Author Forrest Maready joined guest host Richard Syrett to delve into the history, controversies, and health benefits of raw milk. He emphasized that foodborne outbreaks, like the recent one in Florida linked to raw milk, are often unfairly used to target small farms and raw milk producers. Maready argued that contamination can happen in many regulated foods, not just raw milk, and that such incidents are used by the industrial food complex to discredit natural alternatives. He noted that while it's unclear if raw milk truly caused the outbreak, officials tend to amplify such stories to reinforce the fear of raw milk.
Maready explained the historical "swill milk" crisis of the 1800s, where cows were fed the waste from distilleries, producing milk so toxic that tens of thousands of infants died each year. Journalists exposed the horrific conditions, such as cows too sick to stand being hoisted up to be milked, but the practice continued for decades. According to Maready, pasteurization is a band-aid solution that allowed industrial producers to keep selling adulterated milk. While it reduced deaths from contaminated milk, it also stripped milk of much of its nutritional value, forcing later fortification with vitamin D and other additives, he revealed.
Maready suggested that raw milk is a natural, living food humans have consumed for millennia, and that industrial practices, not raw milk itself, made it unsafe. He described how cows and humans share a symbiotic relationship, with milk quality influenced by the cow's emotions and diet. He argued that pasteurization and homogenization have created new health issues, with raw milk providing essential microbes and nutrients for gut health.
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In the second half of the program, Chinese history scholar Leeshai Lemish spoke about the persecution of Falun Gong practitioners by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). He explained that Falun Gong's rapid growth in the 1990s, reaching an estimated 70–100 million practitioners within a few years, alarmed Jiang Zemin and certain factions within the CCP. Although other top officials noted its health benefits and widespread appeal across social classes, Jiang viewed its popularity as a threat to Party authority and Marxist ideology. Falun Gong was neither political nor anti-communist, but Jiang feared its influence and resented its size surpassing that of CCP membership, Lemish revealed. This led to a propaganda campaign and the creation of the extralegal 610 Office in 1999, which spearheaded arrests, detentions, and the portrayal of Falun Gong as a dangerous cult to justify a nationwide crackdown.
Lemish highlighted the ideological conflict: Falun Gong's principles of truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance contrasted sharply with the CCP's materialist and authoritarian worldview. Since 1949, the Party had systematically destroyed traditional Chinese spiritual culture, replacing it with Marxist-Leninist atheism. Falun Gong's revival of moral and spiritual values threatened this control, and its practitioners' peaceful appeals underscored the contrast between Party repression and civil society. The crackdown escalated into mass arrests, torture, labor camps, and eventually forced organ harvesting.
Lemish detailed the brutality of forced organ harvesting, describing how practitioners were medically tested, then killed through organ removal, often while still alive under partial anesthesia. Military hospitals and officials profited from this system, selling organs to wealthy Chinese and international buyers. Lemish also noted that this atrocity expanded beyond Falun Gong to Uyghur Muslims, house Christians, and possibly Tibetan Buddhists. He emphasized the global implications—Western patients have unknowingly participated in this system—and pointed to legislative efforts like the Falun Gong Protection Act as steps toward accountability.