comment because they trust me. And then it’s this hit piece. And so, I feel like I was used,” he adds.

Bond recalls once interviewing Jesse Watters from Fox News while someone at Newsweek was writing a negative piece about Watters at the same exact time.

“I forgot what it was, but in that story, it says, you know, ‘Newsweek was unable to reach Jesse Watters.’ And I’m like, ‘I’m on the phone with Jesse Watters. Newsweek is able to reach Jesse Watters. I’m talking to Jesse Watters about this thing that you’re writing about,’” he recalls.

“They wanted their hit piece. They didn’t want him to deny that it was true, or whatever he would have said if he hadn’t been on the phone with me. So, they write this hit piece. They publish this hit piece. ‘No access to Jesse Watters,’” he says, noting that this happens all the time.

“A lot of times, they’ll reach out to people to get their comment after the story’s written,” he adds.

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Rebel filmmaker unmasks Hollywood’s creative stranglehold on America’s cultural voice



Alex Lee Moyer is a filmmaker, director, and editor, but unlike most cinematic creatives, she isn’t defined by Hollywood capture.

Her edge? Telling the stories nobody wants to touch. “TFW No GF” (2020) dives headfirst into the isolation and alienation of young men in digital subcultures, like incels and Frogtwitter, while “Alex’s War” (2022) explores the rise and impact of controversial media figure Alex Jones.

But neither of these films aims to sway the viewer in any specific direction.

“I'm not trying to make propaganda films. I'm just trying to get to the heart of things ... that people, including myself, have anxiety about,” she told BlazeTV host Nicole Shanahan on a recent episode of “Back to the People.”

Moyer isn’t interested in portraying someone like Alex Jones, for example, as the good guy or the bad guy. “More importantly, he’s a guy. He’s a real person. ... Demystifying some of those [controversial] topics can actually kind of bring people together in conversation,” she says.

Ironically, Moyer’s pursuit of facts would have been considered “a liberal cause” just a few years ago. But after the COVID-19 pandemic, things changed. The hyper politicization of today’s culture has caused her work, which is intentionally apolitical, to be falsely labeled as “right wing.”

“The Hollywood narrative is so narrow right now that if you're outside of it, you're somehow unworthy or irresponsible or unethical,” says Nicole.

The reason we see so many films driven by left-wing political agendas is because high-up executives in the industry have an incredible amount of sway. “In order for something to get made, it has to go through so many different filters,” says Moyer, “and it's not just about whether somebody perceives offense themselves. It has a lot to do with whether they think their boss, or you know, somebody at the streaming platform is going to take offense.”

“Hollywood is not going to be taking any risks — not when you have threats from AI, not when you have threats from appeasing people in other countries like China or ... not wanting to run afoul of the homogeny of liberalism in Hollywood. There's a lot of things that keep them locked in place,” she explains.

While many are tempted to relegate Hollywood to an irredeemable ash heap, both Moyer and Nicole argue it plays a critical role in society.

“We should care about what happens there because it's one of the great sources of soft power for the United States, and it helps forge our identity here and in the rest of the world,” says Moyer.

Nicole agrees, stating, “A failure of Hollywood is a big deal, and a Hollywood that doesn't represent America and American culture and ideals is scary.”

Instead of crossing her fingers hoping for a Hollywood revolution, Moyer is taking matters into her own hands. In late 2023, she founded her own production company called Onset Creative.

The company’s aim, she says, is “to focus first and foremost on developing projects that [cannot] be made anywhere else that reflect the cultural moment, namely the present and the recent past.”

To hear about Moyer’s next documentary “The Technologists” — an honest look into the rapidly advancing world of artificial intelligence and its cultural impacts — watch the full interview above.

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Elon Musk-endorsed Harvard philosopher delivers powerful take on healing America’s political divide



You’ve never seen a resume quite like Kaizen Asiedu’s. He’s a Harvard philosophy graduate with an Emmy-winning career at Riot Games, who’s been publicly endorsed by Elon Musk as a “clear thinker.” After years in the e-sports industry, Asiedu left his impressive role as an architect at League of Legends to pursue life coaching.

And then quite by accident, he transitioned into the political arena when he spoke out on July 13, 2024, about President Trump’s near assassination. Even though Asiedu was a centrist who usually voted liberal or just avoided politics altogether, watching Trump narrowly avoid death was “a spiritual experience,” he tells BlazeTV host Nicole Shanahan.

“When I saw him get shot and get up and put his fist up, it was like the center of my chest just jumped out of me,” he says.

“I just thought if humanity has gotten to the point where people, regardless of who shot him and why ... are trying to kill one another over politics, we've gone too far and I need to say something.”

He made a video responding to the horrific act of violence — a “message of basic humanity,” he calls it — and it instantly went viral. Without really meaning to, Asiedu launched himself into the political sphere, where he’s since become well known for his nonpartisan approach to teaching people how to engage with politics and social issues in a way that bridges the fiery chasm that’s formed between the right and the left.

On a recent episode of “Back to the People,” Asiedu shared some of his philosophy.

“There's just so much media manipulation and confusion and division that it's causing people to actually celebrate violence,” he tells Nicole.

“So many of us have checked out of politics or have tried to check out ... because [we] felt like there's no humanity in it anymore. It's just a bunch of political machinations and games and name calling, and it's just so distasteful because politics is really supposed to just be the software upon which civilization operates. It's not supposed to be this all-consuming thing,” he explains.

There’s a huge population in the country, he says, that doesn’t want any part of the political warring, smoke and mirrors, pandering, or media bias that’s come to define modern politics. Instead, they crave unfiltered truth and respectful discourse among people with opposing views.

“People still underestimate how many of us want that. It's just buried under layers of extremity and the loudest voices dominating the room,” says Asiedu.

“I want realness. I want authenticity. I want people who say what they believe, even if I don't like it because that's how we actually can get to the point where we battle these ideas out in the public square and we come up with the best solutions,” he adds.

The other thing we need to do is “treat the truth as an inherent virtue.”

“We're afraid that saying the truth makes us come across as judgmental. It's like if we say, ‘Hey, a homeless person shouldn't be able to just live on the street or be in a public park or harass people,’ then that means we're not compassionate. It's like, no, actually, we can be compassionate and still want boundaries,” says Asiedu.

He explains that even though much of the social media censorship that barred Americans from speaking freely during the pandemic has lightened, “There's still a cultural suppression of having conversations about narratives that run counter to the idea that America is awful.”

For example, one of the topics Asiedu has been recently covering is slavery. In his videos, he’s been debunking the idea that slavery is a white invention, explaining that it’s “a collective evil that all humans share.”

“The common theme throughout history is not that white people [enslaved] black people ... but that people with power abused people who didn't have power,” he says.

Many have praised him for being brave enough to speak out about the false narrative around slavery, but Asiedu says “pointing out historical facts” shouldn’t have to require bravery.

But sadly, in today’s culture where even facts are considered offensive, it does take guts to speak the truth. “The reason it's scary is because you get projected upon when you say these things. And then people will call me a race trader or say that I'm tap dancing for white people or whatever. And it's like, look, actually the reason I'm saying it is because I think the truth is helpful for everyone,” he says.

“It's cultural software; it's programming. ... There's American cultural software, there's black cultural software, there's white cultural software, and everything in between. The problem is when we become so attached to that software, we can't actually see people as individuals.”

He explains that for a long time black people were viewed as intellectually inferior, but today, that prejudice is aimed mostly at white people, especially white men, because progressives view them as “morally inferior.”

But this mindset is not only racist, it keeps us entrenched in the past and unable to move in a positive direction. “The only thing you can do is perpetuate the past or you can focus on the future,” says Asiedu.

If we continue to be obsessed with past sins, we will continue cultivating a culture of hatred. And “hatred hurts both the hater and the hated. So when you engage in any form of hatred, it always comes back around on you,” he warns, explaining that racism begets racism. Black resentment from slavery has transferred to white people who are decades removed from it, and that in turn is causing some white people to become racist toward black people again.

“If you keep swinging the pendulum from left to right, everyone gets damaged because hatred just keeps on getting transferred instead of getting healed,” he says.

His solution? We need a common enemy to unite us.

But that enemy “needs to be hatred and division itself,” he says.

To hear more of Asiedu’s insightful commentary, watch the full interview above.

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Detransitioner’s heartbreaking story exposes the dark side of ‘gender-affirming care’



It isn’t enough for conservatives to push back against the liberal-spawned transgender movement that’s urging vulnerable children to take artificial hormones and undergo irreversible surgeries that mutilate their healthy bodies. We need people who have experienced the horrors of trans mania firsthand to speak out.

Thankfully, some detransitioners are doing just that. One of them is Chloe Cole, an activist in California who’s sharing her experience “transitioning” genders starting when she was just 12 years old to warn gender-confused minors against the pitfalls of the trans movement.

On an episode of “Back to the People,” BlazeTV host Nicole Shanahan sat down with Chloe to hear her heartbreaking yet hopeful story.

Chloe was 12 years old when she was introduced to the transgender community on social media. She started following the accounts of many young trans people because she felt a connection to them.

“They reminded me so much of myself in so many different ways. A lot of these people were artistic; they were creative; they had a unique fashion sense; they were very individual; they wanted to set themselves apart from the other people,” she says.

Their struggle with being bullied for being tomboys or effeminate boys resonated deeply with Chloe, who was also being bullied in school. On social media, she witnessed their “sense of happiness and wholeness” as they created new identities by cutting their hair short, wearing clothes of the opposite gender, and adopting new names and pronouns.

Tragically, many of these kids found that their new identity was more accepted than their genuine one. This often led them to pursue surgeries and hormonal therapy.

And Chloe was no exception. She was put on the drug Lupron, which was originally used for reproductive cancers, hormonal disorders, and chemical castration for sex offenders.

However, “a lot of facilities have stopped using this drug to castrate those sex offenders because it's been deemed too cruel for use in that population,” says Chloe, pointing out the irony that it’s now marketed toward “perfectly healthy children.”

Convinced that she was truly a male, Chloe was put on testosterone and eventually had an elective double mastectomy at age 15. Her breasts weren’t just removed; they were intentionally reshaped to appear more masculine. All of this, she explains, was covered by insurance because California mandates that insurers cover all “gender-affirming care.”

Just a year later, though, when Chloe was 16, she began her detransitioning journey when she realized that she wanted to be a mother someday. She remains grateful that she didn’t pursue further surgeries that would have stolen that opportunity from her.

Today, Chloe is using her story and her voice to speak out about the dangers of transgenderism, offering hope to confused minors who feel stuck in the wrong body.

To hear Chloe and Nicole dive into the darkest parts of the transgender movement, including the horrendous grooming and predation trans-identifying kids are subjected to, watch the interview above.

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Where’s the outrage?! This whistleblower's vaccine injury lawsuit demands national attention



In 2021, Deborah Conrad, a physician assistant from Rochester, New York, was fired from her role at Rochester Regional Health’s United Memorial Medical Center.

Deborah’s crime?

Doing her job.

When she noticed adverse events following COVID-19 vaccination in her patients, she reported it to VAERS — the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System. Federal regulations, including Emergency Use Authorization requirements for COVID-19 vaccines like Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, mandate that health care providers report specific adverse events to VAERS.

But when Deborah fulfilled her lawful duty, she was terminated.

Today, she is neck-deep in a landmark False Claims Act lawsuit against her former employer, challenging institutional suppression of reporting. Her case has thankfully reached the discovery phase, where evidence will be gathered to expose potential violations and seek justice for her retaliatory dismissal.

On a recent episode of “Back to the People,” Nicole Shanahan sat down with Deborah to hear a story that demands national attention.

In December 2020, the first COVID-19 vaccines hit the market, but they were initially reserved for high-risk individuals, especially the elderly, as that was considered the most vulnerable group.

Deborah immediately began noticing that several of her geriatric patients experienced deadly falls shortly after receiving the vaccine. “They would pass out and fall, hit their head, develop brain bleeds, strokes, acute mental status changes, heart attacks, sudden heart failure. I mean, the list just goes on and on, and the proximity to which they received the vaccine and then the onset of these symptoms often was within sometimes minutes to overnight,” she tells Nicole.

She explains that she and the staff at United Memorial Medical Center “did not receive any education about any possible side effects or what to do if [they] saw them happening,” nor were they trained to use the VAERS system, despite it being a legal requirement. Even their formal training ignored vaccine side effects.

“We are basically told they are safe and effective and to memorize the childhood vaccine schedule and that's it. And so it's ingrained in us from our training to never look at vaccines in any negative light,” she says.

Not knowing what to do about the obvious issues she was seeing in her patients, Deborah set out to find answers. “I went online and found the Vaccine Adverse Event Reporting System and read all about it and taught myself how to file reports. … I then went and volunteered to be the reporting liaison and the educator for our system,” she says.

Initially, Deborah was rewarded for her above-and-beyond efforts. She was even “nominated by the New York State Society of Physician Assistance to sit on the board for professional misconduct for the state.”

But then things took a sharp turn.

Even though it required hours of her time to dig into medical records, take calls back from the CDC, and fill out pages of information for each case, Deborah continued to faithfully file VAERS reports for the sake of her patients and the millions of people across the country taking the vaccine.

“I've probably filed … close to 300 reports. I certainly think I am the person in the country that has filed the most VAERS reports at this point — really,” she says.

Sadly, none of Deborah’s reports have resulted in her patients receiving compensation — even the most well-documented and clear-cut cases.

Over time, Deborah started getting pushback from superiors who accused her of being anti-vaccine. They pelted her with questions, like “How do you know this is due to the COVID vaccine?” even though VAERS requires medical providers to report serious side effects that accompany vaccine administration, even if they think the events are unrelated.

“We're just mandatory reporters, as we are in child abuse situations, right? We're not there to judge who's abusing the child or determine that. That's not our job,” says Deborah.

But even though she explained the legal requirements and stressed the pre-eminence of patient safety to her supervisors, “the gaslighting just kept continuing.” They repeatedly labeled her “an anti-vaxxer” and told her to “toe the company line.”

But Deborah didn’t ease up. Having no support in the hospital, she began filing reports on her days off for both her own patients and the patients of other staff members, all while continuing to pressure supervisors to put a system in place.

One of her supervisors eventually elevated her concerns to higher-ups at Rochester Regional Health. “That's when the suppression really started,” says Deborah. Her VAERS reports were silently audited, and she was reprimanded for “over-reporting,” even though every report she filed matched “the exact criteria on VAERS.”

As a punishment, her supervisors limited the number of reports Deborah could file to just her own patients. When she demanded confirmation that other staff members were filing VAERs reports for their own patients, reminding her supervisors that failing to do so was “committing fraud,” she was met with resistance.

“They basically said, ‘It's not your business,”’ she recounts.

“And I said, ‘No, it is my business. … This is a criminal problem here — like you are billing for these vaccines, you are saying you are completing VAERS reports and you're not, and if I know about it and I do nothing about it, then I'm just as guilty.”’

When it was clear that she would get no support from her supervisors, Deborah contacted the CDC, the FDA, the New York State Department of Health, and the New York State accrediting body and was finally able to get some legal help. She even went public with her concerns.

If anything, this only expedited her termination. After months of being called an anti-vaxxer, accused of spreading vaccine misinformation, and receiving threats to file a petition for her license removal, Deborah was surrounded by HR reps from Rochester Regional Health during the middle of her shift on October 6, 2021, and fired.

“I wasn't allowed to get my things,” she says.

“My health insurance was canceled. I couldn't apply for unemployment. They even fought me in being able to get my benefit time off that they owed me.”

Today, Rochester Regional Health is claiming the corporation fired Deborah for refusing to get the vaccine, which was required for medical staff, but its case is shaky, as she was in the process of obtaining “a valid and approved religious exemption” when she was fired.

Thankfully, with her case now in the discovery phase and strong evidence of institutional suppression, Deborah has a promising chance of proving that her termination was retaliatory for her whistleblowing efforts to uphold patient safety.

To hear the most shocking details and stories from inside Deborah’s hospital, watch the full interview above.

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Love seafood? Here’s why you should skip the grocery store.



When people go to the seafood counter at the grocery store, they face a barrage of concerns: Does the fish contain high mercury levels? Has it been imported from countries where seafood is regularly injected with preservatives, colorants, or antibiotics to extend shelf life or enhance appearance? Was the fish grown in a lab?

Does it come from a farm where fish breed in crowded, unsanitary containers, leading to a massive reduction in nutritional value? And even if the fish is wild-caught, has it ingested toxic residue from geoengineering practices — or worse, radioactive contamination like the recent shrimp scare?

“Fish shopping? Not easy,” says BlazeTV host Nicole Shanahan, who’s a seafood lover.

To help fellow seafood enthusiasts navigate the tricky terrain of buying quality fish and other seafood and to help them understand just how corrupt the global fishing industry is, Nicole invited her friend Miles Wallace to the “Back to the People” podcast.

Wallace, she says, is what you call “a real fisherman.” That means he “owns the company, owns the boat, drives the boat, jumps in the water, gets the fish, kills the fish, brings everything to shore, and delivers it to packaging,” she says.

“From your perspective, how should somebody navigate the grocery store?” she asks.

The most surefire method to purchasing quality seafood, says Wallace, is to avoid the grocery stores entirely. Ideally, “find a reputable fisherman and order a big ol’ supply of fish and have them vacuum-seal it [and] flash-freeze it,” he advises.

If that’s not feasible, “you could go second- or third-party” and “order your fish from somebody like Santa Barbara Fish Market or Get Hooked,” both of which will ship quality seafood to your door.

Wallace praises the Trump administration for recognizing the escalating issues in the global seafood industry and taking measures to counteract it. He points to President Trump’s recent decision to deny Pebble Mine a key permit in order to protect Bristol Bay’s salmon fishery, which is fished predominantly by family-owned fishing companies and independent small-boat fishermen, who harvest the region’s wild sockeye salmon sustainably.

It’s these family-owned fishing businesses that are the key to obtaining seafood that is both safe for the environment and safe for human consumption.

“For the government to look at its domestic fishing industry and just say, ‘I’m going to back the family-owned fishing businesses’ — that is a win for literally everybody,” says Nicole. “It is a win for the environmentalists; it’s a win for the government; it’s a win for the consumer; it’s a win for our ocean ecosystem.”

To hear Miles and Nicole dive into other aquatic subjects, including why our sea kelp forests are collapsing, watch the episode above.

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Former insider exposes Big Pharma's dark side — and fights for health freedom for all



Leslie Manookian, now the president and founder of Health Freedom Defense Fund, was at the top of her career on Wall Street when she decided to leave it all behind for something more meaningful.

“I would say a big breakthrough moment for me was when the CEO, the CFO, the head of investor relations, and the head of R&D of one of the biggest pharmaceutical companies in the world came into our office to reassure us about their stock,” Manookian tells BlazeTV host Nicole Shanahan.

“Their stock was plummeting in the stock market. It was down 25% or 30%. And they were going and visiting with their biggest investors to reassure them that their new blockbuster drug was OK,” she explains.

“The problem was that rumors were trickling out from their phase three trials, which is the last phase of clinical trials that a drug goes through before it can apply for licensure from the FDA, that this drug was killing people,” she says.


Manookian tells Shanahan that when the CEO brought up this issue in a meeting, he looked at her across the table and said, “A few people have died. It’s very, very rare.”

“And he said without missing a beat, ‘The bad news is the FDA is going to make us put a black box warning on our packaging. The good news is we still think we can do seven billion in peak sales,’” she recalls.

“What was the drug for?” Shanahan asks.

“Let’s just say it’s a household name,” she answers. “Everybody knows this company at this point in time, and it was about 25 years ago.”

That led Manookian to leave her career behind to focus on health freedom.

“The reason I started Health Freedom Defense Fund was because going way back, I’d been in the Health Freedom space for 25 years now, or 20 years at that point. And as soon as 2020 opened, I was absolutely certain as much as I could be that what was happening was some kind of an operation in order to mandate vaccines and lockdowns and all these other things,” she tells Shanahan.

“It was a perfect script given everything they’d put in place for over 20 years to facilitate an authoritarian response to a so-called public health emergency,” she continues, adding, “And so I founded Health Freedom Defense Fund, because I wanted to be able to fight back.”

Now, the successful nonprofit seeks to rectify health injustice through education, advocacy, and legal challenges to unjust mandates, laws, and policies that undermine our health freedoms and human rights.

“You don’t wear a mask on an airplane because of Health Freedom Defense Fund,” Manookian explains. “We’re the organization that challenged and defeated the federal travel mask mandate in 2022.”

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