TRIGGERnometry - Exposing China's Murder for Organs Industry with Jan Jekielek

Episode Date: September 5, 2022

Listen to Rob Moore’s no.1 ranked ‘Disruptors’ podcast with the world’s most disruptive guests & billionaires. Plus get access to a digital financial toolkit that will help you save money - Go now to bit.ly/robtoolkit Counterweight is hosting the Counterweight Conference on Liberal Approaches to Diversity and Inclusion. Use code TRIGGERPOD20 at checkout for 20% off all-access pass. Jan Jekielek is a senior editor with The Epoch Times and host of the show, "American Thought Leaders. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: https://www.subscribestar.com/triggernometry https://www.patreon.com/triggerpod Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ | Channel ID: UCo_8zzSxKeL3arKWVuP8wdQ Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/​​​ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/​​​ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod​​​ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod​​​ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Plus, all this great info will help you destroy people with logic and facts. Aye, aye, aye. I give up. See, a heart transplant is something that you can't actually schedule. You would have to know when someone's going to be dead. And the only way you can really know when someone's going to be dead to give that heart is to make them so. As humans, we don't want to believe that people are capable of such things. There was this whole kind of process of bringing China into the international monetary system. First, it was most favored nation's status.

Then it became World Trade Organization a session. The U.S. basically sponsored China's entry without having the usual requirements. They found, through looking at protocols, very carefully, 71 instances in the published literature where people had been killed by heart extraction. Hello and welcome to a very special episode of Trigonometry on the road from the USA. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kisson. And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people. It doesn't get any better than what we have for you today. We're here in New York recording with a man we've been

friends with for a long time. We're really looking forward to this conversation. He is the host of American thought leaders on Epoch Times, where he's a senior editor. Jan Yakel, welcome to Trigonometry. Oh, it's fantastic to be here with you guys. And I love that you use the word fascinating. As my whole audience knows, I use that way too much. Well, welcome to the place for fascinating people and conversations. Jan, one of the things we wanted to talk to you about is actually the reverse of the conversation you and I've just had for your show, which is about, the West and you have a unique personal history and Epoch Times as an organization has an interesting history that ties into all of that. So we normally begin our interviews by asking the

guests to tell everybody who are you, how are you way you are, what's been your journey through life. Give us some of that. How are you where you are and how is the organization that you work for where it is? I don't even know where to start. We could do several episodes on this. Let's start here. Okay. My parents both grew up in Communist Poland. born during the war. And my mother in the early 70s, she made this decision that changed her life. And Constantinio will appreciate for sure why. She was given the offer to join the Polish Communist Party, and she refused that offer. And after that, her life was irrevocably changed. She lost her passport. She lost her privileges. And she made a decision that she was not going to have her children in Poland because

well, it wasn't free, right? So that's a little bit of background. We came to Canada in the 70s in a roundabout way. There's a whole fascinating story into how she got her passport back. There was a communist official in the office where her aunt worked that everybody, of course, knew it was the communist functionary that every one of these offices had. This guy loved to drink this 180-proof alcohol that aunt used to make called Nala. And he basically, they gave him a lot of Nalefka. He signed off the papers. My mother got her passport and she was able to get out to France. My father came out. They got married in Paris, landed in Canada. And I came out, I think, a month after arrival or something like this. And, you know, learned Polish as a first language. And I also learned a lot about, well, the realities of life under communism. In some ways, you know, in your book, Constantine, you mentioned at the very beginning, you mentioned how every Everything in the family has to stay in the family. And I grew up like that, but I didn't really fully understand why, because we were, after all,

growing up, I was growing up in a free country. So that's a little bit of background. And what about the epoch times? Right. Well, so the epoch times is very interesting. There's an immigrant element here, right? So you're familiar with, of course, your audience is hopefully, will be familiar what happened in China in 1989.

1989 was the June 4th, the Tiananmen Square Massacre. There was a whole huge student movement around that, okay? And a lot of people don't know that. John Tong, who is the current leader of the Epoch Times, he was part of that student movement. And after 89, he basically left. He got a scholarship to Georgia Tech and never went back. And this is kind of what a lot of them did that could do that.

1999 rolls around and the Chinese Communist Party picks a new enemy. You know, it was the students in 89 now. It's the Fallen Gong spiritual movement. 70 to 100 million people by government estimates are doing this practice. Grassroots, truth, compassion, tolerance. These are the principles people are living by very self-directed, very serious about these things. The Communist Party feels like it's not maybe in control. like this is a group of people that's bigger than it is.

There were, I think, 70 million Communist Party members at the time. Jung Zemin, the dictator at the time, feels like, you know, there's a lot of evidence that he's kind of jealous of, you know, the sort of the popularity of the group and so forth. He doesn't want something that isn't strictly communist and strictly controlled hierarchically, as you well know, how things work in that system. So basically decides we're going to eradicate this group.

And to facilitate that, and this is where, media comes in, right, they basically take the whole communist propaganda and media that they control and they demonize these people. And, you know, with talking points straight out of 1930s, Nazi Germany. Same type of stuff. These people are evil. Anyway, I don't need to, I don't need to go into the details. The worst things you can say. To justify, right, as it always, as it always works. John, you know, as in America, sees this, starts a website because he is in a free country and he can tell the truth about what's really happening and not have, hopefully, he's thinking, all these Western media just take the Chinese Communist Party talking points verbatim and just regurgitate them, right?

And this little website in Chinese, it started first in Atlanta, explodes, you know, because there is no other place to get this side of the story. And as you know, people want to know, the truth is very interesting. That's at least my supposition. People always want to try to find it, especially when it's in, there isn't a lot of it to go around. So that's how we started. And, you know, within, I think by 2004, they kind of realized, wow, there's, there's an interest in this. There's a market for this.

Let's do this in English. And then let's do this in actually now, I think we're in 21 different languages around the world. And English was the second. And then, you know, with a little bit of time, English grew up and kind of eclips the Chinese became kind of the dominant. And I would say since, well, since maybe 2015, 2016, we've kind of taken on a new role, I think, maybe in Western society, trying to tell the truth in a climate where there doesn't seem to be as much of an interest in it as there once was, which is bizarre. On one side, like among the media, but on the other hand, among the sort of the populace, so to speak, there's a great interest, which has actually fueled our growth.

over time. I was going to say, do you don't find it worrying, Jan, the state of the mainstream media at the moment? I find it deeply, deeply worrying. And in fact, I find it somewhat embarrassing in a way because, you know, I'm glad that we're able to grow in this climate. You know, in marketing, you have this idea of blue ocean strategy, right? Go somewhere where there's a wide open space.

In the area of truth-seeking media, there's a wide-open space. It's kind of bizarre. There's so many that could step into this because so many of these media have just decided to be about narrative creation for lack of a better term. And I'm deeply concerned about it. And, you know, but of course, we'll take it. And why do you think that is? Why do you think there's so many people and corporations and organizations who've abandoned troops-seeking media and are now into narrative creation? There are many, many answers reasons.

I think, to this question that I've come across. And frankly, through talking to people much smarter than me on American thought leaders, I've learned a lot about this. But I think a significant part of it is that a lot of the people in the leg, what I like to call the legacy media are people that have subscribed to this, you know, for lack of a better term, woke, some people will call it neo-Marxist. Every term has its detractors. but this sort of worldview, progressive worldview,

which is, frankly, believes the real ideologues in it, the real true believers believe that reality is constructed by perception, by these narratives. So, you know, why would you seek the truth if there is no truth? It's only what the narrative is. So I think that this has infected, for lack of a better term, these media, even the people that don't strictly believe, that because I think you have to be a very specific sort of person to really completely believe that.

But at some level it influences the way these media function dramatically. And what impact do you think that's had on society, particularly American society? Many, many impacts. Maybe give me a, I can think of like 15 different ways. Well, the most important ones. What are the ones that you can actually see? The most important ones, the most tangible effects? Well, the biggest one is that there seems to be movement away from the idea that there is some kind of objective truth that we can all, you know, basically manage our collective existence around, right? Because that's a very important thing to have, right, to have, you know, you understand, if I'm talking about, let's pick an uncontroversial term, racism. No, I'm kidding, but racism means something very different to the typical person who, you know, learned it in school and the dictionary definition and someone who is very often in the legacy media. It means something very different, right? We were even talking to, we think the word means the same thing. It actually means something different. We're at the point where even some, even the sciences, so to think people are saying things like, well, yeah, two plus two, it doesn't necessarily really equal four. Let's have a debate about that. Right? I mean, that's a kind of a glib example, but this is a real thing.

And there was, if I recall, there was a Fields Medal winner that was making the argument that 2 plus 2 equals 4 isn't quite, it's not quite that simple, actually. So it creates a situation where we're in this kind of hazy cloud of what is truth, what is reality, and it's kind of the social fabric in the process starts kind of, you know, come apart a bit. It's fraying, you're right. And, Jan, you talk about truth-seeking, and one of the things that strikes me out of the conversations you and I have had, and particularly in the context of epoch times, we had a historian on a show called Giles Udi, who talked about the history of communism in Russia, the gulags, and the way that all of these things were being perceived in the West. And one thing he told me that even I didn't know was that actually information was leaking out of the Soviet Union about what was happening. and people in the West were ignoring it. And one of the conversations you've been really present to uncovering is some of the awful things that are happening in China,

to which everyone in the West turns a blind eye. You weren't hear about it on mainstream media at all, which is anything from the organ harvesting program that they have to the Falun Gong, which you mentioned. And why do you think we don't know about these things in the West and don't seem to care? about those things in the West. Another easy question, right?

I'm kidding. But, well, again, so the answer has many pieces to it. I think part of it is ideological. I think that many Americans, you mentioned it in your book, the nuclear bomb was handed to Stalin, like essentially the entire blueprints. How does that happen, right? Well, I call it the West's love

affair with communism. So I think that that is certainly a part of it. There's this sort of attraction. I remember in 2009 Thomas Friedman, you know, Premier New York Times columnist at the time had an op-ed which made me turn red. I rarely turned red reading things, but you know, we should, America should adopt governance practices of China. It's so efficient over there. There are many elements. Recently I heard he kind of disagreed a friend, my friend Lee Smith interviewed him again. He said, well, maybe I wasn't quite right there. So there's this, it's very odd. There's this, plus, you know, I think these authoritarian, totalitarian ideas,

there's an attraction there because, well, you get to control things, right? And here, in place in free societies, there's a lot less control. It's a lot harder to shift things the way you would want to and so forth. So that's one piece. I mean, another piece is, you know, opportunism. With China specifically, right, there's been a great interest in this massive untapped market of now 1.3 billion people. You've heard about this again.

There was this, for lack of a better term, Kissinger Doctrine for many decades, right? There was this belief among American industry and government. If you don't get into China, the next guy, the next big corporation will get into China. So you've got to get in there and you've got to get your piece of the pie. Of course, it doesn't matter that you have to compromise very fundamental things, like hand over your entire IP, right? Intellectual property in order to do it. that. So there's been this kind of rush to get in there. And in the process, you kind of, you know,

forget about some of the crazy things, like in 89. We knew what the Chinese regime was capable. We knew exactly. We knew that it would send in tanks to mow down unarmed students. And we were happy to work with a government like this. I mean, this is, I think this is a profound moral problem, right? This is 1989. Between 1989 and now, we built, you know, America, I think, the most, but the West built the world's biggest and most dangerous dictatorship in the process. There has always been this idea that, you know, that free trade was going to solve everything. Globalization was going to solve all these problems. Why is it that China has opened up economically, but they haven't opened up in, you could argue, far more important ways.

Because they were given full license to open up economically, kind of, and while have no accountability whatsoever in order to be able to achieve that. So, you know, there was in the 90s, right, and into the 2000s, there was this whole kind of process of bringing China into the international monetary system. First, it was most favorite nation's status. Then it became World Trade Organization a session. The U.S. basically sponsored China's entry without having the usual requirements in order to do so. In other words, to be able to get away with the things they get away at the WTO still today. Because the Chinese regime never had an intention of adopting the Western practices, or at least the good government, Western good

governance practices. It only had an interest in accessing the monetary system so that it could, you know, make money hand over fist, so to speak, and build itself. Hey, Francis, do you believe in diversity and inclusion? Of course I do. My dating history is filled with diversity and inclusion. I am nothing, if not an equal opportunities employer. All your previous partners do seem to be of the same sex. I'm not that inclusive. But if you are worried about the polarising effect of diversity and inclusion in workplaces,

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Talking about the things that we don't know about China then, what should we know? What should people understand about this regime that we've been doing business with, what are some of the things that have been happening that a lot of outlets in the West are just not covering? Well, okay, so the obvious one is the Oregon harvesting. You know, I call it murder for organs industry. More commonly, it's called the forced organ harvesting reality in China. It's the only place in the world where it's state-sanctioned, if not state-directed. You know, there's some debate about that among the people that are studying this. But to make a long story short, well, actually, I'll tell a bit of a story, okay?

I believe it was in 2006 or 2005 or 2006. And an Israeli transplant doctor named Jakob Levie had a patient. And Israel has this policy where if you need to get a life-saving transplant, you can go out of country. The state pays for that, okay? his patient tells him, I'm going to China, I'm going to get this transplant, heart transplant, I'm going to get it in two weeks. And Jacob is, as a transplant, by the way, head of the Israeli Transplant Association also. He's shocked and stunned, and he understands immediately that there's no ethical way that this could happen.

Because, see, a heart transplant is something that you can't actually schedule, because you would have to know when someone's going to be dead. And the only way you can really know when someone's going to be dead to give that heart is to make them so. Okay? So, you know, he's kind of stunned by this. The guy goes, comes back, and basically he's got the transplant. Later, there's complications. That's a different story.

But Jacob takes the time. And in a couple of years, the Israeli parliament has adopted a law that says, if you go to China to get a transplant, we will not pay for it. One of the few countries to the state, by the way, that's adopted such a law. It's very interesting. But at this point, we already knew that something terrible is happening. Two Canadian human rights, two Canadian lawyers, David Kilgore, they called them the two Davids. David Colgner, David Maynest. They actually looked at the body of evidence that was available at the time in 2006.

They found, yes, definitely there's an industry in China, the murder for organs industry. And the most likely people that are being used for it are the Falun Gong. Why the Falun Gong? Why? Because there's millions of them in the labor camps. They're a group that's targeted for eradication. So it's much easier for people to do things like this, right? Murder for organs and so forth. And I remember I interviewed David Kilgore back in 2006 about this. He had spoken with a guy who had gone to China and got a kidney transplant. They had fitted him with eight, he had a rare antibody condition. They had fitted him with eight separate kidneys on two separate trips. The eighth one was the one that took because basically the antibody situation wasn't an issue

for that one. So you can just imagine how many people likely lost their lives along the way to get to that one transplant. More recently, okay, and this is, I think what you could call the best smoking gun evidence that exists, but I'll go back to Jacob Levy, him and a journey, journalist Matthew Robertson, they basically looked at all these Chinese, officially published Chinese studies in medical journals. And they found, through looking at protocols very carefully, 71 instances in the published literature where people had been killed by heart extraction. Okay, the cause of death was certainly their removal of a heart. And they've just, they've published this in the American Journal of Transplantation recently. So, you know, it's been this

quest, so to speak, since that time to try to convince people that this is really something that's actually happening, for starters. And, you know, it's really only, I think, this year that I hear kind of broad acceptance. And there's been a lot of hurdles long away. And give everybody a sense of the scale of what's happening. How many people do you think are likely to have gone through this? I just had a conversation with Ethan Gutman, maybe a couple of weeks ago. Ethan was, I think, the premier field researcher on this issue. He's lived in Falun Gong communities and in Uyghur communities. This shifted later, by the way, into the Uyghur communities as another extremely vulnerable group to be used for this practice. But the estimate, a credible estimate since about 2002 is 60 to 100,000

transplants a year. And then if you, and then I said, well, that that would be, could be more than a million people. And Ethan said, no, no, no, Jan, that's an overestimate because of ECMO technology. So ECMO is a type of machine that allows you to replace the heart and lungs. It's often used when people need very complicated surgeries and maybe around those organs or something like this. So around 2007, 2008, ECMO technology started being used. So you could conceivably, because this is important to know, you can only really transplant from a body that's brain dead and body alive. You can't transplant from cadavers. So it's, it's, it. there's limited time frame, right?

This gives you apparently 24, according to Ethan, another 24 hours. So you could do multiple transplants that match tissue and blood and all this. So ultimately, his estimate, and I think, and he's very conservative in his estimates, is about half a million people. But the thing that struck me was I was looking at the black, you're familiar with the Black Book of Communism, right? that chronicles the deaths of various communist regimes. This, you know, is a significant, just this organ harvesting regime,

let's take that million, that number of 500,000 people. 500,000 people killed four organs in China is a significant number in the list of the Black Book Communist alone, never mind the great leap forward, never mind the cultural revolution, never mind, you know, what happened in the Soviet Union. And it's it purely, done for money, or is it also a way to control the population, to strut and still fear in them? So the China Tribunal, which was done a couple of years ago, headed by Sir Jeffrey

Niece, who prosecuted Slobodan Milosevic, you're probably familiar with him, he did this sort of independent assessment with all the available evidence. And they tested the question, they said, definitely crimes against humanity within a few weeks, even before the found, definitely this is a crime against humanity. Definitely these people are targeted. But this is the weird, this is the bizarre thing, okay? Like, I can't, I can't help but smile this because it's so frankly, yeah, it's hard to fathom, right? They said, well, because of the, in order to satisfy the genocide concept, you have to say, well, there's a specific interest in destroying these people, right? And they are being destroyed through the policy. But in the case of Fulongong, and,

this organ harvesting regime, there is the profit motive. So we can't definitively establish genocide because of the profit motive. And it's like, you're laughing. And I laugh too, but then you stop to, you think to yourself, oh my God, right? We can't establish genocide because of the profit motive. So if Hitler had done the Holocaust for money, that would have been okay, basically, according to this way of thinking. Well, so, you know, I'll tell you some really interesting thing. You know, you're aware that I recently produced the film Finding Mani, right, about my wife's father, who's a Holocaust survivor. One of the things we both discovered that we didn't fully grasp

until in that film, you can kind of see us coming to this realization, is how important to the Nazi war effort was the slave labor by the Jews and other people in the concentration camps. You just think of these things as purely death camps. But no, this actually the labor, they were making Panzer Faust. These are these kind of single-use anti-tank weapons. all sorts of stuff, really basic stuff, but significant. So there was also a profit motive, bizarrely.

They just wanted to use, it's such a twisted... All right, Jan. So I hear you on all of that. Why don't we care? Why do we not care? Is it? Because I'm always trying to understand where people are coming from. Is it that I, an ordinary person, when I look at the situation,

you've told me what's going on, there's nothing I can do about it. There's nothing I can do about it. Is that why we don't care? Do we not care because our media won't tell us about it? Do we not care because it requires confrontation with the other major superpower in the world to deal it with this? Do we not care because it's not in our economic interest not to care? It's to care rather. But why don't we care?

Okay. And this is another one of these, all of the above answers. But I actually think the fundamental reason is that as humans, we don't want. want to believe that people are capable of such things. And I've come across this in all sorts of... Actually, you know, Jan Karski was this Polish nobleman, crazy guy, right? During World War II, he breaks into a Nazi concentration camp masquerading as a Ukrainian guard, right?

And basically, you know, sees what's happening, gets out, gets to the UK, gets to America, says they're killing people in mass, right? And there's this famous Felix Frankfurter, AG, at the time in the U.S., Jewish, says something like, I'm not later when faced with the reality, right? He says, I'm not saying I thought the young man was lying. I'm saying that I was unable to believe him. Now, that sounds like a throwaway line by a politician maybe, but I actually think there's truth to it.

I think we don't want to believe it, many people. And then, of course, if you're a politician, the moment that you're a politician, the moment that you invoke genocide, the moment you say, wow, there's something like this happening, that means maybe you're accountable now, you're responsible for doing something. What do we do? Oh, my God, wait, our economic interests might be endangered,

you know, at this point. So I think that the answer is multi-layered. And frankly, I do think that there's this element among the elite class, and this is something that I didn't want to believe until recently that maybe some of them just don't care. about this, about this type of thing, right? And do you not think as well, it's, look, it's very difficult to, and you touched on it, to persuade people to go against their own economic best interests.

If you can turn a blind eye to it and continue to make your business profitable, why would you suddenly make your business unprofitable to talk about this issue? It's very convenient, isn't it? Yeah, I think we're very good at rationalizing things as human beings. Absolutely. Especially when our own interests are involved, right? But that is kind of the answer of saying, you know, you don't really want to know because if you knew, then you might have to change your life. And that itself can be uncomfortable. Never even if it isn't a financial interest. Maybe it's just you have to change the way you do things day to day. We're very, you know, we like to, we're, I think, you know, humanity has a lot of manifestations, but part of it,

we can be quite selfish. Yeah, and moving, but not on, but actually back to where we started, which is your family history and your background. Obviously, we haven't written my book in Immigrants Love Let's to the West. This is something I've thought about a lot. Why do you do what you do? Why do you put yourself out there? Why do you, you know, you're a man who believes in what he does.

You do what you do for a reason. And I think that reason is very much the same reason that I do what I do. And Francis does what he does, because we've seen. seen another world, our families come from that other world, and we know what the West is, and we are all troubled, I think, by the attempts to paint the West or something it's not. Why do you do what you do? Why do you stand up for what you would argue of Western values and why are they important? This is a great question. You know, I mentioned that I had been reporting on the organ

harvesting since 2006. I was very, I was kind of shocked this. You'd think this would be a front page story, right, with a little bit of work. There's a woman named D.D., I'll just mention it, because I think it's worth it, a woman named D.D. Kristen Tatlow, who, as far as I can tell, you know, gave up her career to make sure that this story was published in the pages of the New York Times, which is, you know, was much more influential at the time still than it is now. But I have to, I have to admit, you know, I've always, been a little bit maybe off the beaten path in my thinking. And I've always found myself in situations where I have to make tough decisions that maybe don't affect just me, but maybe

others as well that are uncomfortable. So I guess it's not, I believe in this pursuit of truth. I truly believe in this pursuit of truth and that finding, trying to find it, of course, I don't presume to have a monopoly on it, just to be clear at all, right? But I'm but pursuing it as best you can, checking your assumptions and everything else, and sharing that with people, that's something that actually can help us have a good, productive, and healthy society for myself,

for my family, for everybody. I truly believe in that. And I'm, you know, knowing what communism can do, I, you know, and my family has, all sides of my family, have kind of suffered at the hands of various totalitarianism, the Nazis, and, you know, the Soviets under Soviet occupation in Poland. I feel an extra need to tell people understand that we're definite, that we're kind of heading in a very dark direction if we don't get ourselves, you know,

kind of in order and starts realizing what it is that we, what it is that when we might lose if we adopt these, you know, utopian ideologies and sort of try to realize them. And what evidence do you see that we're moving in that direction? Well, I'll tell you something funny, okay? I see a lot of evidence, but this is actually if when I talk to immigrants

that come from those systems, the people, and this is what's really interesting. There's two groups. One is a group that left for reasons related to freedom, like my mother. Okay? And another is a group that left for economic reasons. Okay? The people that left for freedom without a single exception,

and I've talked to tens of such people, they will tell you, wow, this system that we came from is manifesting around us right now. To me, that feels much more compelling as evidence than a lot of statistics. But there's a lot of information out there that can show you. For example, we talked about in our interview freedom of speech, the erosion of freedom of speech is a great marker, an indicator, for lack of a better term, that we're heading in a very, very dark direction. But to me, it's the kind of the, for lack of a better term, lived experience of people that have come from these systems and left for reasons related to freedom and liberty and so forth.

Like, yeah, this is, I'm seeing it in front of me. This is something funny. My parents, they both, they don't really agree on a lot of things, right? But for them independently, it's an obvious reality. And where they're living, that, I'm not saying we're there, that it's heading in that direction and there's a lot of signs. And why is it? And my mother is Venezuelan.

So I saw communism come in, gradually with Chavez. Why is it such, how can I put this? It seems to Western people, and particularly left-leaning, younger metropolitan types. It's a very persuasive kind of system. You see the kids with a Che Guevara T-shirts. Why is that? It's a fascinating question, because I think it's been this. way from the beginning. From the time that Marx wrote the communist manifesto, there's been a love

affair with it. And, you know, I don't know how many times it's been tried, like a couple of dozen or something like that, right? In every single instance that it's been tried, it's been successful. It's done what it does best. Yes, it's done, it's done what it says. And then you have the next people that are saying, let's, yeah, but it's never really been tried. There's a couple of, again, a couple of answers, and I don't have a definitive answer to this, by the way, not by a long shot. But one, I do feel it has kind of theological elements. It functions, I think, like a replacement religion for people in a situation where, you know, in Nietzsche's words, God was, humans killed God, right?

Not his exact words, but that's the idea. Like we kind of believed in, I guess, the logical conclusion of the Enlightenment, that all these things, that we can figure everything out without the benefits of religion for lack of spirituality, lack of a better term. And communism allows for people to tell themselves, yes, I'm actually, you know, I'm a true materialist, and I'm looking at things this way, and I reject religion, but actually I think that it functions that way. I think it functions like a replacement religion. There's a lot of evidence around that, I think.

So that's one piece. Another piece is, so I think there's sort of an attractiveness to it. But there's also been, you know, a huge interest because America has been, the U.S. and, frankly, Western countries, have been so successful. There's been a specific interest in injecting that system into places like the U.S. and Canada and the U.K. by people who seek to damage it or replace it. We talked about Uri Besmanov, you know, is the perfect example. You kind of explained how the Soviets were doing it for decades, right? So on one side, it's attractive. On the other side, there's a very dedicated effort.

I think Besmanoff once said that 85% of the work or something, some number that high, that they were doing that the Soviet security services were doing overseas, was around that, around changing the culture, around demoralizing. Exactly. So the combination of those two things, I think, creates a really, I guess, difficult reality. And, you know, if Besmanov is right, that once you get past, through this demoralization over decades, it's very hard to convince someone

that they've been brainwashed or ideologically changed. You can try to tell them any sort of facts. Hey, look, here's the result. Look at what happens when you're not part of a, when you're in a fatherless family. Look at what your life results, how they change statistically. It's something that everybody, left-wing, right-wing think tanks, agree uniformly.

fatherless households that children are basically highly disadvantaged. No one wants to talk about it. Or at least the people that don't want to believe that such things are important. And of course, in communism, it's the state that's the father and mother, right? It's not the parents. And we saw that, particularly with, I don't want to go into COVID that much. But what I found interesting with COVID was particularly in the UK, people looking to the state to solve their problems,

going, well, look, this pandemic is here. What is the government going to do about it? You know, what can the government do to solve the pandemic? I found that worrying, deeply worrying. So, you know, you're basically saying that as a society, I mean, as the West, you're talking about the UK, I think the phenomenon is similar in the US. Not for everybody, but certainly for a significant group of people,

there's this idea that somehow the government has to provide for you. The government has to find the solutions. There's a whole other group of people at America that find this whole concept offensive, right? The idea is like, you want, no. What is it that Ronald Reagan said something? One of the most damaging things you can hear is I'm from the government, I'm here to help.

I forget exactly what he said, but something in this vein. It would seem to be a result of this whole, exactly the process that we were just discussing because, you know, you have, in communist society, right, the state is the giver of all, right? It's the manager of perception. It basically is the provider of everything.

It's all the good that is in society comes from it. All the bad is from the nefarious opponents to it. And it believes likewise that the reality, that whatever it tells you is reality is what you must believe and that that is the correct way to view the world. So I'm with you. That's basically what I'm saying. It's stunning to me that there's so many people saying that.

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Where's this going, Jan? There's a big debate between Francis and now on this issue. Okay. Because I'm naturally an optimistic person, and maybe because there are a lot of us now talking about these things, because trigonometry is doing well and my book is doing well, and it's very tempting to think that we're making progress and we're turning things around and the pendulum is slowing down and maybe it will actually swing and then what we need to worry about is it will overcorrect another direction as it always does.

That's where my mind has been at. Francis, the eternal pessimist, of course, says very differently. He says, this is just going to get worse and worse. What do you say? Okay. This is a tough question, and I'm not of a single mind on it, but I'll tell you where I see problems and where I see hope. I kind of, I'm in the Besmanoff camp that once people have been demoralized,

okay, that it's very tough to get them to take things like even reality in front of their face, you know, seriously, they have to kind of be shocked into it somehow. And I, you know, in other interviews I've done, I've, I've, this is a very difficult problem, a very difficult problem because we have a whole generation that's saying things like, you know, that finds socialism attractive. I mean, not everybody, but it's like, what is it, 60% in America? I can't forget if the young people is, it's unbelievable, right? So that's the one side.

On the other hand, you know, the, and the other thing is that essentially all the cultural institutions have been, you know, basically been seized all the major cultures by adherence or somewhat adherence, perhaps some cynically, all cynical adherence, and some actual ideologues of this woke ideology. And that's deeply problematic similarly because all these other people are sort of being pushed into, if not agreeing, believing they should. And the young people are the ones that are, of course,

the most impacted this way. That's one side. The other side is I feel like there is this element of the pan being overplayed. You have, for example, you know, I was just, I was stunned, okay, when we were watching, there's the state of Virginia at an election, and education was a central issue in that, in there. And basically the Democratic opponent literally said that he thinks the state, I mean, to paraphrase, that parents shouldn't have the final say in the children's education that the state should, right?

And so this is, it's a weird platform position to take, right? And just, I don't know who could argue that. And so, you know, we have this situation where all these people that, for lack of the term, just kind of generally want to be left alone, that most of population are not activists. They don't want to be active. They just want to be able to live their lives, have good, have decent lives, be successful, enjoy time with family, whatever, right? Like, basically all of this type of thing.

those people at some scale now have been activated. Democrat and Republican in the U.S., basically of different ideological stripes. And I think that's very interesting because they realized, and this is one of the silver linings of COVID, there was all this remote education. I've heard this story, I could say,

more than a hundred times, not hundreds maybe, but I was listening to what my kid was learning remotely. And, oh, my God, what? Right? And these people just have been quote unquote radicalized, activated to stop some of this stuff. And then in the process, realized maybe that's the shock, right? We're saying there has to be this kind of shock to the system. So when the people that normally don't want to be involved get involved because they feel like they have to. It's gone that far. That's where I actually see the hope. I don't see it coming from, you know, the intellectuals. although there could be certainly some guidance from there.

Like certainly reading a lot of Thomas Sol, you mentioned it at our interview. It would be incredibly helpful to people. A lot of really common sense, basic stuff that, shockingly, you know, six or seven years ago, I didn't even know who Thomas Soul was, right? To give you, so there's certainly a lot of learning we can do that way. But I think it's the normal people, for lack of a better term.

The silent majority, sometimes it's called that, people who believe in common sense. And also, frankly, there's this other element I have to mention, right? I think because we live in an increasingly information economy, we call it the laptop class, there's all these people that live much more in a virtual world, that they can kind of get away with not having to fully grasp that there's kind of a physical, like, how does the food come to me? Well, it arrives on Amazon.

Right. All of this, exactly, exactly. So I think it's the people that have to do things with their hands that are, you know, why was it truckers in Canada that were the ones that said, these mandates, we can't accept this, right? It's because it's the people who have to face the consequences of reality of really bad policy, right? So I think, and that's the silent majority in it. But I also think it's essentially the working class or people that are doing things physically, the reels versus. as the virtuals was one, I think N.S. Lyons described it that way in a wonderful essay a while back. I think that those people becoming awake in the term that I prefer, there's huge hope in that.

And I like to think that we'll be able to turn it around, but I don't know. I wouldn't sit here and make a prediction. Well, the reason I ask about it, you mentioned these real people. I think the last time that attempt was made and inevitably whenever there's a backlash against things it's never the prettiest version of that what could have been right it sort of looked a bit like Brexit and it looked a bit like Trump and what that seems to have done is actually made

I don't know if it's made the problem worse but it certainly made the debate more heated we didn't we didn't get to the places we thought we'd get to whether it was better understanding we got to a place where we're more polarized not less So that to me would sort of, I'm arguing against myself here. That to me is the thing I would question about what you're saying, because as the sort of internet term would be normies start to wake up, maybe the backlash will just be even worse against them. Or look at all these whatever names that get attached to them,

they're doing this thing again that they do. You know what I mean? Yes, yeah, I do. I don't know. I think, see, I think that the people that believe, whether actually or cynically, in wokeism, again, for lack of a better term, I think that they believe, certainly the ideologues, they believe that this is the only way that everybody should think. This is part of the reason for the erosion of freedom of speech and part of the reason why you, you know, you can sort of enforce incredible minority opinions. on a vast portion of the population, whether it's, you know, for example, you know, biological males in women's sports

is a great example of something like that. Like most people really think that's a bad idea, but somehow, you know, in the popular consciousness, whoa, right? So I don't think it would go away. Like the attraction, I've talked with many Trump supporters over the years. The common theme is, why was the attraction of Trump?

Well, actually a lot of policy sort of basic sort of more what would have been considered 10 years ago centrist policy but the other part was he fights for us he'll fight for this position right there's this general

sort of dissatisfaction in the politicians of the day that they simply aren't don't satisfied with the status quo and won't go fight for these things so I think I suspect the polarization

actually already exists inherently. And as long as, you know, as long as things are going in the direction that the woke ideologues think is the correct direction, there doesn't need to be a lot of, you know, animosity because everything's going the right way. But the moment that it gets stopped, then all hell breaks loose.

But I think that's kind of inevitable. Because if there's, if they truly believe that there's only this one way of looking at the world, How can you avoid that? Do you know what I think is never going to stop? And the answer is in the name, progressivism. They believe in constant progress. And not only do they believe in constant progress,

even more terrifyingly, they believe in utopias. So if we carry on and constantly progress, we are going to reach Nirvana, where everybody is equal. So why would they stop? I can't see any reason. Well, so, you know, John McWhorter has a book that I thought was very good. I think he's been on your show. Yeah, yes.

One of our favorite guests. Yeah, he's brilliant, John. Well, so, I mean, his approach is, as perhaps, I don't know if you talked about it, I sure because I haven't seen the episode, but is to, well, you know, of course, we have to tolerate these people, but you just want to kind of move them away from any levers of power. That sounds like a reasonable approach because an authoritarian response or a totalitarian response to all these things isn't something that we can really do without destroying ourselves in the process, right? So these are very serious difficult problems, right?

If someone believes with fervor that society has to look this particular way that's very devoid from any semblance of reality, How can you, well, you want to help that person as best you can, but you don't want them to be making policy, right? I mean, that's, I think that's the, I don't know if I've answered your question. It's fine. The other question I really wanted to ask, and this is particularly... Will they ever stop? I don't think they will if at the levers of power, no. What do we do with institutions, institutions that we use to respect, for instance, in my country, the BBC,

and, you know, New York Times over here and so on and so forth. Do you think these institutions can be saved, or do you think that we need just to scrap them and start again? They're too far gone. This is kind of a setup for me, I think, because, like, in a good way, I mean, I don't, I think that I'm a believer in this sense very much in a free market, right?

And so free market for media. Let me qualify something. I think it's a very difficult situation where most media that have a large megaphone are saying the exact same thing and that thing happens to be often just simply not true. That's a huge problem because it creates a situation where a lot of people in society

are just believe things that are just simply not true. When there isn't this desire at least strong impetus to try to seek the truth because a lot of people believe that these narrative creating media are actually truth-seeking media. See, there's that disconnect, right? I don't know, we can't,

what we can do is we can try to stop supporting these institutions in sort of structural ways, like where the, you know, the government actually supports them. In a lot of cases, like in Canada, the government is actually paying a lot of money to the larger media. And, you know, you can see the inherent problems

that. I'm more in favor of a free market where you can have the epoch times, you know, sort of in a level playing field, same access to advertising, same access to essentially the entire market, not kind of artificially, you know, stopped because of, you know, ideological disagreements. And let the best man win, right? And I, because I'm a believer that truth is something that humans actually do seek and there's an inherent attraction to it. And I think that's the reason. Epoch Times became so powerful and attractive out of the starting gate. And that's why we've been able to grow many times over over the past few years

because people recognize that. And that's the feedback we get from our viewers all the time. So that's why I said it was kind of a set-up question. I don't think we should be scrapping anyone, but I do think what we should be doing is to try to create as level of playing field as we can. So people can legitimately decide for themselves. You know, what is this, hey, okay, let me check this media out. Is it, is it providing me with what I need? I'm going to push back on that because, okay, and I'll tell you why. I completely agree with you. That's great pushback. Right.

I completely agree. Let me push back. You said everything right. I agree with you. There is one flaw in your argument, which is we think we're going to continue or we don't. We think that the internet is going to be fair. We think we're not going to get shadow banned. We think, and we're already suffering from it. So this idea is great. Well, we're also suffering from it. Obviously, this is the reason I'm saying I'd like to see the playing field level.

You're saying, how can we make sure the playing field level? Well, I can say we can, you know, demand legislation. We can, you know, encourage the election of, of, lawmakers that will foster the kind of legislation that will create a level playing field. Do I think that's difficult? Yeah, yeah, I do. But I do think we have to use the democratic institutions to do it or die trying. Like again, I think that we have to, and this is where, you know, some people might disagree with me, right? But I think this system that I've come to really appreciate the American system, right?

It's inherently, inherently slow. It was created, I've come to believe, in such a way as to try to prevent any one group from assembling too much power at once. But the cost of that is that things move slowly, that, you know, you hear pack the court, you hear all these things. All these things are kind of difficult

to actually accomplish because of the structures. Because of these founding fathers, you know, basically thought to themselves, people are going to try to amass massive amounts of power and enforce their view on everybody else. Let's create a system that actually prevents that from happening. It doesn't matter who, right? So, yeah, it's difficult.

But I have to believe that the institutions can be resilient to it if we fight for it, right, using that these, let's say, for lack of the term, good and just tools at our disposal. That's a good note to finish up on, Jan. It's been an absolute pleasure to speak with you. And I think one of the things that makes everything you've said more powerful for me, we've just been at the Epoch Times offices, we've seen how many people are working around.

And it shows me that it's possible to create big institutions that can challenge some of these narratives, and what you're doing is really valuable for that reason. As you know, the last question, we'll ask you a couple of questions from supporters only for locals, which only they will see. But before we do that, the last question we always ask is, what is the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? You know, of course, you posed this question to me. I think there are many things of this nature. But I think I've come to believe that humans have an intrinsic interest in their nature of being connected, for the lack of a better term, with divinity, with their creator.

People think about it in different ways, right? And to pretend that that's not the case, and this is a consequence of the, you know, the enlightenment, the amazing products of the enlightenment, I might add, right? And this is something that Mityas Desmond chronicles very well in his book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, which I keep plugging because I think it's such an important book. He talks about society has become atomized, you know, and just by nature of us thinking of ourselves as being just, you know, physical entities, as opposed to spiritual entities connected to God or divinity or, again, you know, different people across the world think about these things differently.

So to me, that is a central piece of the conversation that I don't see being had a lot, but I think it's sort of foundational to finding our way out of this. Because I personally don't think there's a way out without people facing that and trying to understand that connection. Now, people that three of us know mutually would, I think, vehemently probably disagree with that. people who I respect deeply, and I've learned a lot from. But yeah, that's what I think. Jan, thank you so much for coming on the show. If people want to find you online, if people want to learn more about the Epoch Times or American Thought Leaders, where can they go to

find these things? Well, so theepoktimes.com is, of course, the main epoch times website. You can join us there. American Thought Leaders is on Epoc TV. If you type in Epoch TV, you'll find American Thought Leaders and a whole suite of other very interesting shows, including my film Finding Mani, a film that I made with my wife about her Holocaust Survivor father. I'm plugging it a little bit because I do think it was kind of a bit of a miracle for us of a film first attempt out of the blocks and just a very important story. So that's, yeah, and American Thought Leaders, you can also find us as a podcast on Apple Podcasts and so forth. Yeah, and don't go anyway because we're going to ask you a couple of questions from our local

supporters. But I should thank you also for letting us use your studio here at the Epoch Times. We really appreciate the time you've spent with us today. I hope people check out your work with American Thought Leaders. Thank you for being on the show. And thank you guys for watching and listening. We will see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one or a raw show. All of them go at 7 p.m. K-time. And for those of you who like your trigonometry, on the go, it's also available as a podcast. Take care and see you soon, guys. Do you think the Epoch Times is getting traction with their information on the war being waged by China against the West, or is there still a dominance of ignorance out there?