TRIGGERnometry - September 05, 2022


Exposing China's Murder for Organs Industry with Jan Jekielek

Topics
murder for organs practice communist ideology evidence
Hosted by
Francis Foster Konstantin Kisin
Mentioned
Ethan Gutmann Beautiful Noise John McWhorter David Kilgore Yuri Bezmenov Didi Kristen Tatlow Sweet Caroline Finding Manny Thomas Sewell Yakub Lavi Rob Moore Konstantin Nalefka Ayaan Hirsi Ali Kissinger Doctrine Slobodan Milosevic Matty Roberts Thomas Friedman Jordan Peterson Andrew Sullivan and 42 more
Bill Burr： ＂The Internet is an Abusive Relationship＂ Andrew Doyle： ＂Vote Left or Right, You Still Get Woke Politics＂

Episode Stats


Length

1 hour and 5 minutes

Words per minute

170.67

Word count

11,235

Sentence count

779

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

3

sentences flagged

Hate speech

9

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this special episode of Trigonometry: On the Road From The USA, Francis Foster sits down with the founder of American Thought Leaders, Jan Jekyllic, to talk about his journey to becoming a writer, entrepreneur, and thought leader.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Hey Francis, do you like entrepreneurs?
00:00:02.700 Not really.
00:00:03.800 What do you mean? What do you think we'd do at Trigonometry?
00:00:06.200 Annoy people on the internet, cause meltdowns on Twitter,
00:00:09.800 and destroy people with logic and facts.
00:00:13.200 Right, stop stealing my catchphrases. It's facts and logic.
00:00:17.000 I'm just saying, being an entrepreneur is against my culture.
00:00:21.200 Why would I work hard when I could just lie on the beach,
00:00:25.200 in a sombrero, shouting aye aye aye?
00:00:28.700 Well, for those of you who aren't Venezuelan,
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00:00:56.700 and turn their passion into their profession.
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00:01:17.300 Go now to bit.ly slash robtoolkit, but be quick, because this isn't usually free.
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00:01:32.700 Plus, all this great info will help you destroy people with logic and facts.
00:01:39.100 Aye aye aye!
00:01:40.500 See, a heart transplant is something that you can't actually schedule.
00:01:46.700 You would have to know when someone's going to be dead.
00:01:50.300 And the only way you can really know when someone's going to be dead
00:01:53.100 to give that heart is to make them so.
00:01:59.100 As humans, we don't want to believe that people are capable of such things.
00:02:06.100 There was this whole kind of process of bringing China into the international monetary system.
00:02:13.100 First, it was most favored nation status.
00:02:17.900 Then it became World Trade Organization accession.
00:02:20.900 The U.S. basically sponsored China's entry without having the usual requirements.
00:02:30.700 They found, through looking at protocols very carefully,
00:02:34.500 71 instances in the published literature where people had been killed by heart extraction.
00:02:50.900 Hello, and welcome to a very special episode of Trigonometry on the Road from the USA.
00:02:58.900 I'm Francis Foster.
00:03:00.300 I'm Constantin Kissin.
00:03:01.500 And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations with fascinating people.
00:03:07.300 It doesn't get any better than what we have for you today.
00:03:10.100 We're here in New York recording with a man we've been friends with for a long time.
00:03:14.100 We're really looking forward to this conversation.
00:03:16.100 He is the host of American Thought Leaders on Epoch Times, where he's a senior editor.
00:03:20.700 Jan Jekyllic, welcome to Trigonometry.
00:03:22.500 Oh, it's fantastic to be here with you guys.
00:03:24.500 And I love that you use the word fascinating.
00:03:26.500 As my whole audience knows, I use that way too much.
00:03:30.100 Well, welcome to the place for fascinating people and conversations, Jan.
00:03:35.100 One of the things we wanted to talk to you about is actually the reverse of the conversation you and I have just had for your show, which is about the West.
00:03:44.100 And you have a unique personal history and Epoch Times as an organization has an interesting history that ties into all of that.
00:03:50.700 So we normally begin our interviews by asking the guests to tell everybody who are you, how are you, where you are, what's been your journey through life.
00:03:57.700 Give us some of that.
00:03:58.700 How are you, where you are, and how is the organization that you work for where it is?
00:04:01.700 I don't even know where to start.
00:04:03.300 We could do several episodes on this.
00:04:06.300 Let's start here.
00:04:08.300 My parents both grew up in communist Poland, born during the war.
00:04:14.300 And my mother in the early 70s, she made this decision that changed her life.
00:04:20.300 And Konstantin, you'll appreciate for sure why.
00:04:23.300 She was given the offer to join the Polish Communist Party and she refused that offer.
00:04:29.300 And after that, her life was irrevocably changed.
00:04:33.700 She lost her passport, she lost her privileges, and she did made a decision that she was not going to have her children in Poland because, well, it wasn't free, right?
00:04:44.900 So that's a little bit of background.
00:04:47.500 We came to Canada in the 70s in a roundabout way.
00:04:51.500 There's a whole like fascinating story into how she got her passport back.
00:04:55.900 There was a communist official in the office where her aunt worked that everybody, of course, knew.
00:05:02.100 It was the communist functionary that every one of these offices had.
00:05:06.300 This guy loved to drink this 180 proof alcohol that aunt used to make called Nalefka.
00:05:13.300 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.
00:05:20.700 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.
00:05:27.500 And, you know, learned Polish as a first language, and I also learned a lot about, well, the realities of life under communism.
00:05:37.500 In some ways, you know, in your book, Konstantin, at the very beginning, you mention how everything in the family has to stay in the family.
00:05:44.700 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.
00:05:51.700 So that's a little bit of background.
00:05:53.700 And what about the Epoch Times?
00:05:55.700 Well, so the Epoch Times is very interesting.
00:05:59.500 There's an immigrant element here, right?
00:06:02.700 So you're familiar with, of course, your audiences, hopefully you'll be familiar with what happened in China in 1989.
00:06:09.700 1989 was the date, June 4th, the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
00:06:14.700 There was a whole huge student movement around that, okay?
00:06:17.700 And a lot of people don't know that.
00:06:19.700 John Tong, who is the current leader of the Epoch Times, he was part of that student movement.
00:06:27.700 And after 1989, he basically left, he got a scholarship to Georgia Tech, and never went back.
00:06:34.500 And this is kind of what a lot of them did that could do that.
00:06:37.500 1999 rolls around, and the Chinese Communist Party picks a new enemy.
00:06:43.300 You know, it was the students in 1989 now.
00:06:45.300 It's the Falun Gong spiritual movement.
00:06:48.500 70 to 100 million people, by government estimates, are doing this practice.
00:06:54.300 Grassroots, truth, compassion, tolerance, these are the principles people are living by.
00:06:59.300 Very self-directed, very serious about these things.
00:07:02.300 The Communist Party feels like it's not maybe in control.
00:07:06.300 Like this is a group of people that's bigger than it is.
00:07:09.300 I think 70 million Communist Party members at the time.
00:07:12.300 Jiang 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.
00:07:22.300 He doesn't want something that isn't strictly communist and strictly controlled hierarchically, as you well know how things work in that system.
00:07:29.300 So, basically decides we're going to eradicate this group.
00:07:33.300 And to facilitate that, and this is where media comes in, right, they basically take the whole communist propaganda media that they control, and they demonize these people.
00:07:44.300 And, you know, with talking points straight out of 1930s Nazi Germany.
00:07:48.300 Same type of stuff. 0.98
00:07:49.300 These people are evil. 0.91
00:07:50.300 Anyway, I don't need to go into the details.
00:07:52.300 The worst things you can say to justify, right, as it always works.
00:07:58.300 John, you know, is 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.
00:08:06.300 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?
00:08:15.300 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.
00:08:25.300 And as you know, people want to know.
00:08:28.300 The truth is very interesting.
00:08:29.300 That's at least my supposition.
00:08:31.300 People always want to try to find it, especially when there isn't a lot of it to go around.
00:08:36.300 So, that's how we started.
00:08:39.300 And, you know, within, I think, by 2004, they kind of realized, wow, there's an interest in this.
00:08:45.300 There's a market for this.
00:08:46.300 Let's do this in English.
00:08:48.300 And then let's do this in actually now I think we're in 21 different languages around the world.
00:08:53.300 And English was the second.
00:08:55.300 And then, you know, with a little bit of time, English grew up and kind of eclipsed the Chinese, became kind of the dominant. 0.83
00:09:01.300 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.
00:09:22.300 On one side, like among the media, but on the other hand, among sort of the populace, so to speak, there's a great interest, which has actually fueled our growth over time.
00:09:33.300 I was going to say, do you don't find it worrying, Jan, the state of the mainstream media at the moment?
00:09:39.300 I find it deeply, deeply worrying.
00:09:41.300 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.
00:09:49.300 You know, in marketing, you have this idea of blue ocean strategy, right?
00:09:53.300 Go somewhere where there's a wide open space.
00:09:56.300 In the area of truth-seeking media, there's a wide open space.
00:10:00.300 It's kind of bizarre.
00:10:01.300 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.
00:10:10.300 And I'm deeply concerned about it.
00:10:13.300 And, you know, but of course, we'll take it.
00:10:16.300 And why do you think that is?
00:10:18.300 Why do you think there's so many people and corporations and organizations who've abandoned truth-seeking media and are now into narrative creation?
00:10:29.300 There are many, many answers, reasons, I think, to this question that I've come across.
00:10:34.300 And frankly, you know, through talking to people much smarter than me on American Thought Leaders, I've learned a lot about this.
00:10:40.300 But I think a significant part of it is that a lot of the people in 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.
00:10:59.300 There's every term has its detractors.
00:11:02.300 But this sort of worldview, woke progressive worldview, which is, frankly, believes the real ideologues and the real true believers believe that reality is constructed by perception, by these narratives.
00:11:16.300 So, you know, why would you seek the truth if there is no truth?
00:11:20.300 It's only what the narrative is.
00:11:22.300 So I think that this has infected, for lack of a better term, these media with these, even the people that don't strictly believe that.
00:11:31.300 Because I think you have to be, you know, a very specific sort of person to really completely believe that.
00:11:36.300 But at some level, it influences the way these media function dramatically.
00:11:40.300 And what impact do you think that's had on society, particularly American society?
00:11:48.300 Many, many impacts.
00:11:51.300 Maybe give me a, I can think of like 15 different ways.
00:11:55.300 Well, the most important ones.
00:11:56.300 The most important ones.
00:11:57.300 What are the ones that you can actually see, the most important ones, the most tangible effects?
00:12:02.300 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?
00:12:18.300 Because that's a very important thing to have, right?
00:12:21.300 To have, you know, you understand if I'm talking about, let's pick an uncontroversial term, racism.
00:12:27.300 No, I'm kidding.
00:12:28.300 But racism means something very different to the typical person who, you know, learned it in school in the dictionary definition and someone who is very often in the legacy media.
00:12:40.300 It means something very different, right?
00:12:42.300 We were even talking to, we think the word means the same thing.
00:12:44.300 It actually means something different.
00:12:46.300 We're at the point where even some, even the sciences, so to speak, people are saying things like, well, yeah, 2 plus 2, it doesn't necessarily really equal 4.
00:12:55.300 Let's have a debate about that, right?
00:12:57.300 I mean, I'm just, that's a kind of a glib example, but this is a real thing.
00:13:00.300 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.
00:13:09.300 So we're kind of, 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 to kind of, you know, come apart a bit.
00:13:26.300 It's fraying, you're right.
00:13:27.300 It's fraying, you're right.
00:13:28.300 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.
00:13:35.300 We had a historian on our show called Giles Udy, 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.
00:13:48.300 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.
00:13:58.300 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. 0.71
00:14:09.300 You won'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.
00:14:20.300 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?
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00:15:00.300 Another easy question, right?
00:15:02.300 I'm kidding.
00:15:03.300 But, well, again, so the answer has many pieces to it.
00:15:09.300 I think part of it is ideological.
00:15:11.300 I think that many Americans, you know, you mentioned it in your book, the nuclear bomb was handed to Stalin, like essentially the entire blueprints.
00:15:22.300 How does that happen, right?
00:15:24.300 Well, I call it the West's love affair with communism, right?
00:15:28.300 So I think that that is certainly a part of it.
00:15:30.300 There's this sort of attraction.
00:15:32.300 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.
00:15:41.300 I rarely turn red reading things.
00:15:42.300 But, you know, we should, America should adopt governance practices of China.
00:15:46.300 It's so efficient over there.
00:15:47.300 There are many, many elements.
00:15:49.300 Recently, I heard he kind of disagreed.
00:15:51.300 A friend, my friend Lee Smith interviewed him again.
00:15:53.300 He said, well, maybe I wasn't quite right there.
00:15:55.300 But, so there's this, it's very odd.
00:15:58.300 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?
00:16:06.300 And here, in place in free societies, there's a lot less control.
00:16:09.300 It's a lot harder to shift things the way you would want to and so forth.
00:16:13.300 So that's one piece.
00:16:14.300 I mean, another piece is, you know, opportunism.
00:16:18.300 With China specifically, right, there's been a great interest in this massive untapped market of now 1.3 billion people.
00:16:27.300 You've heard about this again.
00:16:28.300 There was this, for lack of a better term, Kissinger Doctrine for many decades, right?
00:16:34.300 There was this belief among American industry and government, if we don't, if you don't get into China, the next guy, the next big corporation will get into China.
00:16:42.300 So you've got to get in there and you've got to get your piece of the pie.
00:16:47.300 Of course, it doesn't matter that you have to compromise very fundamental things like hand over your entire IP, right?
00:16:54.300 Intellectual property in order to do that.
00:16:57.300 So there's been this kind of rush to get in there.
00:17:00.300 And in the process, you kind of, you know, forget about some of the crazy things.
00:17:07.300 Like in 89, we knew what the Chinese regime was capable of. 0.99
00:17:11.300 We knew exactly.
00:17:12.300 We knew that it would send in tanks to mow down unarmed students.
00:17:17.300 And we were happy to work with a government like this.
00:17:20.300 I mean, this is, I think this is a profound moral problem, right?
00:17:24.300 This is 1989.
00:17:25.300 You know, 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.
00:17:36.300 There has always been this idea that, you know, that free trade was going to solve everything.
00:17:41.300 Globalization was going to solve all these problems.
00:17:45.300 Why is it that China has opened up economically, but they haven't opened up in, you could argue, far more important ways?
00:17:55.300 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.
00:18:09.300 So, you know, there was in the 90s, right?
00:18:15.300 And into the 2000s, there was this whole kind of process of bringing China into the international monetary system.
00:18:21.300 First, it was most favored nation status, right?
00:18:24.300 Then it became World Trade Organization accession.
00:18:27.300 The US basically sponsored China's entry without having the usual requirements in order to do so.
00:18:37.300 In other words, to be able to get away with the things they get away at the WTO still today.
00:18:42.300 You know, because the Chinese regime never had an intention of adopting the Western practices, or at least the Western good governance practices.
00:18:54.300 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.
00:19:04.300 Hey, Francis, do you believe in diversity and inclusion?
00:19:08.300 Of course I do. My dating history is filled with diversity and inclusion. I am nothing, if not, an equal opportunities employer.
00:19:17.300 All your previous partners do seem to be of the same sex.
00:19:20.300 I'm not that inclusive.
00:19:22.300 But if you are worried about the polarizing effect of diversity and inclusion in workplaces, then you have to attend the Counterweight Conference on Liberal Approaches to Diversity and Inclusion.
00:19:33.300 We've had people from Counterweight on this very show to talk about how this can be achieved.
00:19:39.300 They're great people who want to improve society.
00:19:42.300 Counterweight believe that there is a need for diversity and inclusion that aims to eliminate workplace racism and discrimination through a liberal and unifying lens.
00:19:51.300 The current way isn't working, and we need a less divisive approach.
00:19:55.300 The speakers are also former guests of ours, including Eric Kaufman.
00:19:59.300 They're also giving free access for a very limited time to a huge variety of resources showing how diversity and inclusion can be done properly without all the reactionary nonsense peddled by those who shall not be named.
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00:20:58.300 Talking about the things that we don't know about China then, what should we know?
00:21:03.300 What should people understand about this regime that we've been doing business with?
00:21:07.300 What are some of the things that have been happening that a lot of outlets in the West are just not covering?
00:21:14.300 Well, okay, so the obvious one is the organ harvesting.
00:21:18.300 You know, I call it murder for organs industry.
00:21:21.300 More commonly, it's called the forced organ harvesting reality in China.
00:21:28.300 It's the only place in the world where it's state sanctioned, if not state directed.
00:21:34.300 You know, there's some debate about that among the people that are studying this.
00:21:38.300 But to make a long story short, well, actually, I'll tell a bit of a story, okay?
00:21:43.300 I believe it was in 2006 or 2005 or 2006.
00:21:48.300 An Israeli transplant doctor named Yakub Lavi had a patient.
00:21:54.300 And Israel has this policy where if you need to get a life-saving transplant, you can go out of country.
00:21:58.300 The state pays for that, okay?
00:22:01.300 His patient tells him, I'm going to China.
00:22:04.300 I'm going to get this transplant, heart transplant.
00:22:06.300 I'm going to get it in two weeks.
00:22:08.300 And Yakub is, as a transplant surgeon, by the way, head of the Israeli Transplant Association also.
00:22:14.300 He's shocked and stunned.
00:22:15.300 And he understands immediately that there's no ethical way that this could happen.
00:22:19.300 Because, see, a heart transplant is something that you can't actually schedule.
00:22:23.300 Because you would have to know when someone's going to be dead.
00:22:27.300 And the only way you can really know when someone's going to be dead to give that heart is to make them so.
00:22:32.300 Okay?
00:22:33.300 So, you know, he's kind of stunned by this.
00:22:35.300 The guy goes, comes back, and basically, he's got the transplant.
00:22:39.300 Later, there's complications.
00:22:40.300 That's a different story.
00:22:42.300 But Yakub takes the time.
00:22:44.300 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.
00:22:51.300 One of the few countries to this day, by the way, that's adopted such a law.
00:22:55.300 And it's very, very interesting.
00:22:57.300 But this is, at this point, we already knew that something terrible is happening.
00:23:02.300 Two Canadian human rights, two Canadian lawyers, David Kilgore, they call them the two Davids, David Kilgore, David Matas.
00:23:10.300 They actually looked at the body of evidence that was available at the time in 2006.
00:23:15.300 They found, yes, definitely, there's an industry in China, the murder for organs industry. 0.96
00:23:21.300 And the most likely people that are being used for it are the Falun Gong.
00:23:24.300 Why the Falun Gong?
00:23:25.300 Why?
00:23:26.300 Because there's millions of them in the labor camps. 0.98
00:23:29.300 They're a group that's targeted for eradication.
00:23:32.300 So it's easy, much easier for people to do things like this, right?
00:23:37.300 Murder for organs and so forth.
00:23:38.300 So, and I remember I interviewed David Kilgore back in 2006 about this.
00:23:42.300 He had, he had spoken with a guy who had gone to China and got a kidney transplant.
00:23:46.300 They had fitted him with eight, he had a rare antibody condition.
00:23:49.300 They had fitted him with eight separate kidneys on two separate trips.
00:23:53.300 The eighth one was the one that took because the, basically the antibody situation wasn't an issue for that one.
00:23:58.300 So you can just imagine how many people likely lost their lives along the way to get to that one transplant.
00:24:04.300 More recently, okay, and this is, this is, I think what you could call the, the best smoking gun evidence that exists.
00:24:13.300 But yeah, I'll go back to Jacob Levy, him and a, and a journalist, uh, uh, uh, Matthew Robertson.
00:24:21.300 They put to, they basically looked at all these Chinese officially published Chinese studies in medical journals.
00:24:27.300 And they found through looking at protocols very carefully, 71 instances in the published literature where people had been killed by heart extraction.
00:24:37.300 Okay.
00:24:38.300 The, the, the cause of death was certainly their heart removal of a heart.
00:24:42.300 And they've just, they published this in the American journal of transplantation recently.
00:24:45.300 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.
00:24:55.300 And, you know, it's really only, I think this year that I, I hear kind of broad acceptance and there's been a lot of hurdles along the way.
00:25:02.300 And give everybody a sense of the scale of what's happening.
00:25:05.300 How many people do you think are likely to have gone through this?
00:25:08.300 I just had a conversation with Ethan Gutmann, maybe a couple of weeks ago.
00:25:12.300 Ethan was, I think the premier field researcher on this issue.
00:25:18.300 He's lived in Falun Gong communities and in Uyghur communities.
00:25:22.300 This shifted later, by the way, into the Uyghur communities as another extremely vulnerable, vulnerable group to be used for this practice.
00:25:31.300 But the, the estimate, a credible estimate since about 2002 is 60 to 100,000 transplants a year.
00:25:40.300 And then if you, and then I said, well, that, that would be, could be more than a million people.
00:25:45.300 And Ethan said, no, no, no, Jan, that's an overestimate because the, because of ECMO technology.
00:25:50.300 So ECMO is a type of machine that allows you to replace the heart and lungs.
00:25:55.300 It's often used when people need very complicated surgeries and they, you know, maybe around those organs or something like this.
00:26:01.300 So around 2007, 2008, ECMO technology started being used.
00:26:04.300 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.
00:26:12.300 You can't transplant from cadavers.
00:26:14.300 So it's, it, it, there's limited timeframe, right?
00:26:16.300 This gives you apparently 24, according to Ethan, another 24 hours.
00:26:20.300 So you could do multiple transplants that match tissue and, and, and blood and all this, all this.
00:26:26.300 So ultimately his estimate, and I think, and he's very conservative in his estimates is about half a million people.
00:26:33.300 But the, the thing that struck me was I was looking at the black, you're familiar with the black book of communism, right?
00:26:39.300 That chronicles the, the deaths of various communist regimes.
00:26:44.300 This, you know, is a significant, just this organ harvesting regime.
00:26:49.300 Let's take that million of 500,000, that number of 500,000 people, 500,000 people killed for organs in China is a significant number in the list of the black book.
00:27:01.300 The black book coming alone, nevermind the great leap forward, nevermind the cultural revolution, nevermind, you know, what happened in the Soviet Union. 0.59
00:27:08.300 So, and is it purely done for money or is it also a way to control the population, to strut and still fear in them?
00:27:15.300 So, uh, the China tribunal, which was done a couple of years ago, headed by Sir Jeffrey Nice, who prosecuted Slobodan Milosevic.
00:27:23.300 You're probably familiar with him.
00:27:24.300 Um, he did this sort of independent assessment with all the available evidence and they tested the question.
00:27:30.300 They said, definitely crimes against humanity within a few weeks, even before the found, definitely, this is a crime against humanity.
00:27:36.300 Uh, definitely, these people are targeted, but this is the weird, this is the bizarre thing.
00:27:40.300 Okay. Like I can't, I can't help but smile.
00:27:43.300 Uh, this is because it's so frankly, yeah, it's, it's hard to fathom, right?
00:27:49.300 Um, they said, well, because of the, in order to satisfy the genocide concept, you have to say, well, these, there's a specific interest in destroying these people.
00:27:59.300 Right. Um, and, and, and they are being destroyed through the policy.
00:28:04.300 But in the case of, uh, Fulungong and this organ harvesting regime, there is the profit motive. 1.00
00:28:12.300 So we can't definitively establish genocide because of the profit motive.
00:28:17.300 And it's like, you see, you're laughing and I laugh too, but then you stopped, you think to yourself, oh my God.
00:28:24.300 Right.
00:28:25.300 We can't establish genocide because of the profit motive.
00:28:27.300 Wow.
00:28:28.300 So if Hitler had done the Holocaust for money, that would have been okay, basically. 0.95
00:28:31.300 Yeah.
00:28:32.300 According to this way of thinking.
00:28:33.300 Well, so, you know, I'll tell you something, a really interesting thing.
00:28:35.300 You know, you're, you're aware that, that I recently produced the film Finding Manny, right?
00:28:39.300 About my, my wife's father, who's a Holocaust survivor.
00:28:42.300 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.
00:28:48.300 It's how important to the Nazi war effort were the, was the slave labor by the Jews and other people in the concentration camps.
00:28:56.300 You keep, you just think of the death, these things as purely death camps.
00:28:59.300 But no, this actually, the labor, they were making Panzerfaust there.
00:29:02.300 These are these kind of single use anti-tank weapons, all sorts of stuff, right?
00:29:06.300 Really basic stuff, but significant.
00:29:08.300 So there was also a profit motive, bizarrely.
00:29:11.300 They just wanted to use, it's, it's such a twisted.
00:29:15.300 All right, Jan, so I hear you on all of that.
00:29:18.300 Why don't we care?
00:29:19.300 Why do we not care?
00:29:21.300 Is it, because I'm always trying to understand where people are coming from.
00:29:26.300 Is it that I, an ordinary person, when I look at the situation, you've told me what's going on.
00:29:32.300 There's nothing I can do about it.
00:29:34.300 There's nothing I can do about it.
00:29:35.300 Is that why we don't care?
00:29:37.300 Do we not care because our media won't tell us about it?
00:29:40.300 Do we not care because it requires confrontation with the other major superpower in the world?
00:29:45.300 To deal with this?
00:29:46.300 Do we not care because it's not in our economic interest not to care?
00:29:50.300 Is it to care rather?
00:29:52.300 But why don't we care?
00:29:53.300 Okay.
00:29:54.300 And if this is another one of these, all of the above answers.
00:29:57.300 Yeah.
00:29:58.300 But I think the, I actually think the fundamental reason is that as humans, we don't want to
00:30:06.300 believe that people are capable of such things.
00:30:09.300 And I've come across this in all sorts of reality. 0.69
00:30:12.300 Actually, you know, Jan Karski was this Polish nobleman, crazy guy, right? 0.99
00:30:17.300 During World War II, he breaks into a Nazi concentration camp masquerading as a Ukrainian guard, right?
00:30:24.300 And basically, you know, sees what's happening, gets out, gets to the UK, gets to America, says,
00:30:29.300 they're killing people in mass, right?
00:30:32.300 And, you know, there's this famous Felix Frankfurter AG at the time in the US, Jewish, says, you know,
00:30:40.300 something like, I'm not later when faced with the reality, right?
00:30:45.300 He says, I'm not, I was, I'm not saying I thought the young man was lying.
00:30:49.300 I'm saying that I was unable to believe him.
00:30:51.300 Now, that sounds like a throwaway line by a politician, maybe, but I actually think there's truth to it.
00:30:55.300 I think we don't want to believe it.
00:30:57.300 Many, many people.
00:30:58.300 And then, of course, if you're a politician, the moment that you invoke genocide, the moment you say, wow,
00:31:03.300 there's something like this happening, that means maybe you were accountable.
00:31:06.300 Now you're responsible for doing something.
00:31:08.300 What do we do?
00:31:09.300 Oh, my God, wait there, the, the, you know, our economic interests might be endangered, you know, at this point.
00:31:14.300 So, so I think that the answer is multilayered.
00:31:18.300 There's, and, and frankly, I do think that there's, there's this element among the elite class.
00:31:23.300 And this is something that I've, I didn't want to believe until recently, that maybe they, some of them just don't care about this, about this type of thing.
00:31:32.300 Right.
00:31:33.300 And.
00:31:34.300 Do you not think as well, it's look, it's very difficult to, and we, you touched on it, to persuade people to go against their own economic interests.
00:31:43.300 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?
00:31:56.300 It's, it's very convenient, isn't it?
00:31:58.300 Yeah.
00:31:59.300 I think, I think we're very good at rationalizing things as human beings.
00:32:02.300 Absolutely.
00:32:03.300 Especially when our own interests are involved.
00:32:06.300 Right.
00:32:07.300 But that, that is kind of the, the, the, 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.
00:32:14.300 And that itself can be uncomfortable.
00:32:16.300 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.
00:32:20.300 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, we can be quite selfish.
00:32:29.300 Yeah.
00:32:30.300 And moving, but not on, but actually back to where we started, which is your family history and your background.
00:32:35.300 What, what obviously we haven't written my book and immigrants love led to the West.
00:32:39.300 This is something I've thought about a lot.
00:32:41.300 Why do you do what you do?
00:32:43.300 Why do you put yourself out there?
00:32:45.300 Why do you, uh, you know, you're, you're a man who believes in what he does.
00:32:49.300 You do what you do for a reason.
00:32:51.300 And I think that reason is very much the same reason that I do what I do.
00:32:54.300 And Francis does what he does because we've seen another world.
00:32:58.300 Our families come from that other world and we know what the West is.
00:33:04.300 And we are all troubled, I think, by the attempts to paint the West or something it's not.
00:33:10.300 Uh, why do you do what you do?
00:33:12.300 Why do you stand up for what you would argue Western values and why are they important?
00:33:17.300 This is a, this is a great question.
00:33:19.300 Um, you know, I, I mentioned that I had been reporting on the organ harvesting since 2006.
00:33:26.300 I was very, I was kind of shocked that this was the, you'd think this would be a front page story, right?
00:33:31.300 With a little bit of work.
00:33:32.300 There's a woman named Didi.
00:33:33.300 I'll just mention it because I think it's worth it.
00:33:35.300 A woman named Didi Kristen Tatlow, who from 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, than it is now.
00:33:49.300 But, um, I have to, I have to admit, you know, I've, I've always been a little bit, um, maybe off the beaten path in my thinking.
00:34:02.300 And I've always, um, 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.
00:34:11.300 So I guess it's not, I, I, I, I, I believe in this pursuit of truth.
00:34:18.300 I, 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?
00:34:27.300 But, but, but pursuing it as best you can, checking your assumptions and everything else, um, that, that, and, and sharing that with people.
00:34:35.300 That's something that actually can help us have a good, productive and healthy society for myself, for my family, for, for, for everybody.
00:34:43.300 I, I, I truly believe in that.
00:34:45.300 Um, and I'm, you know, knowing what communism can do.
00:34:51.300 Um, I, you know, and my, my family has all sorts, all sides of my family have kind of suffered at the hands of various totalitarianism, the Nazis, and, and, you know, the Soviets under Soviet occupation in Poland.
00:35:05.300 Um, I get feel extra, an extra, uh, need to, 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.
00:35:20.300 And starts realizing what it is that we, uh, what it is that we might lose if we adopt these, you know, utopian ideologies and sort of try to realize them.
00:35:36.300 And what evidence do you see that we're moving in that direction?
00:35:39.300 Well, I'll tell you something funny, okay?
00:35:45.300 I see, I see, I see a lot of evidence, but this is actually, if you, if when I talk to immigrants that come from those systems, the people, and this is what's really interesting.
00:35:57.300 There's two groups.
00:35:58.300 One is the group that left for reasons related to freedom, like my mother.
00:36:04.300 Okay.
00:36:05.300 Okay.
00:36:06.300 And another is a group that left for economic reasons.
00:36:09.300 Okay.
00:36:10.300 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 among, around us right now.
00:36:24.300 To me, that feels much more compelling as evidence than a lot of statistics and a lot of, but there's, there's a lot of information out there that can show you, you know, for example, you know, we talked about in our interview, freedom of speech, the erosion of freedom of speech is a great, uh, uh, marker and indicator for lack of a better term that we're heading in a very, very dark direction.
00:36:47.300 But, but, but I, but to me, it's the, the, the kind of the, for lack of a better term lived experience, right.
00:36:54.300 Um, of people that have come from these systems and left for reasons related to freedom and liberty and so forth that like, yeah, this is, I, I'm seeing it in front of me.
00:37:03.300 This is, and this is something funny.
00:37:05.300 My parents, they both, they don't really agree on a lot of things.
00:37:09.300 Right.
00:37:10.300 Um, but they're, it's for them independently, it's an obvious reality.
00:37:15.300 And where they're living with that, that, that, I'm not saying we're there, that it's heading in that direction and there's a lot of signs.
00:37:22.300 And why is it, and my mother is Venezuelan, you know, so I saw communism come in gradually with Chavez.
00:37:30.300 Why is it, it's such, how can I put this?
00:37:35.300 Like it, it seems to Western people in particularly left leaning, younger metropolitan types.
00:37:43.300 It's a very persuasive kind of system.
00:37:47.300 You see the kids with the Che Guevara t-shirts.
00:37:50.300 Why is that?
00:37:52.300 It's a, it's a fascinating question because I think it's been this way from the beginning.
00:37:57.300 Yeah.
00:37:58.300 From the time that Marx wrote the Communist Manifesto, there's been a love affair with it.
00:38:02.300 And, you know, I don't know how many times it's been tried, like a couple of dozen or something like that.
00:38:06.300 Right.
00:38:07.300 In every single instance that has been tried.
00:38:10.300 It's been successful.
00:38:12.300 Yeah.
00:38:13.300 It's done what it does best.
00:38:15.300 Yeah.
00:38:16.300 It's done what it does best.
00:38:17.300 And then you have the next people that are saying, let's, yeah.
00:38:21.300 But it's never really been tried.
00:38:23.300 Yeah.
00:38:24.300 I, there's a couple of, again, a couple of answers that, and I don't have a definitive answer to this, by the way, not by a long shot.
00:38:34.300 But one, I do feel it has kind of theological elements.
00:38:41.300 It, 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?
00:38:53.300 Or not his exact words, but that's, that's the idea.
00:38:56.300 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.
00:39:10.300 And, and, and communism allows for people to tell themselves, yes, I'm actually, you know, I'm a, I'm a true materialist.
00:39:21.300 I'm, you know, and I'm looking at things this way, but, and I reject religion.
00:39:26.300 But actually, I think that, that it functions that way.
00:39:28.300 I think it functions like a replacement religion. 0.54
00:39:30.300 And there's a lot of evidence around that, I think.
00:39:32.300 So that, that, that, that's one piece.
00:39:34.300 Another piece is, so I think there's sort of an attractiveness to it.
00:39:40.300 But there's also been, you know, a huge interest because America has been, the U.S. and, and frankly, Western countries have been so successful.
00:39:49.300 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, who seek to damage it or replace it.
00:40:04.300 We talked about Yuri Bezmenov, you know, is perfect, is, is the perfect example.
00:40:09.300 He kind of explained how the Soviets were doing it for decades, right?
00:40:13.300 So on, on one side, it's attractive.
00:40:15.300 On the other side, there's a very dedicated effort.
00:40:18.300 I think Bezmenov once said that 85% of the work or something, some number that high that they were doing, that the, that the Soviets security services were doing overseas was around that, around changing the culture, around demoralizing.
00:40:33.300 Exactly.
00:40:34.300 So, so the combination of those two things, I think, is, creates a really, you know, I guess, difficult reality.
00:40:42.300 And, you know, if, if Bezmenov 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, or, or, you know, ideologically, you sort of, you know, changed.
00:40:57.300 You can try to tell them any sort of facts.
00:41:00.300 Hey, look, here's the, look at, look at what happens when you're not part of a, when you're in a fatherless family.
00:41:06.300 Look at what, look what your, look what your life, life results, how they change statistically.
00:41:11.300 It's something that everybody left wing, right wing think tanks agree uniformly.
00:41:15.300 Fatherless house households, the children are basically highly disadvantaged.
00:41:21.300 No one wants to talk about it, or at least the people that, you know, don't want to believe that such things are important.
00:41:27.300 And of course, in communism, it's, it's the state that's the father and mother, right?
00:41:33.300 It's not the parents, so.
00:41:35.300 And we, and we saw that particularly with, look, 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.
00:41:47.300 Going, well, look, this pandemic is here, what is the government going to do about it?
00:41:52.300 Yeah.
00:41:53.300 You know, what can the government do to solve the pandemic?
00:41:56.300 I found that worrying, deeply worrying.
00:41:58.300 So, you know, you're basically saying that as a society, I mean, as the West, you're talking about the UK.
00:42:03.300 I think the phenomenon is similar in the US, not for everybody, but certainly for a significant group of people.
00:42:09.300 There's this idea that somehow the government has to provide for you.
00:42:13.300 The government has to find the solutions.
00:42:15.300 There's a whole other group of people in America that find this whole concept offensive, right?
00:42:21.300 The idea is like, you want, no.
00:42:23.300 What is it that Ronald Reagan said something?
00:42:25.300 One of the most, the, the, the most damaging things you can hear is I'm from the government.
00:42:30.300 I'm here to help.
00:42:31.300 I forget, 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, in.
00:42:44.300 In communist society, right?
00:42:47.300 The state is the giver of all, right?
00:42:51.300 And the manager of perception.
00:42:53.300 It's the, it basically is the provider of everything.
00:42:57.300 It's, it's, it's all the good that is in society comes from it.
00:43:00.300 All the bad is from the nefarious opponents to it.
00:43:03.300 And it believes likewise that, that, that the reality that it, whatever it tells you is reality is what you must believe.
00:43:12.300 And that that is the correct way to view the world.
00:43:14.300 So, um, it's, it, I'm, I'm with you, but that's basically what I'm saying.
00:43:19.300 It's, it's stunning to me that there's so many people saying that.
00:43:22.300 Um, and we, I would, I would hope we, we have a, we can robustly educate the next generation to not think that way.
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00:45:07.300 Where is this going, Jan? There's a big debate between Francis and I on this issue.
00:45:13.300 Okay.
00:45:14.300 Because I'm naturally an optimistic person, and maybe because there are a lot of us now talking about these things,
00:45:24.300 because trigonometry is doing well, and my book is doing well, and it's very tempting to think that we're making progress,
00:45:32.300 and we're turning things around, and the pendulum is slowing down, and maybe it will actually swing,
00:45:39.300 and then actually what we need to worry about is it will overcorrect another direction, as it always does.
00:45:43.300 That's where my mind has been at.
00:45:46.300 Francis, the eternal pessimist, of course, says very differently.
00:45:49.300 He says, this is just going to get worse and worse.
00:45:52.300 What do you say?
00:45:54.300 Okay.
00:45:55.300 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.
00:46:03.300 I'm in the Besmanov camp, that once people have been demoralized,
00:46:12.300 that it's very tough to get them to take things like even reality in front of their face seriously.
00:46:19.300 They have to kind of be shocked into it somehow.
00:46:22.300 In other interviews I've done, this is a very difficult problem.
00:46:30.300 A very difficult problem, because we have a whole generation that's saying things like,
00:46:34.300 that finds socialism attractive.
00:46:36.300 I mean, not everybody, but it's like, what is it, 60% in America?
00:46:40.300 I can't forget of the young people.
00:46:41.300 It's unbelievable.
00:46:43.300 Right?
00:46:44.300 So that's the one side.
00:46:46.300 On the other hand, you know, and the other thing is that essentially all the cultural institutions have been, you know,
00:46:55.300 basically been seized, all the major cultures, by adherence or somewhat adherence, perhaps some cynical adherence and some actual ideologues of this woke ideology.
00:47:07.300 And that's, you know, deeply problematic.
00:47:10.300 Similarly, because all these other people are, you know, sort of being pushed into, if not agreeing, believing they should.
00:47:19.300 And the young people are the ones that are, of course, the most impacted this way.
00:47:23.300 That's one side.
00:47:24.300 The other side is, I feel like there is this element of the hand being overplayed, right?
00:47:30.300 You have, for example, you know, I was just, I was stunned, okay?
00:47:35.300 In the, when we were watching the, there's the state of Virginia at an election and education was a central issue in that, in there.
00:47:44.300 And basically the democratic opponent literally said that he thinks the state, I mean, to paraphrase, that the parents shouldn't be, have the final say in the children's education, that the state should, right?
00:47:59.300 And so this is, it's a weird platform position to take, right?
00:48:04.300 And just, I don't know who could, who could argue that.
00:48:07.300 So, you know, we have this situation where all these people that, for lack of a better term, just kind of generally want to be left alone.
00:48:16.300 The most of the population are not activists.
00:48:18.300 They don't want to be active.
00:48:19.300 They want, they just want to be able to live their lives, have good, have decent lives, be successful, enjoy time with family, whatever, right?
00:48:27.300 Like basically all of this type of thing.
00:48:29.300 Those people at some scale now have been activated, Democrat and Republican in the US, basically of different ideological stripes.
00:48:39.300 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.
00:48:46.300 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.
00:48:56.300 And, oh my God, what, right?
00:49:00.300 And, and these people just have been, quote unquote, radicalized, activated to stop some of this stuff.
00:49:06.300 And then in the process realized maybe that's the shock, right?
00:49:09.300 We're saying there has to be this kind of shock to the system.
00:49:11.300 So when, when those, 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.
00:49:21.300 That's where I actually see the hope.
00:49:24.300 I don't see it coming from, you know, the, the intellectuals, although there could be certainly some guidance from there.
00:49:30.300 Like certainly reading a lot of Thomas Sowell, you mentioned in our interview, it would be incredibly helpful to people.
00:49:36.300 Very, a lot of really common sense, basic stuff that shockingly, you know, I, if six or seven years ago, I didn't even know who Thomas Sowell was.
00:49:44.300 Right. To give you, so there's certainly a lot of learning we can do that way.
00:49:50.300 I think it's the, the, the, the normal people, for lack of a better term, the silent majority.
00:49:56.300 Sometimes it's called that people who believe in common sense.
00:49:58.300 And also, frankly, there's this other element I have to mention, right?
00:50:02.300 I think because we live in an increasingly information economy, the, the, we call it the laptop class.
00:50:09.300 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?
00:50:20.300 Well, it arrives on Amazon, right?
00:50:23.300 All of this.
00:50:24.300 Exactly.
00:50:25.300 Exactly.
00:50:26.300 So, so I think it's the people that are, 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, that's, we can't, we can't accept this, right?
00:50:38.300 Why?
00:50:39.300 It's because it's the people who have to face the consequences of reality of really bad policy, right?
00:50:44.300 So I think, and that, that, that's the silent majority.
00:50:47.300 And, but I also think it's the, essentially the, the, the, the working class or people that are doing things physically, the, the reals versus the virtuals was one.
00:50:56.300 I think NS Lyons described it that way in a wonderful essay a while back.
00:51:00.300 I think that those people becoming awake in the term that I, I prefer, there's huge hope in that.
00:51:10.300 And I, I like to think that, that, that, that we'll be able to turn it around, but I don't know.
00:51:15.300 Like, I wouldn't sit here and make a prediction.
00:51:18.300 Well, the, the reason I ask about it, you mentioned these real people.
00:51:21.300 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, of that, what, what could have been, right?
00:51:33.300 It sort of looked a bit like Brexit and it looked a bit like Trump.
00:51:36.300 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.
00:51:43.300 We didn't, we didn't, we didn't get to the places we thought we'd get to where there was better understanding.
00:51:48.300 We got to a place where we're more polarized, not less.
00:51:51.300 So that to me would sort of, I'm arguing against myself here, that, that to me is the, the, the thing I would question about what you're saying.
00:52:00.300 Because as the, the sort of internet term would be normies start to wake up, uh, the, the, maybe the backlash will just be even worse against them.
00:52:09.300 You know, I'll look at all these, whatever names that get attached to them that they're, they're, they're doing this thing again that they do.
00:52:16.300 You know what I mean?
00:52:17.300 Yes.
00:52:18.300 Yeah, I do.
00:52:19.300 I, I don't know.
00:52:20.300 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, the ideologues, they believe that this is the only way that everybody should think.
00:52:40.300 This is part of the reason for, uh, 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, uh, you know, biological males and women's sports is a great example of something like that.
00:52:59.300 Like most people really think that's a bad idea, but somehow, you know, in the popular consciousness, whoa.
00:53:05.300 Right.
00:53:06.300 Um, so I don't think it would go away.
00:53:09.300 Like the, the attraction, I've talked with many Trump supporters over the years.
00:53:14.300 The, the, the common theme is why, what was the attraction of Trump?
00:53:18.300 Well, actually a, a lot of policy sort of basic sort of more what, what would have been considered, you know, 10 years ago, centrist policy.
00:53:27.300 But, but the other part was he fights for us.
00:53:31.300 He'll fight for this position, right?
00:53:33.300 There's this general sort of dissatisfaction in the politicians of the day that they simply aren't, don't, don't, are satisfied with the status quo and won't go fight for these things.
00:53:43.300 So I think, I suspect the polarization actually already exists inherently.
00:53:52.300 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.
00:54:06.300 But the moment that it gets stopped, then all hell breaks loose.
00:54:11.300 But I think that's, that, that it's, that's kind of inevitable because if there's, if, if, if they believe, truly believe that there's only this one way of looking at the world, how, how can you avoid that?
00:54:21.300 Do you know, do you know why I think it's, it's never going to stop?
00:54:24.300 And the answer is in the name, progressivism.
00:54:27.300 They believe in constant progress.
00:54:29.300 And not only do they believe in constant progress, even more terrifyingly, they believe in utopias.
00:54:35.300 So if we carry on and constantly progress, we are going to reach Nirvana, where everybody is equal.
00:54:42.300 So why would they stop?
00:54:44.300 I can't see any reason.
00:54:46.300 Well, so, you know, John McWhorter has a book that I thought was very, very good.
00:54:53.300 I think he's been on your show.
00:54:54.300 Yeah, he has.
00:54:55.300 One of our favorite guests.
00:54:56.300 Yeah, he's brilliant, John.
00:54:57.300 Well, so, I mean, his, his approach is, as perhaps, I don't know if you talked about it.
00:55:03.300 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.
00:55:12.300 That sounds like a, you know, a reasonable approach because an authoritarian response or totalitarian response to all these things isn't something that we can really do without destroying ourselves in the process, right?
00:55:28.300 So these are, these are, these are very serious, difficult problems, right?
00:55:31.300 If someone believes with fervor that the 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?
00:55:47.300 I mean, that's, I think that's the, I don't know if I've answered your question.
00:55:52.300 Yeah.
00:55:53.300 It's fine.
00:55:54.300 The other question I really wanted to ask, and this is particularly-
00:55:56.300 Will they ever stop?
00:55:57.300 I think, I don't think they will if at the levers of power, no.
00:56:02.300 Yeah.
00:56:03.300 What do we do with institutions?
00:56:05.300 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.
00:56:15.300 Do you think these institutions can be saved or do you think that we need just to scrap them and start again?
00:56:22.300 They're too far gone.
00:56:23.300 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 that very much in a free market, right?
00:56:35.300 And so free market for media, let me qualify something.
00:56:40.300 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.
00:56:52.300 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, right?
00:56:59.300 There isn't, when there isn't this desire at least, strong impetus to try to seek the truth.
00:57:04.300 Because those people, a lot of people believe that these narrative-creating media are actually truth-seeking media.
00:57:10.300 See, there's this, there's that disconnect, right?
00:57:13.300 I don't, we can't, we, 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.
00:57:29.300 In a lot of cases, like in Canada, the government is actually paying a lot of money to these, to the larger media.
00:57:35.300 And, you know, you can see the inherent problems with that.
00:57:38.300 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.
00:57:59.260 And let the best man win, right?
00:58:04.260 Because I'm a believer that truth is something that humans actually do seek, and there's an inherent attraction to it.
00:58:11.260 And I think that's the reason Epoch Times became so powerful and attractive out of the starting gate.
00:58:18.260 And that's why we've been able to grow many times over, over the past few years, because people recognize that.
00:58:24.260 And that's the feedback we get from our viewers all the time.
00:58:27.260 So that's why I said it was kind of a setup question.
00:58:29.260 Like, I don't, I don't think we should be scrapping anyone.
00:58:32.260 But I do think what we should be doing, and is to try to create as level of playing field as we can.
00:58:38.260 So people can legitimately decide for themselves, you know, what is this?
00:58:42.260 Hey, okay, let me check this media out.
00:58:44.260 Is it, is it, is it providing me with, with what I need?
00:58:47.260 I'm going to push back on that, because, okay, and I'll tell you why.
00:58:51.260 I completely agree with you.
00:58:53.260 That's great pushback.
00:58:54.260 Right, okay.
00:58:55.260 I completely agree.
00:58:56.260 Let me push back, you said everything right.
00:58:58.260 I agree with you.
00:58:59.260 There is one flaw in your argument, which is, we think we're going to continue, or we don't.
00:59:07.260 We think that the internet is going to be fair.
00:59:10.260 We think we're not going to get shadow banned.
00:59:12.260 We think, and we're already suffering from it.
00:59:14.260 Mm-hmm.
00:59:15.260 So this idea is great.
00:59:17.260 But, well, we, we're also, we're also suffering from it.
00:59:21.260 Obviously, this is the reason I'm saying I'd like to see the playing field level.
00:59:25.260 Yeah.
00:59:26.260 How can we make sure the playing field level?
00:59:29.260 Well, I can say we can, you know, demand legislation.
00:59:33.260 We can, you know, encourage the election of, of lawmakers that will foster the kind of legislation that will create a level playing field.
00:59:43.260 Do I think that's difficult?
00:59:44.260 Yeah.
00:59:45.260 Yeah.
00:59:46.260 I do.
00:59:47.260 Yeah.
00:59:48.260 But I, I do think we have to use the democratic institutions to do it or die trying.
00:59:53.260 Like, again, I, I, I think that we have to, and this is where, you know, some people might disagree with me.
01:00:00.260 Right.
01:00:01.260 But I think this system that I, I've come to really appreciate the American system.
01:00:08.260 Right.
01:00:09.260 It's in, and I, it's inherently, inherently slow.
01:00:14.260 And it's in, 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.
01:00:23.260 But the cost of that is that things move slowly.
01:00:26.260 Mm-hmm.
01:00:27.260 That, you know, you, you, you, you hear pack the court, you hear all these things.
01:00:31.260 All these things are kind of difficult to actually accomplish because of the structures, because 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.
01:00:44.260 Let's create a system that actually prevents that from happening.
01:00:47.260 Mm-hmm.
01:00:48.260 Doesn't matter who.
01:00:49.260 Right.
01:00:50.260 So, yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's difficult, but I, I, I kind of, I have to believe that the, the institutions can be resilient to it if we fight for it.
01:01:02.260 Right.
01:01:03.260 Using the, these, let's say, for lack of a better term, good and just tools at our disposal.
01:01:09.260 Well, that's a good note to finish up on, Jan.
01:01:12.260 It's been an absolute pleasure to speak with you.
01:01:15.260 And I think one of the things that makes everything you said more powerful for me, we've seen, we've just been at the Epoch Times offices, we've seen how many people are working on it.
01:01:23.260 Mm-hmm.
01:01:24.260 And it, it shows me that it's possible to create, uh, big institutions that, that can challenge some of these narratives.
01:01:31.260 And what you are doing is really valuable for that reason.
01:01:34.260 Uh, as you know, the last question, we'll ask you a couple of questions from, uh, supporters only for locals, which only they will see.
01:01:42.260 But before we do that, uh, 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?
01:01:49.260 Hmm.
01:01:55.260 You know, you, you, of course you posed this question to me.
01:01:58.260 I, I think there are many things of this nature, but I think here, 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.
01:02:17.260 People think about it in different ways.
01:02:19.260 Right.
01:02:20.260 Right.
01:02:21.260 And to pretend that that's not the case.
01:02:23.260 And this is a consequence of the, you know, the enlightenment, the amazing products of the enlightenment, I might add.
01:02:29.260 Right.
01:02:30.260 Um, and this is something that Matthias Desmet chronicles very well in his book, The Psychology of Totalitarianism, which I keep plugging because I think it's such an important book.
01:02:38.260 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.
01:02:58.260 So I, to me, that is a central piece of the conversation that I don't see being had a lot, but I think is sort of foundational to finding our way out of this because I don't, I personally don't think there's a way out without people facing that and trying to understand that connection.
01:03:19.260 Now, you know, people that we, three of us know mutually would, I think, vehemently probably disagree with that.
01:03:26.260 Uh, people who I respect deeply and I've learned a lot from, but, uh, yeah, that, that's what I think.
01:03:32.260 Yeah.
01:03:33.260 And thank you so much for coming on the show.
01:03:35.260 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?
01:03:43.260 Well, so theepochtimes.com is of course the main, uh, Epoch Times website.
01:03:49.260 You can join us there.
01:03:50.260 Um, American thought leaders is on Epoch TV.
01:03:54.260 If you type in epochtv.com, you'll, you'll find American thought leaders and a whole suite of other, uh, very interesting shows, including my film, uh, Finding Manny, a film that I made with my wife about her Holocaust survivor father.
01:04:07.260 It's a, it's, I, 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.
01:04:17.260 Um, so that's, yeah.
01:04:19.260 And American thought leaders, um, you can also find us as a, as a podcast, uh, on Apple podcasts and so forth.
01:04:26.260 Yeah.
01:04:27.260 And don't go anywhere.
01:04:28.260 Cause we're going to ask you a couple of questions, uh, from our local supporters, but I should thank, thank you also for letting us use your studio here at the Epoch Times.
01:04:36.260 We really appreciate the time that you've spent with us today.
01:04:39.260 Uh, I hope people check out your work with American thought leaders.
01:04:42.260 Thank you for being on the show and thank you guys for watching and listening.
01:04:46.260 We will see you very soon with another brilliant episode like this one or, or show all of them go at 7 PM UK time.
01:04:52.260 And for those of you who like your trigonometry on the go, it's also available as a podcast.
01:04:57.260 Take care and see you soon guys.
01:05:00.260 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?
01:05:12.260 I love you.
01:05:14.260 I love you.
01:05:16.260 Maybe a bit.
01:05:18.700 I love you.
01:05:19.260 You have a chance of getting traction.
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