The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe - 438: Jan Jekielek—The Terrible Truth About China

Episode Date: May 27, 2025

Jan Jekielek is a senior editor with The Epoch Times and host of "American Thought Leaders." He has extensively covered the issue of forced organ harvesting in China, particularly concerning Falun Gong practitioners. It is estimated that 60,000 to 100,000 organs annually have been involuntarily extracted from political prisoners in China. Jan's investigative work has brought international attention to this human rights atrocity.

Hey guys, it's Mike Roe. This is the way I heard it. My guest today is Jan Ykelek. Chuck, did I get it right? Yeah, you said it exactly right. That's the way he says it. Full disclosure. This is the second time I'm doing this. And as you know, I hate to do anything two times. But as a rule, I hate to mispronounce my guest name. And likewise, you hate when I correct you. I do hate that a lot. So we did cut that out. You know what? There's something here to hate for everyone. Except for Jan, who is a terrific guy. He works for the epoch times. Sure. Let's go with you. Epac. Were you like epoch? I think what he said was epoch? Yeah, epoch or? Oh, God, here we go again. Whatever it is, I called him the Epic Times for like five years. That's what their advertising says, I believe.

I think it does too. Yeah. Well, look, we don't spend a lot of time talking about pronunciations in this episode, but we do spend some because the language matters an awful lot. And the Epoch Times interviewed me years ago, and I met Jan, who does a terrific series called American thought leaders. Yes. And he's also the senior editor over there at the Epoch or the Epoch or the Epic Times.

I've been wanting to have him on here for a while because I didn't really give these guys the credit I think they deserved for creating a really fantastic, journalistic enterprise. They really have put their money where their mouth is. And there's not a ton of money to go around. It's a subscription-based model. But this newspaper, unlike the journal or the New York Times, or really any other newspaper I can think of, began like 20 years ago in Georgia, and it was published entirely in Chinese. In Chinese for an American Chinese audience. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, because, well, some of you were old enough to remember Tiananmen Square and the full-on gong and the persecution that happened to something like 70 to 100. hundred million. This conversation is going to blow you away. It's called the terrible truth about China because there are many terrible truths, but how familiar, Chuck, were you with this one? Not as much as I, I mean, I'm embarrassed to say that I wasn't as aware, although I was aware of the organ harvesting, but only through Jan's work. Yeah. Well, spoiler alert, that's what's been in front of me now for the last couple of months. The more I've read about this, the more it's just

become something I can't not look at. It's 60 to 100,000 human organs a year are being taken from dissidents. From living people. Prisoners, people who have been put in prison, really because they're political enemies of the state. Right. Anyway, we're talking about hearts and livers and kidneys and lungs and all sorts of things. And it's a $9 billion business. and it's happening right in front of our noses. And no one except the Chinese government is really denying it. It's just one more thing we don't quite know what to do with. And it just seems like now as we're looking at these tariffs

and trying to figure out how to talk about the economy and how to talk about the future and how to talk about our reliance and our dependence on countries that don't share our values, it just seems like a good time to maybe push this out in the sunlight a bit. Yeah. He has a lot to say about very important things. It's going to make you look at China a lot differently.

And if you're not aware already, it did me. Let me say a thing that I hate to say, not because I don't believe it, but because I just hate the fact that I have to say it. The Chinese are a wonderful people. The Chinese culture is an amazing culture. I'm talking about the Chinese government. Yes. I'm talking about the communists.

I'm talking about the fact that we have, for a long list of, well, people will say complicated reasons, but actually they're not complicated. They're economic reasons. We're in business right now with people that I don't think we want to be in business with. And I think most Americans would agree. It's just that things get a little wobbly when our individual 401k's and the cost of our sweatshirts and the cost of everything hits us right smack between the eyes. So you got some situational ethics to contend with as we dig in with Yon. Yackelik in an episode called The Terrible Truth about China right after this. I love stories like this. Seven years ago, a guy named Ben Still was a musician.

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Thank you so much for doing this. I'm in your debt. I've got many questions. I'm tempted to dive right into this tariff thing. But before I do that, congratulations on, what is it, thought leaders? Yeah, American thought leaders. Made a show six years ago and people liked it. It's so good.

And I'm not saying that because I've been on it twice. I thought I did pretty well when I was on. But people loved it. And it's such an interesting mix of guests and your perspective. I think is, I mean, it must be fun to watch a thing grow the way this has. Well, for me, it's been a, frankly, you know, six years of educating myself about all sorts of things I didn't really know about trying to figure out the madness of our world, you know, because these last years have been some of the most eventful, it seems, in quite some time.

I think we're living in the most, certainly the most interesting time in my life. It's not for me to say about, you know, the whole, you know, last generation. or two, but I just can't imagine how more interesting things can get. I think what happens over the next few years is for all the marbles. So I agree with you. I agree with you. And I think China, and I'm biased, of course, because this has been my focus for the last 25 years.

I think China's at the center of it with the Communist Party at its home. Well, I think you're right. I think a lot of people in this country are in various stages of denial, or maybe it's the five stages of grief. I don't know, but to be so reliant on a country that is so fundamentally, at least from the, you know, policy side, at odds with so many of our tenants, it just, I feel like, I feel like America has really been the frog in the pot of boiling water, and it's starting to bubble over the sides right now. But before we get to all of that, epoch, epic, what's the correct way to pronounce your? It took me a great many years to figure out how to simply explain the answer. But, well, so here's what I usually say to people, okay?

You know, we're obviously for freedom of speech at epoch, right? And we're for freedom of belief, for freedom of conscience. I mean, this is a core, core value, in fact. We're also for freedom of pronunciation. Because even when I was on the front page of your publication, I was handing out copies to people saying, check it out. in the Epic Times, which of course, you know, was wrong until I heard other people further up the food chain

than me pronounce it the same way. And I thought, well, maybe I'm right, maybe you guys just spelled it wrong. Here's the weird thing, okay? The correct way to pronounce it in American English is epoch, but nobody does that. No one even knows that's the case. One of our editors once, you know, explain this to me.

Around the world, a lot of, I'm Canadian like me, we say epoch, but it's also phonetic. So you think epoch, you know what it's spelled Like you know how to get to the website. But if you say Epic, that's not the website I want to be sending people to. But it's perfectly fine to use that too. Well, look, and I guess I should officially start with an apology of sorts because I didn't, well, I didn't really understand the level of subversion, really, that you guys embraced.

I knew a little bit about Fu Long Gong from what I had read. I knew it was a big persecuted group, but I had no idea. You're the senior editor over there. Correct. And so this whole thing has grown into a really sizable organ, but it started by some Chinese Americans who were publishing the truth in Chinese, in Georgia, if I recall. That's right, in Atlanta. So, I mean, it's kind of an incredible story because it is, you know, I know how much you

love the American dream, Mike. And this is the American dream at work. You know, you have people that a number of whom had been involved in the student movement in 1989, right? And you know what happened? Some people watching might not even happen. So I'll just mention it. Tiananmen Square is talking about. Exactly.

There was a giant movement for democracy of students all across the country, all across China, and many, many cities. And then the regime came in and decided to crush it. And they made a point. They made an example of the place where it was centered, where the kind of leadership of the movement was. And there was a massacre. They sent in the military to do it,

and we don't know how many people died. The number that is on my mind is about 5,000 were killed by the PLA. What happened afterwards was a bunch of things in a good way, and a bunch of things in a terrible way. The West kind of said, well, that wasn't too good, but we're not really going to hold you to account in any way, communist China, right? A good thing that happened is some of these students that were in the movement, managed to get scholarships to Georgia Tech in this case, right? We're talking about Atlanta, Georgia here.

And, yeah, they ended up there and they found freedom and just never went back, which is what a lot of people did, that were kind of a little more quietly in the movement or weren't sort of the authorities weren't aware of them. And when the Chinese regime started persecuting the Falun Gong, which was in 1999, this is now 10 years later, these people thought to themselves, hey, we're in a, we're in a free country. We have the First Amendment. We can do something, right? We can actually tell this story, which we weren't able to tell effectively last time that all this happened because communist regimes always pick an enemy. It's just how it works. You have to blame all the ills of society, which you're creating mostly on someone else, right? Because it obviously can't be the Communist Party that's responsible.

No. So in 1999, Fellengong becomes the group that's targeted. And of course, to justify this, there's always a massive media campaign. You could call it propaganda. You know, state media, all media and China are controlled. And you take a group of people who were, you know, was growing really, really fast in the 90s, right? Up until, I think the government estimate was 70 to 100 million people by the end of the 90s.

90s. So that's the first thing I'm, I'm apologizing for, right? When I, when I, I think of Falling Gong, I don't know, it's bigger than Heaven's Gate and maybe not as crazy, but some culty kind of thing that just existed somewhere over there in the shadows. You're talking about 100 million people. This is massive. And it's a, I mean, it's not a cult, but it is certainly a concentration of like-minded people who seem to, I mean, the more I read, the more embarrassed I was, because it feels like truth, justice, and the American way. Well, perhaps you're alluding to truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance being the core principles.

Right. And the Falun Gong practitioners take those very seriously. It's kind of the centerpiece of the practice, at least as I understand it. But, you know, hate propaganda, slander is very effective, especially when it's dished out on a, you know, kind of all country, whole of government scale, like whole of propaganda. organ scale. And that's what happened. So one of the other things, one of the reasons why Falun Gong became so popular, I think, is that it had these health benefits, right? Yeah, there was almost like a Tai Chi component or so. Correct. So there's these exercises that you do.

Oh, really the whole thing is, is, you know, in traditional methods, you can think, think of it like a Chinese yoga. Let's see yoga traditionally or Qigong traditionally, which is what what Chinese is called, it actually means energy practice. It's not just, it's never just physical exercise. it's traditionally. It's always the three parts, mind, body, and spirit. You're cultivating yourself. You're cultivating your body. You're cultivating your mind and your spirit all at once. So really, when you're a Falun Gong practitioner, you're practicing those principles and that manifests in your body as well. And there's these exercises that kind of support you in doing that. At least that's how I understand it. So at some point, this practice really comes to the attention

of the Chinese government. And for whatever reason, they see is that the tenants that they were so opposed to, or just the critical massive people, the number of people who were practicing that freaked them out. You're hitting on something really important. I hadn't really thought about the tenants themselves being responsible. I mean, communist parties are very jealous, you could say. They don't like anything that's not directly under their control.

And Falun Gong's very unusual, actually, as a system. In fact, I think that's one of the reasons why it's kind of misunderstood in the West. It doesn't, there's a lot of teachings written by a man. named Li Hongsha, who's the teacher or the master. Some people don't like that term, but you can think of it in the Eastern sense, right? There's a lot of teachings, but there aren't a lot of rules. There aren't a lot of things that you absolutely have to do, right? You know, one of the things would be, for example, that you're not allowed to enrich yourself by sharing it with people, right? That would be a rule. Another one is sharing the practice. Correct. Yeah, exactly, exactly. Or, yeah,

or in any way, frankly, you know, associated with it. That would be one of the rules. Another of the rules would be that there's no hierarchy. You have an internal level which you're raising as you cultivate as you do this practice, but there's no black belt or anything like that. There's no, and there's no kind of priest or some kind of person like this. No, you actually have to find your own way through the teachings. And that would be another rule, at least, you know, again, these are, these are, this is Jan's version, right?

But another rule would be, let's say you're a great Valengong practitioner. You practice truthfulness, compassion, tolerance, really well. well, right? I can't emulate you. I would need to understand the teachings and find my own way to live those principles, right? So it's very self-directed, right? In a lot of ways, I think it actually promotes, you know, individual agency. And that is something the communists do not like. What the persecution look like once it became a thing. So one of the reasons that we know it happened was that the dictator at the time, his name was Zhang Zemin. He was very jealous of Li Hongsha.

He, you know, basically here was someone, a man who had the genuine love of the people. It changed a lot of people's lives. There were a lot of these health benefits that I was mentioning. So people were getting healthy. There was even awards. Some were even getting awards, you know, from their local governments for helping do things. So, yeah, like, basically it was this emergent movement that grew, basically right from the ground up. Another rule, I just, I'm kind of deviating a little bit from

your question would be that there's no kind of official roster. You're a practitioner because you choose to be. Because you say you are. Because you live, well, not entirely because you're really trying to live it that way. It's an internal. Like I could say I am, but if I'm not really living the teachings, then I'm not one. I just find it so interesting because it's like, like you could look at the Boy Scouts, you could look at the Kiwanis Club, the JCs. You could look at, you know, these civic organizations. And if you sprinkle in a little physicality and then, you know, lean into whatever their tenants happen to be. And then suddenly it grew. Like in this country, if you had, I don't know what the relative corollary would be, but tens of millions of people all

doing the same thing. Right. So with the persecution, do they come over here on mass? Did they come over here at the same time as the Tiananmen Square uprising? Were those two things sort of conflated or juxtap? No. So this is, we've got about a 10-year period. Things in the 90s in China, the healthcare system kind of really crumbled. And at the same time, there was a little bit of internal opening up after the Tianmen Square massacre. So people started going back to these old methods. Chi Gong was just a name. It just means energy practice that, you know, all these things were called, basically had very religious sounding names.

So you didn't want to use that because communists don't like that. So they named them different things and they started doing them on mess. And Falun Gong was just by far the most. popular, the most effective, arguably, and so forth. And sort of a combination of the government saying, hey, this is bigger than the Communist Party, right? So I think there were 60 million Communist Party members at the time, right? There was a bigger than the Communist Party on one hand.

Grassroots, so it's not sitting underneath a lid and on and basically kind of the lid of the party. And at the same time, there's this kind of jealousy that the dictator knows he can never, he has his iron fist, he can rule, but he'll never have the love of the people like this man does. And so the combination of that, that's how I always viewed it. Okay, that's what caused this, what caused it. I mean, basically he outlawed it. And he imagined, and we know this through documentation, that he thought he could eradicate the group. And it didn't mean kill everybody. It just meant crush it, right? You know, basically re-educate the people, get them to renounce it. That was the

purpose, I think, initially. It turned out that people don't re-educate easily that do this practice because of this internal agency that's grown because of the benefits they got from it, they wouldn't. And that's when unwritten rules started being laid down into the, remember, they put millions of people into the prison and labor camp system, right? This is a massive thing across the entire country. And now the rule becomes unwritten. Unfortunately, we just know, again, from testimony, all Falun Gong deaths in these places will be ruled suicides. So the real thing was, You can work on these people whatever way to break them. And they tried really hard.

That's when this thing really went bad. And I think the organ harvesting piece is kind of the most pernicious. In communist societies, this is difficult for people to understand. But if you end up on the enemy of the state side of things, or you're not sort of sanctioned by the regime or the regime doesn't kind of agree to what you're doing, you are not really human anymore. It's arguably, I don't even know if anybody is, but you can be basically dealt with in whatever way,

and whatever means. It's a twisted, twisted way of thinking. So someone, and I have a theory who this is, but I don't have evidence of this part, said, hey, look, we're just growing our organ industry. We've just started it. We've been using these death row prisoners to do this. Now we have millions of people in the system. This is perfect. We can do whatever we want now. And they're healthy. And on top of that, they're healthy. Early 2000s. Okay. So what we know about organ transplants, at least what I know, is that you can't, you need a living person who's basically brain dead. Correct.

Right. In most cases, corneas would be the exception, but yes. Okay. But you can't take a heart from a cadaver or a liver or a spleen or whatever, a kidney. So you've got millions of people, many Falun Gong imprisoned. And the reason I reached out to you was I read some. that there was just a, and it's just one of the most baffling coincidences. How come there's so many hospitals built right next to prisons in China?

Yeah. I mean, I'm, well, it's crazy. I mean, listen, I, when I was doing human rights work, for a couple of years, I represented the International Society for Human Rights in Poland. This was during the time of the Beijing Olympics. we actually made a map where we showed all the Olympic venues and then the forced labor camps

and re-education camps that were right beside those venues unbeknownst to the world, unbeknownst to the world's people. We didn't get a lot of play with that, unfortunately. I was thinking it would be the most interesting thing for people. The suggestion was, go knock on the door there and find out what they do at this place. We see what they tell you.

At the very least, you could do that. But the whole thing was just totally nuts. Do do do do do do dumb. Well, are you sick of it yet? Are you sick of AI hogging up all the headlines and sucking up all the bandwidth? You find yourself wishing we lived in a simpler time? Do you miss the rotary phone? Well, get over it.

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How many organs do you think are being harvested in this way from China? Then to be clear, we're talking about a market where people can schedule a procedure in order to get their new heart, which really is the first heads up. Wait, you can't schedule that. You're on a list and you have to wait, at least over here. But for a few hundred grand, you can go to China. You can schedule and set it up and you get a heart. That's right.

There's been quite a large body of evidence that's been developed about this. And I'll tell people right away, you know, this is to some of you, it's going to sound crazy and unbelievable. And it is unbelievable, in fact. So that's a fair reaction. Chinatribunal.org is the repository of a year-long tribunal that assessed all the available evidence a few years back. And it's pretty compelling and pretty damning. But I'll give you kind of a thumbnail, a bit of a picture, okay? The situation you just described, Mike, Jakob Levy, the head of the Israeli Transplant Association at the time, he had a patient.

They have socialized medicine. They pay for people to get necessary work done outside of the country. country, health-related. So he said, look, I'm waiting for a heart and I'm going to go. And they've scheduled it for me. And Dr. Jacob basically said, that's impossible. There's no ethical way that could be done. Because as you said, you can't transplant from a cadaver, but the guy goes, gets the heart, comes back, and here I am. Right. And that's when Jakob realized this is real. There's something terrible is happening. And Israel was, I think, the first country to enact legislation that in some way counter this terrible situation by saying we're not going to pay.

There's a bunch of states now that are enacting legislation like that, but it's really only now. And we're talking about 2006, 2007, something like this right now. But we know that this has been happening since the early 2000s. The growth of this industry has been basically kind of almost exponential growth has been since the early 2000s. What am I looking at there, the China Tribunal? That's right. So Sir Jeffrey Nees, who was the prosecutor of Slobodan Milosevic back in the day, he was asked to convene a people's tribunal. What that is, is basically they went and found all the experts, anybody related to this issue, and tried to establish, is this real? Because this is the question, everybody is asking themselves as they're watching this show, unless they already know, right? How could this be a thing? How could this be real?

And by the way, you asked me about the scale, Mike. The scale, the best estimates that we have are still, and these came from Ethan Gutman, who wrote an amazing book called The Slaughter, one of the best journalists that have in-depth reporters on this issue over the years. About 60 to 100,000 a year transplants from no ethically provided donor.

Okay? A year. That's his estimate. No, not okay. Well, wait, wait, 60,000 organs are being removed probably from prisoners. Correct. And through a... There's no credible organ donation.

They only instituted a supposed organ registry in 2015, okay, in response to people asking these inconvenient questions. And there's a paper, and one of, I forget which journal is right now, that shows that their growth of that organ registry is a perfect quadratic equation, which means that they fudge the data. So that to our knowledge, whatever credible organ donor in situation there is, it's tiny. It does not account for even a small portion of the annual organs being transplanted. And I assume the market is global. This isn't just Chinese nationalists. Well, the people come from all over, but it's, you know, as far as we can tell, it's obviously Chinese the most.

Then there's Taiwan. These countries around there, you know, there was actually a South Korean film crew that went in and actually went to some of these hospitals, got some very interesting information. What they tell people is they say it's a death row prisoner because no one really is going to believe that this is entirely ethically sourced, but to assuage people's guilt, they would say, well, it's a death row prisoner. To me, that's not cool. There's no way a death row prisoner is voluntarily surrendering their organs. But that's how they would make you feel better about it. But even the most aggressive estimates of the death penalty in China, it's still 10, you know, orders of magnitude more transplants happening.

I don't even think about this. So, I mean, is there a dollar figure you can put on it? 60 to 100,000 organs times what? 100,000? It ranges. Like, we've seen different numbers. On the low end, it was something like 60,000 for kidneys. This is just off the top of my head, up until 200,000 for hearts, livers, things like that.

The estimate, David Mades, who is one of the, probably the person who, who understands this issue the best in the world. He's a human rights lawyer from Winnipeg, fellow Canadian. Actually was hunting down the last Nazi war criminals in Canada as part of his work as well. Amazing human being. His estimate is, I believe, it's a $9 billion a year industry.

Yeah. You're just throwing some numbers around that are just so consequential. It's hard to fathom, right? But why is this so important? Okay, because we're gonna talk about other things, too. This helps you understand the nature of the government, the people who purport to govern this country, how they operate and what they allow for. My theory, and based on my understanding of the regime and so forth, is that even more so than this, the $9 billion a year, that tells you about the scale.

It's not small. But the real reason is that of the 200-odd families that make up the people, the super elite that rule that country, kind of like the, you know, like you could think of it like the polypia, like the mafia, right? It's in a way it functions a lot like the mafia, right? They have an unlimited source of organs at any time. Imagine how much that is worth to people, right? That is decent people who. become desperate. I mean, I'm just trying to imagine a moneyed person in this country with a sick kid who's on the clock. This person probably spent their whole life with snappy answers to ethical questions. They would never blink. They would never know. No, of course not. But you get in a situation. You know, desperation plus means equals, let's call it situational ethics. And you're right. That's what would you need to hear as a parent to somehow assuage your guilt? Well, it's a death row prisoner.

Well, you know, if not you, somebody else, if not your kid, somebody else is going to get it. I even had a friend in Poland tell me, you know, I was explaining this whole thing to him. And he said, you know, if it was me, I might do it. And I was like, that is extremely honest of you. But you have a really perverted sense. of ethics, my friend. Well, you know, that's, you're both right, or both of those things are right. You know, I, we're probably going to hopscotch around a little bit because I think what's going on with the tariffs right now, to your point, these things rhyme. And when you look at, you know,

the Uyghurs, you know, I've talked to Ennis Freedom, he's been here, I've talked to, I, when you look at the whole Free Tibet thing, when you look at how righteous so many Americans get, when they are confronted with the inescapable truth of what's going on over there, versus this poll I just saw, I think it was a national review, but the percentage of Americans who will turn a blind eye when their own 401ks, when their own businesses, when their own supply chains are revealed to be so inexorably wrapped up with the Chinese, it's like 52% of people affirmatively say what your friend said.

in a way. They just say, look, all things considered, life is short, and I'm an ostrich, and I put my head in the sand. But let's talk about the Uyghurs for a moment, or Uyghurs. As I once said Uyghur with an Uyghurs right beside me, and she said, Uyghur. I said, yes, you're right, but that's not what people understand. No, but to me, Ethan Gutman right now, I hope I'm allowed to say this, Ethan, is working on a follow-up book to the slaughter, which is how this whole industry has now shifted to the Uyghurs. Now, I don't have the evidence around that, but everything I know about how the regime operates and how vulnerable.

Okay, let me paint a picture for you. Okay, why is it... What's his name, Ethan? The author? Ethan Gutman. G-U-T-M-A-N. 1-N-N. Okay. Why is it so easy to do this organ harvesting from Falun Gong?

You pick people up. You're picking them up in mass. They're not telling their names because they would implicate their family members, then their family members are going to get picked up. Okay. So you have these people that just disappear into the system, and you don't know what happened to them. If they get harvested, they just don't, they never come out. Maybe they died because of torture. Maybe, I mean, they did horrible things to them, too. That's well documented. But you just don't know. So with the Uyghurs, or Uyghurs, I'll try to say it correct. This is a much smaller population than the Falun Gong in a fairly remote region, very mountainous region, very hard to get to, okay, ethnically different, and I won't even talk about, you know, sort of this Han supremacism that the CCP has been pushing on the nation as well, which makes it easier to victimize people that are different. It's a similar sort of situation, a very vulnerable population in an isolated area, and one of the things that Ethan found, because I remember I was talking about at the International Religious Freedom Summit a couple of years back, a situation where there's hospitals that were more recently built right around these labor camps,

right? And there, I think the estimate is something like two million people are in the, I forget what the euphemism is for it, but in the basically concentration camp or its labor camp system. So re-education. Here's the key. You don't deal with it. You say to yourself, hey, look, you know, this is something far away from us. It's happening in China. Maybe it's real, maybe it's not. Let's not think about this. But there's a reason when the genocide convention was signed, okay?

There was this whole idea of never again. The Holocaust, my father-in-law is a Holocaust survivor. This is very close to me. The whole point of the genocide convention was never again for real, right? It meant don't do things of this nature, right? Crimes against humanity genocide, we could argue about the nuance. But when you allow for that to happen, when you say, because this is the one, you know, people, a lot of, there's a lot of folks in America these days that are like America should pull back too much adventurism. They want to be a little, we should be a little more inward focused. I think that may be right. However, when it comes to this level of crime, if we don't hold others accountable, what do we hold people accountable on? You know? Right. And so by allowing this felon gong persecution and then this whole organ harvesting to go, it wouldn't, It's not that hard to investigate it, really.

Some people have tried, but at a larger scale, now we have it moving to another vulnerable group. And here we are, right? And so this is why we can't be entirely focused on ourselves, right? Especially when it comes to things of this scale. But what do we do with our standards when the people we're in business with don't comport? This is an extreme example. to me a no-brainer. It's like, wait a minute, if we have incontrovertible proof that the Chinese

government is behind a scheme to sell 60 to 100,000 organs harvested from living people, this is Michael Crichton. This is coma. Let me give you the two closest things to a smoking gun. I think they're pretty smoking gun, okay, that we have. It's very hard because remember, the crime scene is a hospital room cleaned up, you know. There's a paper in the American Journal of Transplantation, titled Execution by Organ Procurement. Okay? They found, they did a literature search of the Chinese transplant literature, and they found 71 instances, and this was by no means exhaustive,

71 instances where the dead donor rule was violated. In other words, the Chinese researchers, transplant people, they wrote into their methods that they had killed someone by extracting their organs without realizing it. And the way I interpret this, okay, horribly, is that it's, It's just become so normalized over there that they just, that people write it in because this is just how it's done. Okay, that's one thing.

The second thing, and I never in a million years thought we'd ever see this, someone like this, but there's a survivor. There's a guy, Chang Pfei Mae, who's missing part of his liver and part of his lung, and the Chinese regime admits they operated on him. They say they did it to save his life. a whole week and week. I'm not going to go into the nuance of all this. The point is, the guy's alive by multiple miracles, as is the case with, you know, the many Holocaust survivors that I've interviewed over the years. And he's missing part of his liver and parts of his lung.

The scans show it, and it was done there. So how do you get away? The quick answer is, by multiple quirks of fate, as is the case with every Holocaust survivor, including my father-in-law that I've talked to. They just made certain decisions where if they had made the other decision, it would have been certain death. But for whatever reason, they picked this. And in the end, they got to the finish line and they made it somehow. This is the same thing with him.

He was almost dead at least twice. Where is he now? Here. Well, in the U.S. And he's hiding out because there's an effort right now to repatriate him. You know this Operation Fox Hunt. So the Chinese regime, I mean, we could talk for a very long time about the stuff it does. But among other things, they put bounties on people's heads and they try to get them back

into China so they can deal with them. And there's a whole project, Operation Fox Hunt, you can look that up. And there's a young woman named Francis Hui who is a Hong Kong, a young, I mean, this is actually an amazing, I'm getting a shiver up my sign thinking about it. This young woman was a Hong Kong freedom activist, right? As a teenager, basically, and eventually she basically came to the U.S. especially after this national security law was going to come into place because she would have been picked up immediately. She came here. And they put a bounty on it. They put a million dollar, Hong Kong dollar bounty on her head.

And more recently, they're harassing her family. Her family's there or here? Our family's there. But this is what has. So, you know, we could talk about Hong Kong. I was there right before the national security law came down. Many of the people I interviewed are in prison. Why?

Because they were advocating for freedom. Right. So how quickly can a society change from one of the first. freest societies in the world, economically at least, right, but also quite free from a basic civil liberties perspective. Overnight turns into, you know, something a lot closer to communist China. In all your investigative work, all the interviews, all the projects that you've been involved in over the years, where does this rank in terms of holy crap America? If I could grab you by your metaphorical lapel and shake you, right?

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Pure talk. I think it's right at the top of my list, but I have to qualify that, okay? People don't deal with, well with crimes against humanity. There's a famous anecdote with Yon Karski. An Karski was a Polish nobleman who saw what was happening and he understood the Holocaust was happening during World War II and he got out of Poland, traveled to the UK to the U.S. and tried to explain to people they are killing people en masse. People would not believe him. There's a famous line, you know, the Felix Frankfurter, who was the

AG at the time in the U.S. has this famous line where he says something, this is a paraphrase. I'm not saying that the guy was lying. I'm saying that I was unable to believe him. Okay. But And people, you know, say all sorts of bad things about Frankfurt or this. But I thought it's a very telling and honest line. I think it's, I think he was being honest. We don't want to believe that people do such things. By the way, another anecdote, this is just from a few days ago. In Arkansas, there's a one of these laws to, they won't pay, they won't let Medicare pay for anything

with transplant related in China. And also to stop genomics collection. That's the second part to that law that they're working on over there, okay? one of the one of the one of the the democratic senators Arkansas senators explained that he actually why is he for this law because he had a friend who's an ophthalmologist who was working in China and you know they they needed they were they did like 13 patients they were going to do some sort of experiment around a cornea for right and he's like oh we don't have the corneous and he just mentioned it to them and the next day 13 corneas magically appeared Right? And this guy, and that guy was shocked and stunned. It didn't know what to say when he was there. But the point is, like, this is what can happen. Basically, on order, you can do stuff like that over there. I'm just so struck. I kind of just glossed over a minute ago, but it is Michael Crichton. It is coma. When I look at Star Trek sometimes, it's amazing how fantasy and fact, reality and, you know, science fiction can,

just come smashing together. I remember Koma, too. And also there's a newer kind of Cuoma-like film called The Island, which was more sci-fi, which, again, kind of same. Was that Leonardo DiCaprio? Was that the island? The island was Scarlett Johansson and Ewan McGrath. I don't know why I remember that.

Maybe because I found, I probably, fair enough, fair enough. If I went on an island with Scarlett Johansson for a while, yeah. Let me answer your question, you about is it number one? So it's number one because if you understand that this regime does that to its own people at scale, and is perfectly happy to do it and is completely uninterested in stopping it, who is our trade partner? Who are we working with? Can we assume that we have the same shared values?

Does it make sense for us to still be pumping money into Chinese military companies through index funds? I mean, I could talk about, does it make sense for us to and basically entrust the lion's share of our genetic drug supply chain to that country, which is where we're at at this moment? Does that make sense? If you know, if you understand that this is what this regime sanctions and, frankly, profits of and services it's super elite with. Well, obviously, the answer to that question is simple, until, at least for a lot of people, people that you attach the consequence to it. So in a vacuum, I mean, who among us today doesn't look back 170 years and say, isn't it crazy how we wrestled with this whole slavery thing? Isn't it crazy how it tore the country in half? Isn't it crazy that we had to fight a war?

What the heck was wrong with us? And yet, you know, 170 years ago, I think the conversation was probably very similar. If you framed, in other words, the entire conversation around the economic impact of outlawing slavery on this country, any economist in that silo would conclude this is a horrible idea. It's going to impact, obviously, the triangle trade, but the north as well as the south, it's going to be a disaster for our economy to get rid of a giant unpaid workforce. Therefore, we can't do it. That was the analysis and that was the conclusion right up until the point where we just couldn't, we just couldn't live with it anymore. So I, you know, obviously I wasn't around then, but when I think about that, it's hard not to think today about fill in the blank,

capital punishment, abortion, 150 years from now, maybe it's meat eating. Who knows? But it sure seems like if you really want clarity, your example is the best one. We're in business with people who are selling organs harvested without the permission of their owners and sold for billions of dollars. Or, you know, it's a murder. I mean, I call it sometimes a murder for organs industry, which is really kind of non-eophimistically what it is. It's particularly, I think, reprehensible that the people that are being killed are, you know, entirely innocent. But I frankly would the same whoever it was that was being used. Yeah.

Okay. Well, then how... I mean, I'm just thinking, I just had dinner the other night with a, with a friend who runs a big Fortune 500 company and whose stock is crushed right now. This person is upset, you know, with this economic policy. And a big part of their supply chain is rep. That's the person you should be asking the question to. Because I can sit here and tell you, of course we shouldn't be.

in business. Look, my skin crawled when I saw those officials go into the stands at the NBA game and take the banners from people who were saying free Uighurs. That's how captured the NBA is. And that's how captured. I'll just say it. People will hate me for it. But if you're a diehard fan of the NBA, how much of this do you want to know about? You come home, you just want to watch the game. You just want to watch a great game. Do we really have to see this on that guy's sneakers and these banners and thing. That's what I meant before. When push comes to shove, half the country, they don't want to hear what you're saying and they don't want to see what we're talking about. Because the answer is, it means that you have to do something. That's the corollary, right? If you

really believe this is real, if you accept it. Now you know. Right. Either, or you could be like, well, there's nothing I can do. I'll live with it. I suppose you could. But I think for a lot of people, we've got to do something here. This is crazy. This is too easy. And why? And why? Why do you think that it's going to stay over there? That's my question to you, right? If you're going to work, you know, sort of hand in glove with the regime like that, what makes you think that that's not going to come here in some form, right? I mean, this is the, we worked with Nazi Germany, right?

When you first were talking about slavery, I thought you were talking about that example. It's very analogous. There was a lot of trade. I mean, you know, the famously IBM punch cards, you know, computing punch cards were used in some of their, documentation of what they were doing in the concentration camps, right? If I recall correctly, but certainly IBM was deeply invested there and many other companies, right?

I don't even know how to think about it. You're not an economist and neither am I, but when you look at, when you come at the whole tariff question through that lens, I call it like a tier one lens, and then there's the tier two lens. The tier two is just economists all basically agreeing that tariffs wreak havoc. there's no real disagreement. They can be used here and there, they say. But by and large, if the economy is the most important thing in your conversation,

you'll conclude what everybody seems to have concluded. But it's this other thing that I don't think anybody wants to talk about. And when you start to talk about it, at least in the press and in the headlines I've seen, things get real wobbly real quick. People don't want to be shown that our primary partner, is up to its neck in any number of things that we simply wouldn't tolerate over here. It's just denial. Well, here's the terrible truth, right?

The terrible truth is that the Chinese regime wages what can be called unrestricted warfare. This is a little bit, a book that's gotten a little bit of fame. More recently, people have been writing about it. It was written by two Chinese colonels about how to take anything, basically anything, that is weaponizable outside of actual kinetic war and use that to wage war. Okay? For instance, I mean that we can talk. There's a doctrine of three warfares.

Okay. So one is by changing public opinion. Another one is by launching lawsuits. Okay. Another one is by getting the U.S. to fund you massively for your military growth, for example. Right. So, you know, until not too long ago, the Thrift Savings Plan, which is where all our militaries, pensions are located, was actually invested in multiple Chinese military companies. If you can imagine that, if you can imagine that being true. And lasting for years, even with people knowing about it, right? There's all these MSCI, there's multiple index funds that passively, you want to buy in, you want to get most of these funds have what are called emerging markets components, which have a big Chinese component. And there's an undisclosed amount

of Chinese companies in there. And in many cases, they're Chinese military companies. So we're, if you're invested in these funds, there's a really good chance, unless you specifically get a fund that says, we don't do this, which is very rare. You're invested in that. So you want to talk about, I can't speak for President Trump, but Trump might say, you know, they're very smart to do that, right? He, this is very cunning. This is very, What an amazing approach. How is it that all the stocks listed on U.S. exchanges of Chinese companies don't require a proper audit? And it's the only country that gets that exemption.

You know, and there's a reason because you want and believe that the thing that you're buying is really worth what you say it is, right? How can you not sue a pharmaceutical company? So listen, there's an instrument called a VIE. Okay, what is a VIA? If you actually buy that stock, that unaudited stock, Chinese stock. on a U.S. exchange, okay? You're not actually buying that stock even. You're buying a piece of a company in the Cayman Islands, which has a contract with a Chinese company, which the SEC itself, based on Chinese law believes it might be illegal. And you've invested by doing that about

the estimate is something like $700 billion over the years, okay, and in that. And the actual value of those companies, we don't really know. It's what the prospect has told us. Now, how embarrassing is that to a company that did that to think that what they actually have there is just on paper and not real and can be seized at any moment? How much IP do you think the Chinese steal year over year? There's various estimates, okay, but some estimates are a trillion dollars a year. I mean, averaged out across the time period that that IP would hold. I've seen between $500 billion to a trillion a year as estimates. So smart people and our government know this.

And what's the analysis? They just put that into the calculus and say, you know what? It's a toll. It's the cost of doing business. And in the end, in the end, it's still in our favor to do this. Well, you know, what I think happened, and this, you know, actually speaks to a topic which is very close to both of our hearts, Mike, which is, you know, the hollowing out of the middle class and the working class, right, over these last,

since the 19, probably the heyday was the, you know, early 70s, right, where a lot of that wealth was held in that, in that group. We developed what's called a financialization economy, in my mind. I don't know if others call it that, but basically cheap credit allowed for people who have access to capital, which is the upper rung of society, right, to basically take inordinate at risks with money. And in that process, and this is obviously way more complicated than what I'm painting here, but people made a ton of money just by manipulating money. And a lot of, you know, a lot, this is a lot of Wall Street money is kind of that ilk. My suspicion is, is that that sort of moving out of a place, do you know, actually, you know, pretty woman,

right? It's such an interesting film from years ago, but this is, this is actually the theme there, right? The is this guy, Richard Gear, who, by the way, China blacklisted and killed his career, but that's a whole another discussion. Free Tibet. Right? Exactly. Exactly. He's this guy who does financialization stuff and he's about to take apart. I think it was a shipbuilding company, if I recall correctly. I have a terrible, terrible memory for most things, fantastic memory for movie plots. I don't know why. Anyway, that's the point. It was this shift into doing the kind of stuff Richard Gear was doing as opposed to the guy he was going to crush. But in the end, because of the intervention of Fridie woman, Julia Roberts, he changed his mind and decided to build things. So we stopped actually having

to make meaningful things to make money. It became this weird casino game. And if you could game the system, if you had loaded dice in some ways, and so of course you could do even better. And then you could also make a lot hand over fist money by just off the fees of doing this. Right? And I think that's where things went wrong because you started investing. Initially, there was this big, you know, Kissinger Doctrine time. Basically, you were told, you have to invest all the money in communist China right now. That's where the market is going to be in the future. If you don't do it now, someone else will get it.

And there's this group thing, mania, to do that. And what did you give away? Well, if you actually tried to move your manufacturing over there, right, you actually have to give away all your IP in the process. That's part of the deal. Right. So not only was there the theft that we were just talking about that trillion dollar have, there's all the kind of legal, let's call it legal theft, right?

Because you agree. In order to get the market, I'm going to sacrifice my intellectual property. This is really, I mean, I guess I'm saying something obvious, but a big part of this conversation simply comes down to what part of the animal are you unwilling to look at, right? Back to slavery. It was easier to tolerate it. Even though you knew your clothes were spun from cotton picked by slaves, maybe you're up in Massachusetts or Maine or whatever, right?

It's like once removed. Or if you're right down there on the plantation, you're so used to it. You grew up with it. Right? So pretty woman is like weirdly analogous for me. Gary Marshall, charming movie for all the reasons you said. Just don't spend too much time.

thinking about the fact that she's a prostitute, right? And the movie certainly doesn't spend too much time showing you in the act of what a daily prostitute does. There's not too much business with her pimp, and there's not too much time spent, you know, with the whole underlying debasement of the whole thing. So as a viewer, right, you pay your eight bucks back in the day and you go and you sit down and you watch this movie, and you're either charmed by it because you're really, willing to look away from certain ugly parts, or you're appalled by it because you're being told,

wait a second, don't spend too much time thinking about the reality of prostituting yourself. I mean, I don't know, maybe it's a stretch, but I look at the tariffs, I look at China, and I hear people on the air every day saying, yeah, look, they're not perfect, the Chinese, right? I mean, wonderful people, wonderful people, the government. See, I remember the argument, too, that went, well, part of the reason we're going to wade in with these characters is because we want to export American values as well as American products. We think it'll be good for the global world order for, you know, hundreds of millions of Chinese to get a load of our stuff. But China's doing the same thing. Who do you think has exported more of their philosophy successfully into the other country?

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that the nature of the thing that is most important. And that's why I put this organ issue at the top of the list, even though it's so difficult, is you have to understand, if you understand the nature of the regime, you would treat it differently, right? If you understand, like, if I knew that the person I'm dealing with is a psychopath

and has a, you know, great record of behaving as a psychopath, I would treat that person different. I would maybe not ask them to babysit for my kids. kids, right? I might not do business with them because what would happen? Well, it would kind of be predictable, wouldn't it? What would happen? You see what I'm saying? Like it's this if you, if you want this is the part that we've had the hardest part. And it's not the Chinese people. This is I'm with those people that you mentioned earlier by the way that say, oh, it's the, it's not

the people, it's the government. Yeah, absolutely. Chinese people unbelievably industrious, right? Good heart. I mean, this truthfulness, compassion, forbearance. This. This This is ancient Chinese culture, you know, come back. And, you know, Ethan Gunman actually describes Falun Gongan as a kind of a revivalist movement, Buddhist revivalist. I don't know if I quite agree with that, but that, you know, it's an interesting way to characterize it, right? And this is actually a Western ideology that's been foisted on them, communism. It's not nothing, communism with Chinese characteristics, still communism, as they euphemistically call it. So, no, it's the regime that you have.

have to understand the nature of. And of course, and it does co-opt people into behaving some people. But then there's this huge, I mean, this is the untold story, actually. You know, this is, I don't think we've done as good a job as we should have at Epoch Times to tell the story, but the Felon Kong have actually changed a lot of people's hearts and minds through their grassroots effort to explain to people that we're not the things this hate propaganda is telling you that actually communism isn't good. You should quit the Communist Party. There's over 400 million people that have decided to do that, that have decided to quit the Communist Party over 25 years. You know, it's one by one. It's over a long period of time. But it's not even a public thing.

But somewhere inside, someone said, you know, I'm kind of done with this. I'm done with this system. And I'm ready for a better future. I think there's hope in that, you know. What do you think we should do vis-a-vis the tariffs? Should we be doing business with China? Well, the answer is, if we are going to be doing business, we have to do it with an understanding of what they're about and that they're seeking to subvert us. The problem with communist regimes is that any free society, okay, this is why, you know, you keep hearing about Taiwan, the people's liberation armies have been inculcated with the idea that Taiwan is Chinese and that we're going to take it one day and you're going to be a part of that. that. Why? Well, a big part of it is because it's a great shining example of a very successful emergent democracy. And it says the Chinese regime's propaganda says the only way to deal with the Chinese people is with an iron fist. They can't really, you know, do freedom. But here we have,

hey, in some ways, Taiwan is more successful as a democracy than we are here in some ways. I'm not going to say it across the board, because actually all of these, every single democracy, came out of this one, you know, really. Sure. And same with Hong Kong, right? Hong Kong now being turned into day after day into something much closer to what communist China is actually quite quickly. Similarly, it's not, it can exist because it's an anathema.

It proves the, it shows that we don't need to do things in this totalitarian way and be incredibly successful. Maybe even if China, and this is, you know, maybe even if China didn't have it, maybe China would be more successful than we'd have, you know, maybe it would be a problem we would want to have, wouldn't it? I would think so. It would be a problem where it would challenge us to, you know, work our butts off to, to, to, instead of having this sort of pathocratic, you know, system, which has to steal its IP,

basically take advantage of free nations to, to grow itself, kill a lot of people in the process, to do things like organ harvesting. I don't know. I think a free China would be an incredible thing. And of course, there's plenty of people who believe that there. What's baffling is that people will push back against that and tell you why.

Right? I mean, there's, it just seems like such an obvious thing to want. But I, again, when I look at the conversations that are happening around the trade thing, it's way more tier two than tier two. Tier one. So I'm still not clear what to say to my friends, you know, at polite dinner parties. Okay. I really don't. Well, listen, I'm not, I'm also not an economist. I've talked with some really great people on this. Some are not sure. Some. What I can talk about is, for example,

okay, I was over at the White House when, you know, Liberation Day, on Liberation Day. It was more press there than I've ever seen in my life. You know, it was just like everywhere. Press everywhere in the sticks as they're called. And I looked at those tables that were published, right? And in two minutes, it was very clear to me that this whole thing was all about China. Why did I think that? I didn't, I mean, this was just my, you know, instant response. You're talking about the charts with all the individual countries listed with all the different tariffs applied.

Correct. The thing that I noticed, just looking at, I have a mind, I was, you know, back in the day, I was biologist, and I liked dealing with data and it kind of would jump out at me. but the highest tariffs by and large, okay, were all for countries which were what you would call high transshipment countries for Beijing. So what happened, right, the first time in 2018 when Trump imposed the first sort of, you know, let's call it economic hardship on communist China,

to my, to me, this was the first time, the first time they had ever been forced into a position. Like, I mean, probably since 1949, I don't know, that they didn't want to be in. Because we're so worried about the whole face-saving thing. It's like there's this narrative

that says you do not want to put the Chinese government in a corner. If they don't have a way out without looking bad or foolish, it's going to be bad for everybody else. What a crazy way to do business or have a relationship. Does that make any sense?

Only if you're so reliant and so dependent, right? And even then, right, ethically, there's not much of an argument, but what in the world are we so scared of, if not that? So the effect of that action was that the Chinese economy diversified and went out, there's more of it outside of the US right now. We're talking about this massive export economy into the US.

It's still massive, but it's less as a result of that. But what they did, and part of what they did, of what they did was they set up, you know, a glib example would be, I set up a warehouse in Vietnam, which was an example, or Cambodia, which are example of countries that had these super high tariffs, right? And I call it a factory, and then I send my stuff from Vietnam or from Cambodia, but it's actually the Chinese, you know, production just isn't called that. So now I don't have the problem anymore, right? So there's a lot of that, that transshipment. And then so there was kind of debate. I saw there's a few people that I really, I think had really good takes on this. There's

Christopher Balding. He was a former professor from Peking University economist. He had kind of had to get out of there because he was a little too honest publicly while in China, a very interesting guy. What do you say? Well, he basically called out the regime for some of the things that it was doing that it didn't want to have be called out on. And I, like, I'd have to think, he said a few different things. I'd have to think back exactly. But the point is he, he would explain. the realities which aren't very frankly you know are not pleasant right like Chinese economy is in shambles as we speak and that's a whole different discussion that you know I weighed on a number of people that I really trust to talk about this to discuss but so

Christopher balding's one another one is a Singapore professor named Henry Gao who was just pointing out so what I thought when I first saw it I thought oh maybe all these other countries are kind of camouflage because you don't want to you don't want to go out and say yes we're coming after China right that was my initial thought what henry gao was saying well no actually all these all these different tariffs are really there to help bring everybody in to not offer the loopholes into the u.s system okay basically so this is trump and the trump administration saying We want to have a relationship where you're not gaming the system. The gaming of the system stops.

And the entirety of our effort right now is to manifest that. Have you seen that clip of Trump with Oprah, like back in 1988? Yeah, yeah. I saw that too, and I shared it. This is where he's saying that, yeah, it'll be easier to extract concessions from our allies. who knows about the others yeah right i think there's probably truth to that but ultimately look at we let communist china into the world trade organization they never ever followed the rules isn't that crazy there was no consequence yes yes it's wild right you kind of let the fox in the headhouse and

you saw what they were doing and you said okay right for for for for for for the whole time right right But it's the same rationale as like, eh, border, whatever, whatever. Yeah, it's a border, but what's a border that's not enforced? Right. Right. Right. And so that's very interesting point. I hadn't thought of that.

Yeah. I just think people by and large are looking around and your point, not to make this a polemic, but you're right. Trump in 2017, 2018, that was really the first time. He just didn't seem to care if he hurt China's feelings. And I think a lot of people looked at that and said, right, good. He did more than that, okay, with that. And it was, I mean, it was stunning to me because I'd never seen anything like this happen. He put a chink in the whole, I don't think you can say that.

I see what you've done here. Oh, boy, this is now, now I'm going to be in big trouble, right? A notch. A notch in the armor. The CCP has been insinuating itself into the global economic order, making itself a part of everything very difficult to extract. And in the process, enriching itself, while using lawfare to prevent others from doing the things it doesn't want to do, because now it's part of these multilateral organizations. but completely ignoring, not applying those rules to itself. That is a little bit of maybe a slight oversimplification, but very close to reality.

Okay. This was the first time where someone said, no, we're going to, that this is not a good way to do things. In effect, I don't know if that's exactly what they were thinking, but that was the effect of it, right? And it actually changed the economic relationship quite substantially between the U.S. and China. even that, right? So to me, right, if it was me, right, which it isn't clearly, but this is, this is a difficult thing to do. This is a complex economic system that's developed, emerged over time with, you know, a lot of, let's say a lot of people lining their pockets along the way and a lot of wealth being, you know, concentrated up in the process.

And so now to change that, well, you know, it's difficult. Is there going to be pain? Absolutely, there's going to be pain. But if you did, if we didn't change the status quo, I would argue, we're going to end up basically a vassal, vassals to a murderous regime. I mean that. And I mean that very seriously. Like people don't like when you say things like that, right? Because it seems lambatory.

inflammatory and so forth. No, this is like it's really bad. It's a gross dereliction of any sense, the basic sense of ethics that any normal human being would have. Right? That's who we're dealing with. You personally are 100% certain that the organ harvesting thing is is clear and present and huge. And if people listening want to go somewhere and do some research for themselves, where would you send them? Is there an objective place? My guest today, Tom Albanyce, is an American Giant, and I'll tell you why. Tom understands on a fundamental level that the business of mining is a non-negotiable prerequisite of our civilization and our economic independence, just like the business of making things.

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of gently reminding people that when you buy a piece of clothing from American Giant, you're not just buying a high-quality sweatshirt or T-shirt or another pair of jeans, You're investing in a local supply chain. You're supporting communities from the Carolinas to California. And you're getting a piece of clothing that won't just survive the wash. You're getting a garment that'll get better with age.

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Was it the China Tribunal.org is a really good place to get an overview. Let me mention another thing, which I think is quite important. right? How does this affect us here? Yeah. Right? I talked a little bit about how there's these operation fox hunt things where see from the perspective of communist China if you're Chinese they kind of own you. So if you're over here doesn't matter if you're Chinese American doesn't matter as long as if you're Chinese they're kind of you're kind of under their jurisdiction they kind of imagine that okay so you know, you know, we have this, right now we have this crazy situation.

I was just in New York last week. There was an 18 show run of Shen Yun, you know, the dance performance. My wife and I go every year. We've been going for a long time. It's kind of a new show every year. It's an incredible thing. Bomb threats. Okay.

Threats on people's lives. Harassment of family members that might still be back there. Lawfare. Ten hit pieces by the New York Times in the last six. months. It's all being basically foisted on what's essentially an American dream success story, people who built a dance company out of nothing and service a million audience a year now out of upstate New York. That's it. Yeah, I've, I've been meaning to see it. But why is the New York Times, like, where's the meat on the bone in an article about this that is so problematic?

Well, there's, there's a, again, few things off the top of my head. One, you're familiar with the Trump hush money. You remember there's this Trump hush money scandal, so to speak? Was it around? Years ago. Stormy Daniels. Oh, sure. Okay. So Dershowitz described this like the worst case he's seen in 60 years of his, you know, practice as a lawyer or something like this, right? But it seems like the model of that case was there's a whole bunch of articles that are written by a media. In this case, it was the Wall Street Journal, that trigger an investigation. And then demonization occurs, so to speak. That's the model.

And two people that did that investigation moved over to the New York Times, and they're doing that investigation on Shen Yun now. And seemingly with a similar, also multiple articles, also things that are very difficult to prove or disprove. There's a woman that actually was a Shen Yun dancer, ended up going to Taiwan after she, I guess, retired, right? Started her own dance school, sent multiple dancers back to Shen Yun to participate and so forth, got married with some. somebody who was connected from, I think from Taiwan connected to Communist China, started working the Beijing Dance Academy, which is, of course, a CCP outfit, and subsequently launched civil lawsuits against Shen Yun.

How did this happen? It's not clear. She seemed to have had a really, you know, amazing experience to the point where, you know, she was providing these, you know, wonderful dancers. But what we do know is that communist China has a particular interest. lately in the last couple of years and they've made this codified this in a kind of raising it to the level of the Minister of State Security to basically I don't know handicapped Falun Gong activities overseas so this is how it's manifesting and my guess is it's because they're effective effective in exposing

the regime for what it does effective in China getting people to quit the communist party They're trying to do, we're talking about the Free Tibet movement, right? The Free Tibet movement, they put a huge effort into crushing it years ago. I think they're trying to do the same thing to the Falun Gong right now. So what about the Epoch Times? Are they coming after you? They've been coming after us for 25 years.

You know what Russia Gate is when I say Russia Gate, right? So there's this idea that the president, current president, was a Russian agent. Yeah, yeah, we were, I mean, to write about it. There were multiple people, to be fair, that we're writing about it, but we were very early in the game, okay? And because why, it wasn't even that difficult to figure out that this is not a reasonable narrative, right? And there was nothing to it. And then later we discovered it was, you know, basically oppo research and a whole Clinton campaign thing, blah, blah, anyway, so forth. But until that time, we were used to being attacked by the Chinese Communist Party for years,

cyber attacks, attempts to get rid of all our advertising at one point before we switched to a subscription model. We were basically advertising driven. They would always try to block, you know, talk to people and tell them, hey, don't advertise with these guys. They're against China. You're going to hurt the feelings of the Chinese people. All this kind of stuff, right? But it was only in that, you know, those mid, probably around 2018 again at that time, that suddenly it was like Americans that started writing hit pieces against Deepak. It was kind of shocking. But we were used to it. This is what I'm getting at. We're kind of used to being attacked, but it was shocking and really dispiriting to see that now it's Americans that are doing this, you know. I got to admit, man, I was a little confused because you guys were writing a story on me around that time, the first one. And I've been interviewed a couple times by you since then and come to see that I think what you're doing is not only really important, but I'm a genuine fan of.

how it started. You know, because I don't know of any other newspaper that has that story. I mean, you were printing in Chinese, for Chinese Americans. It became popular. And then it's English.

And then it's multiple countries. Now it's all over the place. So, I mean, you've got to feel enthused or at least optimistic for that. Listen, it is the American dream story.

It's not like, you know, it's not like, you know, they got funded, government, money or something like that for doing any of this, right? This is, this is people working their butts up. I know, Mike, you know, I know a little bit about, you know, how you're trying to do it with

your organization, right? They built it from nothing. We're actually 95% supported by our individual subscribers. The U.S. epoch times is a 501c3 nonprofit, but, and it's, you know, very, let's just say that, that funding is very diversified. Let's us stay quite independent, right? Of course, we're open to to anybody who wants to support us, for sure. But that's where we're at right now. So I think it's a pretty good place. Last question. I saw this interview with Tim Cook, Apple.

And the question put to him was, it's just simply not fair. The labor is so much cheaper. You're doing all this work over there. And, you know, it's a criticism I'd heard before. But what he said was interesting. He said, no, it's, the labor is actually not that much cheaper. Yes, we're aware of the human rights things,

and that's a calculus that everybody has to kind of balance. But we're not there because the labor's cheap. We're there because the labor exists. We need tens of thousands of people doing very specialized work in manufacturing. And that doesn't exist in this country right now. You just can't find those people. As of January, I think you and I talked about it back in wherever we were, D.C. there are 500,000 open positions in manufacturing as we speak.

If the president is successful and reshores all this and we start bringing manufacturing back, you know, that's a couple million new jobs. And the assumption is if we build it, they'll come. But that's what Obama assumed in 2009, too, with three million shovel-ready jobs. You know, you're talking to a country who's not that crazy about picking up a shovel, it seems. So I just wonder if you have any thoughts on how that plays out. Well, we have to change our culture.

I mean, maybe return back to the past culture, which is, you know, I guess a lot more entrepreneurial. By the way, this still exists in America. People still flock here, right? Because this is the one place where you can have this upward mobility, you know, in society, if you work your butt off, right? It's a, this is a problem. Like the side effect of this, and partially, I think it was very deliberate, you know, was that we have a society, which is a bit demoralized.

Maybe it doesn't even believe in America sufficiently anymore. It doesn't believe that these trades, I mean, this is what you're working on, right? You're trying to make the trades cool again. There's no future without that. Whatever, however this plays out, however many robots are going to be doing things. I mean, who would have guessed that I had no idea. that it would be the white-collar jobs, which would get her hit first with AI. There's so many white-collar jobs that are basically disappearing now.

That's so interesting, right? Right in front of us. Right in front of us. But it actually, the skilled labor is going to be a lot harder to change, frankly, right? But, so I don't know. This is why I love, you know, this is why I was so thrilled to have you on the show before, right? Because this is, you're actually trying to put a dent in this. I think we need an, you know, all-hands approach and explain to people, no, the trades are where it's at.

This is where the future is that we need to re-industrialize, remanufacture as much as possible, as quickly as possible. This is the name of the game. And I think when I look at all these actions that are happening with the Trump administration, I think they're trying to do that. Will it be successful? I think it's a very difficult task. I don't know the answer to that. But if you don't try, there is no hope, is there? Right?

You've got to try. You've got to try, ma'am. Look, I'm hopeful that people poke around and learn more about the organ harvesting thing. I think it's better to know. It's not pleasant and people aren't going to want to see it, but it's better to know. Not just for the whole never again mantra, which I completely support, but these are our partners. These are the people that are making stuff we rely on. And it's not just cheap little trinkets and toys and stuff.

You know, we're talking about everything from steel to lumber. to aerospace, all of it. Medicine, it's a big deal. I don't know how we unravel it, but it feels like you're trying. I mean, I think the key is maybe conversations, more conversations like this, frankly. I think if more people understand what's at stake, right?

What's at stake? It's not bombastic to say this. freedom is at stake. The reason I'm here partially, right, and not in Canada, because what happens here is so consequential to everybody else, to everybody. And we can see that. And I think the president just demonstrated this with this tariff scheme. Look how the whole, everybody is reeling from this, reality, right? This, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, this, regime. Everyone's asking these questions. What the U.S. decides to do is so important, right? If we really understand the nature of this, the Chinese Communist Party threat, we can counter it and we can

guarantee a much better world. I mean, America, Canada, I think, in the world. There it is, folks. It's only freedom and Western civilization as we know it. Thanks, John. Oh, people want to get the Epoch Times. Best place to check in out, subscribe? Theepoktimes.com. On the top right, you'll see a subscribe button. And Mike, this has been a fantastic conversation. I really appreciate it. I really appreciated it, too. I enjoyed it. Who's your next guest on American Thought Leaders? Let me see. Who do I have coming up? Gosh, you caught me at a, give me one sec. You'll have to cut this part.

Sorry, American Thought Leaders is no longer in production. I'll be back again. No, you've had so many, man no no no i'm trying to i'm trying to kind of get you one that is a one that you'll know um no no aside from me who should people go listen to you interview what's your favorite interview in the last year too well let me tell you my favorite interview okay my favorite interview was but with a guy who is the only medical doctor known to have survived the can He's a fascinating man, and it's shocking because what did they do? They actually just killed all the educated people. If you had glasses, they would kill you.

If they knew you were a doctor or professor, I think they would kill you, right? This was the revolution. It's hard to imagine, right? That's why it's so shocking. Like, how would you know it's the only medical doctor? Well, they went after all of them. And he ran off into the, he pretended to be a workman, eventually ran off into the forest and lived to tell the tale.

But he's also a philosopher, just like an unbelievable. believable guy. What's his name? Nal Ome. Now Ome. All right. On American Thought, you can look it up on, I think we have that one in full on YouTube. So you can check that out. Well, you got the best guests ever. Present company. Somewhat excluded. Please come back some time. Appreciate it. And I hope to have you back too, Mike.

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