Jan Jekielek reveals how Falun Gong’s 70–100 million practitioners in China—one-third the size of the Communist Party—faced persecution starting in 1999, sparking a transplant industry explosion by 2005 with up to 90,000 annual procedures. Whistleblowers like Annie and Jakob Levy expose systematic harvesting, including pre-matched organs for scheduled transplants, while the CCP’s refusal to verify donor registries mirrors Nazi-era "extractive repression." Jekielek warns of utilitarian bioethics justifying atrocities, from forced organ removal to medically assisted exploitation, as China’s elite Project 981 and Western engagement risk normalizing such practices. Her book Killed to Order (March 17) dissects how power systems—especially communism—enable psychopathy and resource theft under hollowed-out democratic accountability. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse podcast Inside Rail.
I have the distinct honor and pleasure of sitting this morning with Jan Yakelek, who is the senior editor of the Epoch Times.
He has written a book about organ harvesting in China, and this is going to be an exciting, if difficult, conversation.
So Jan, without further ado, welcome to Dark Horse.
Brett, it's a real pleasure and an honor.
And I, you know, you do quite amazing work on this show.
So I'm so glad to be here.
Yes, I'm really glad you are here.
I have, of course, been on your show, American Thought Leaders, an excellent show for those of you who have not yet discovered it.
Our subject today is a tough one.
And I don't think you know this, but I have a, let's say, a professional interest in organ donation that goes back to at least 2003.
My focus on it has been about the game theory surrounding the donation of organs.
And anyway, so I find our interests here intersect.
Now, I don't have a hard copy of your book, and I've just gotten one of the galley proofs.
I've done my best to go through it.
There's the book itself.
Imagine that.
Just got it on Friday.
The first copies were sent out.
I mean, it comes out in a month, to be fair.
KilltoOrder.com, shameless plug for where to get it.
But I do have a print copy, actually, finally, first one.
Yes, and if you're going to get a copy, which I recommend to everyone, you should also get a chair so you can sit down while you read it because you don't want to be stunned and fall over.
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Nasal Hygiene Solutions00:02:18
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Teachings and Truthfulness00:13:11
So I'm trying to figure out how to approach this topic with you.
One thing I think we should probably do at the top is address your connection to the subject matter.
In the book, you describe the evidence for forced organ harvesting from Falun Gong members.
Actually, I don't know how to pronounce it.
Maybe you should tell me how is it pronounced?
Oh, so, I mean, that's actually pretty darn close.
Falun gong, also sometimes known as Falon Dafa.
It's actually, I could tell you a little bit more about it, too, because I think it's relevant to why, you know, whenever there's sort of a mass atrocity that happens, everyone's always asked, why do they do it?
Right.
And the answers are never kind of satisfying because, you know, typically when there's a mass atrocity, it's not because the people being subjected to it have done anything wrong.
Well, we'll get there.
I don't know how much you and I have talked about this, maybe not at all.
But when I talk about game theory, one of my foci, in fact, since I was a college student, was the game theory surrounding genocide.
And I actually think there is a very straightforward logic.
It's a diabolical logic, but there is a very straightforward logic that explains why these things happen.
And the case that you present fits the pattern perfectly.
But before we get there, you have a professional connection to Falun Gong, and I believe a personal one.
That will, of course, be on the minds of any critic who wishes to argue that what you present is not believable because of that connection.
So maybe we just ought to talk about what your two connections to it are so that that's on the table.
I love that, actually.
So, well, first of all, Epoch Times, the media that I've now worked with almost 21 years, was founded by Falun Gong practitioners.
They were actually students at Georgia Tech.
A number of them were students who had been part of the student movement in 89, if you recall.
There was a big student movement across the country in China, a pro-democracy movement, right?
There's a famous stat, the kind of goddess of democracy.
They had paper macheted in Tianmen Square.
And the Chinese regime crushed that movement.
Actually, a guy named Zhang Zemin, who was the dictator at the time when the Falun Gong persecution began, was kind of rose to power through participating in that, crushing that student movement.
Okay, there was a massacre.
We don't know, our best guess is about 10,000 people were killed, students.
People say 5,000, people say more.
You know, that's our best number is about 10,000 were murdered by the People's Liberation Army.
But some of those students that weren't sort of on the radar, they were able to get scholarships to other places like the U.S., like Georgia Tech in Atlanta.
And our founders were actually a group of kind of a ragtag group of students who were there.
And when the Falun Gong persecution began, it was kind of a neat moment for them because they felt, hey, we have the First Amendment here.
There was very little credible good information about what was happening in China.
And they thought they would just start a little website, you know, to talk about it.
And that little website, thankfully there were some great tech people there, okay, among them, because that little website just exploded.
Because, you know, as we've learned, especially during COVID, right, when there's a dearth of good information about anything, you know, wherever that happens, people go to the sources that actually present a bit of that.
And this is sort of, so we were actually, in a way, right, we were kind of born to challenge a really giant narrative that was coming out of China.
One of them was, of course, that the Falun Gong is somehow bad, and that's justified to eradicate them, to use the words of the dictator at the time.
But the broader narrative actually was kind of what we would call the Kissinger doctrine, okay?
The Kissinger doctrine was roughly, and this is a little bit glib, but if we pump enough cash into China, right?
If we get in bed with, if our elites get in bed with their elites, we're going to turn them into South Korea or a Taiwan.
They're going to reform and liberalize.
And I remember even in 2009, there were op-eds in the New York Times about how, you know, it's basically a democracy.
They just have their little rough around the edges, right?
And at this point, you know, I already knew that they were killing people to order for organs, you know, for profit, which is not a liberalizing situation.
But so that's the connection.
I just want to add this.
You know, the core tenets of Falun Gong are truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance or tolerance.
That last term is a little more difficult to translate, but a bit of like sort of a pain is a positive thing and we should treat it that way kind of fits into that third term.
But the truthfulness part is incredibly important because we continue to this day to be inspired by that truthfulness element.
And this is part of the reason why the Falun Gong in China right now constitute, I think, probably the largest peaceful civil disobedience movement maybe in the world.
I don't want to argue with people about dimensions, but it's one of them, right?
To this day, there's millions of people every day exposing the realities of the Chinese Communist Party to their fellow man.
Okay.
But and we benefited from it dramatically in that truthfulness principle, right?
We hear a lot about activist journalism these days, right?
The dean of Columbia Journalism School talks about activist journalism.
They train their people that way.
Okay.
Activist journalism, if I may, right?
I think you would probably agree.
It's just propaganda.
It's just like a nice word for propaganda.
What we do is truth-seeking journalism.
It doesn't mean we have the truth.
We have the license for the truth.
We are the truth.
We've heard that terminology before.
It just means that we deeply care about the truth and we're trying to get at it as best we can.
If we get it right, we celebrate.
If we get it wrong, we fix it.
Right.
And that's sort of so the Falun Gong connection, when it comes to epoch times, in my view, is kind of like the blessing, not a problem, as some people might, you know, of course, the Chinese regime would say, well, it's connected with Falun Gong, therefore it's illegitimate.
But that's kind of what they say about anything they're looking to crush or anything that really stands in their face, so to speak.
How many people are members of this movement inside of China and then abroad?
So the numbers right now are very hard to measure, okay, because there isn't like anyone really doing a census of any sort.
But back in 1999, so this is actually quite interesting.
So I'm going to touch on this.
Why did they persecute the Falun Gong?
Okay.
There were, by government estimate, in 1999, there were 70 to 100 million Chinese, one in 13 Chinese, was doing Felungong.
Okay.
And so that, so, you know, often I would use this, especially in the early years when I worked on China-related human rights issues.
I would say, you know, it was bigger than the Communist Party, which was like 60 million, I believe, at the time.
Okay.
So that's, and communists don't like competition.
Okay.
So that's kind of a good reason.
But there's something deeper here.
Okay.
Because Falun Gong is really, it doesn't fit into the categories that we like or we understand very well.
It's even like people ask me, is it a religion?
Right.
And that's a very interesting question because it doesn't have, there's a teacher or a master.
His name is Li Hong Zhe.
Some people don't like the term master.
And he's written voluminous teachings.
And a lot of it is about connection with divinity and connection to God and so forth.
But there aren't a lot of rules in it, what we would call rules, and there's no hierarchy in it.
That's in fact one of the rules.
A rule would be something that every Falun Gong practitioner might agree on.
Okay.
So there are no leaders in Falun Gong, even the teacher or the master, right?
Many practitioners might have a deep, profound respect for him, but there's one of the rules would be there's no worship.
Some of us as human beings want to worship, right?
And that's okay.
That's the part people said.
But in Felun Gong, we don't do that, okay, as Felungong practitioners.
So, and you mentioned the personal connection.
I'll explain to you my personal connection in a moment.
But so there's what would be the rules?
There's no enriching yourself from it.
Okay.
You're not allowed to kind of collect money for the benefit of Falun Gong.
There's no treasury or something like that.
Okay.
There's no hierarchy, as I mentioned.
There's no worship of the teacher or the master or anyone in the sort of system.
Here's something really interesting, right?
Let's say I'm, let's say, Brett, you're a really good Falun Gong practitioner.
You're implementing truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance or forbearance extremely well, okay?
And I might want to emulate you.
I'll just say, Brett is great.
I really find him excellent, how he does this.
I'm just going to copy Brett.
I'm not allowed to do that.
Okay.
I have to understand the teachings and figure out how to do it myself.
That would be, I think, something else that's a rule, right?
And another thing I'll just mention, a kind of a tell if someone is a Falun Gong practitioner, actually, is if they're talking about Falun Gong and they'll say, well, I think, or in my understanding, this is what the teachings mean.
Because one of the sort of teachings is actually that in a lot of traditional kind of, let's say, approaches or a lot of traditional writings or so forth, people would take those writings and sort of say that their interpretation of the writings was actually what the message of the teachings or the writings was in the first place, which would actually end up watering those things down, right?
So the teaching basically is don't change the teachings, keep them as they are.
And if you are talking about the teachings, say this is your understanding of the teachings or how you understand they work, because that's in fact what it is.
And if someone really wants to learn about it, they should actually like just read the actual teachings and then they'll figure it out.
That would be the best way to understand, you know, what it is.
So I'm trying to think if there's other, let me, I want to pick up on a couple of your threads here.
Yeah.
One, it sounded like I forgot what date you put on it, but that there were at one time something like 100 million practitioners in China.
Is that right?
Correct.
Okay.
So right order of magnitude.
It sounds to me like it has a religiosity to it, but that it is decidedly and intentionally decentralized, that getting individuals to interpret the teachings for themselves and in fact, forbidding you from copying somebody else's interpretation is a way of moving the locus of the relationship between practitioners and the belief structure in the direction of the individual,
which I suspect does not play well in the Chinese system, which is obviously about hyper-centralization.
So when we get to the question of why Falun Gong might be targeted, this would be one thing, is that it, A, is a competing source of a kind of authority, something, you know, you and I will both have experienced that in the medical freedom movement, there is a disproportionate number of believers.
And I take that to be an indication that people who truly believe in a higher power more easily found the courage to confront tyranny during COVID than atheists.
And so you can imagine trying to manage a country of something like a billion people where central authority must have no competitors, that's something in which nearly 10% of the population is decentralizing authority and imagines that there is a structure more significant than the governmental structure.
You can imagine how they would see that as threatening.
Yeah.
And I mean, in Falun Gong, you just reminded me, there isn't even a roster.
Like there's nothing to join.
What defines you as a Falun Gong practitioner is living the teachings, not some kind of membership that you might have.
Promoting Agency Through Falun Gong00:02:29
And, you know, to your point, okay, I think like this is what I, it took me about 15 years, by the way, to kind of realize this, right?
But I think it promotes an unusual level of agency in people.
And it just, and in communist systems, and I actually explore this in Kill to Order quite a bit, right?
In communist systems, the supremacy and the survival of the Communist Party is the paramount goal in the system.
And you're expected to participate in that, whether through believing in it deeply for the purposes of your own power or simply performatively, right?
If you're not participating in that, well, that could be a real problem.
I think I understand.
I am looking forward.
It should probably come later after we discuss the evidence in your book and the picture that it paints.
But I am looking forward to the place where we get to the game theory because I wonder what you'll make of it.
My sense is that this is a story that is repeated again and again in human history, and the superficial explanations change radically, but the underlying explanation doesn't.
And anyway, I'm curious what you'll make of that.
All right.
So you want to talk about your, it sounds like you are a practitioner.
I think I know that from discussions that you and I have had, but do you want to just say what your personal relationship is?
Oh, absolutely.
So I had, you know, just, I have to mention this, okay, because you're one of the very few people in the world who knows what Nosimanga Bay is, which is one of my favorite places in the world.
I'm not even kidding, right?
And you understand, I think you understand why I would say that, but it's a little island on the base of Antonguel Bay in Madagascar where I was, where I used to do my field work as an evolutionary biologist.
And it turns out that you, I learned, you know, from reading your wife's book, from Heather's book, that you guys are familiar with this exact little tiny island, which has both lemurs.
And I went there because I eyes, this very rare lemur that doesn't like humans because humans tend to kill them, can be seen, right?
That's the reason I went there.
And also there's humpback whales that kind of mate in the bay.
So you have like humpbacks breaching the whole thing.
It's just like this magical wonderland.
Landed in Albina00:09:51
So why am I mentioning this?
Because that was my work before.
But the last time that I ended up going back to Albina, I was at the University of Alberta.
That was where my lab was.
And I ended up getting very ill with something called Guillain Berry syndrome, which many people in the health freedom movement will be familiar with.
It's an autoimmune disease.
It's your immune system attacking your peripheral nervous system.
Of course, it's a syndrome.
You know, it's not a disease, right?
So there could be many possible reasons for it.
Actually, I think the J and J vaccine off the top of my head had Guillain Berry listed as one of the possible side effects.
But I don't actually think I got it from that or something like that.
I think I had a parasitic worm infection, which I did, an ascarid infection.
I had mono.
I was also in a really difficult relationship, let's just say at the time.
I think the combination of that made my immune system go haywire and I ended up with GB and there wasn't really any treatment for it.
It killed that whole career of mine, basically.
And I started looking for alternative alternative therapies.
But okay, listen, by the way, I have to, I will mention this too.
You talked about, you know, people that tend to have allegiance to a higher power being more resilient to mass propaganda or something like this.
In the process of all this, I kind of, I was, you could call me an agnostic.
Okay.
I was, I was, science was my, uh, how I was approaching the world and how I was seeking truth, frankly, because I've always been a truth seeker.
But I kind of made a lot of people do this when they're faced with their mortality.
They say, well, God, just in case, just in case you're up there, so what I said was, what I knew to say was, I'll dedicate my life to service, right?
And that was my promise.
And then, so what happened was a guy I knew at the University of Alberta introduced me to the Falun Gong exercises through a DVD.
I didn't know anything about it.
This was a guy I talked film with at a coffee shop.
That was our the nature of our relationship, okay?
But he had had chronic fatigue and he told me this had helped me.
This helped me.
You should try it.
Right.
And so I did.
And, you know, basically with, I would say within the, within a couple of months, I had my next appointment with my neurologist because I had basically, I had been in the hospital for about a week.
I was a very self-aware patient.
It's a rare disease.
So they kept sending their residents to try to diagnose me, right?
But I was saying, look, I'm not dying exactly, right?
I'm a little bit limited in my motion.
I can't do certain fine things.
I've lost my reflexes.
I have double vision.
I have all this kind of stuff, but I can kind of go home.
I don't need to be in a hospital bed.
It's a waste of one.
And I'll call you.
If things go worse, I'll just give you a ring.
You can pick me up and bring me back.
Right.
So I wasn't in the hospital, but I was just kind of things weren't working properly.
Okay.
Would be the best way to describe it.
I couldn't really do a lot.
I even, I love teaching and I tried to teach.
And even that, you know, let's just say it was very, I was very disappointed in what I was able to do, even with that, which, you know, isn't that physical of a thing to do.
So anyway, within two months, I had my next appointment with my neurologist.
And she basically, and I knew I was starting to feel better as I started to learn these slow Falun Gong exercises because that was the reason I continued it.
It just made me feel a little better for the first time in a long time.
So, okay, I'm going to keep trying this, right?
And basically within two months, I had, she told me that I was in absolute complete remission.
My reflexes had come back.
I hadn't tested them until she did.
And she said, you know, this is actually a very funny thing for health freedom movement people.
But she told me, I don't know what you're doing, but whatever it is, keep doing it.
But as my wife pointed out to me some years later, she never asked me what I was doing.
And this apparently is a very common thing in the health freedom movement.
Like someone has this, you know, kind of for me, it was, I mean, internally, I don't know if it was an actual miracle, but for me internally as a, in my life, it was a miracle, okay?
Because I already knew I was feeling better, but this was kind of the final validation, if you will, or something, right?
Where I got tested and it told, she said, look, everything is back.
And, but the bizarre thing is apparently when people have these spontaneous remissions or they do alternative treatments for something like ivermectin for cancer.
I know that's something that the NIH is actually investing and doing research on right now, right?
The doctors kind of just dismiss anything that isn't part of the normal menu of possibilities for treatment, right?
As something as spontaneous remission.
And they don't even want to know.
And that's just so weird, right?
And I mean, it's anti-scientific.
And the fact is, it used to be the case that doctors were necessarily scientists.
If you were a doctor on the frontier somewhere, you're faced with a community, an outbreak of something.
You don't know what it is.
You don't know what to do for these people.
So you take your best guess based on symptoms.
You attempt something.
You see what the impact of it is.
You're visiting their homes.
So you see if there's some condition that might explain the pattern that you're seeing.
That scientific instinct of doctors has been decimated and they have become effectively like automatons who dispense best practices as a result of your checking a certain number of boxes on a checklist.
And it's alarming when you realize that they are, by their very nature, they are practitioners who are intervening in a complex system that they cannot possibly understand with the power of saving your life or bringing about your death.
So to have these doctors not in touch with that scientific instinct is just dangerous beyond measure.
And actually, the story in your book tells us what happens next when doctors lose touch with what they're supposed to be doing.
They change.
Well, and Fred, you know, but if I may, with the exception of some incredible doctors, some of whom both you and I know and love.
Yeah.
Yes.
Well, there's quite a few.
I mean, you know, I don't know what percentage it is across the population, but it's not zero.
It's not zero.
And it is amazing.
It tells the entire story, if you think about it, how many of them have been thrown out of their prestigious jobs, had their licenses taken away.
The fact is, if you did the job of a doctor, it was the route to being excommunicated by modern medicine, which is obviously intolerable, among other things.
It's also very stupid if you want doctors to get better at it.
These are the doctors you want to encourage.
It's kind of the opposite of what you would want, right?
No, and in fact, one of the outgrowths of the COVID catastrophe is that I, and I would imagine you, have the best doctors in the world at our disposal because they've all been thrown out.
We've become part of a small community of people fighting this battle.
And so, yeah, I have all these people on speed dial.
Something goes wrong.
Man, I've got the greatest pathologist.
I've got a cardiologist.
All of these great doctors.
And they're completely open to the entire spectrum of things that may in fact have a positive value.
And let me add something.
And they're also all of them, without exception, doctors that practice what we would call traditional Hippocratic medicine, meaning I'm going to treat you as an individual, as a patient, and I'm going to do the best I can for you.
I'm going to try to understand your specific circumstances.
And I'm going to figure out what's best for you.
And whatever intervention I'm going to put in, this is where the do no harm thing comes in with Hippocratic medicine, right?
I'm going to make sure that that possible harm to you is minimized through the intervention that I'm going to propose.
And it's just shock.
So a central feature of the book, as you probably know, because it sounds like you've been reading it, which I really appreciate, is this distinction between Hippocratic medicine on one end and utilitarian bioethics, greatest good for the greatest number medicine.
And so because the book is not just about the organ industry, but it's also about how it explains the logic of communists or communist elites that run a society the way they do.
Yes, which I think is a completely fascinating thread because so much of the horrifying picture that you paint actually, in a subtle way, follows from the logic of communism.
And what's interesting is that it is corrupting of the West through mere contact, which we will get to.
Again, this is what the game theory does.
You say, you know, or somebody says, well, if our elites get in touch with the Chinese elites, their system will westernize.
Well, at one level it did.
Its interface with the outside world certainly looks like ruthless capitalism.
But in fact, the question is what flowed which way?
Because there's an awful lot of totalitarianism that seems to be essentially contagious.
And to your point about utilitarianism, I think I landed here.
Robert Malone separately landed here.
Why CrowdHealth Offers Hope00:02:43
But there's something about utilitarianism.
that it has a problem, which is that it's right most of the time.
It's rule of thumb level.
You probably want to make policies that do the greatest good for the greatest number.
But if you take it as more than a rule of thumb, it can literally justify anything, including slavery, genocide.
It literally justifies anything.
So if you're going to touch utilitarianism, you better know where the thou shalt nots are, or you're going to end up manning a concentration camp.
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Omelette Break Explained00:15:46
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Brett, let me jump in here because I had so many, like this book was writing this book was a magical experience because I was able to integrate so much of what I've learned over the last several decades.
Okay.
And the thing that dawned on me, right?
At one point, I'm just getting massive shivers up my spine just thinking about it because I remember when it hit me finally again.
These things sound so obvious once you say them, but it just never occurred to me, right?
The greatest good for the greatest number.
You've heard this maxim, right?
In order to make an omelette, you have to break a few eggs, right?
That's typically ascribed to Stalin, but people tell me it might have actually been New York Times reporter and Soviet agent Walter Duranti who had said it.
I don't know for sure, but typically ascribed to Stalin, but this is the personification of utilitarian bioethics.
Because see, in communism, right, utilitarian bioethics is basically the idea that you can sacrifice a few for the good of the many, for the good, you know, for the greater good, right?
And like, I love your rule of how you describe a rule of thumb approach.
This is actually kind of makes sense.
The way I describe it is it only makes sense on the battlefield.
Okay.
Like if you're a medic and you're on a battlefield and you see all this carnage and a bunch of these people are going to die, and you're going to have to make some hard choices about who you're going to take back because, you know, if this person really looks like they're going to die in two minutes, you know, that's where you see people putting the X's on the forehead or whatever in the movies, right?
That's a situation where you have to do this triage and you have to make these decisions.
But in a normal situation, this is not how we have to think.
We have to think from the perspective of one doctor looking at that one patient and how can I best help them and how can I make sure not to harm them.
Okay.
Just back to greatest good for the greatest number and making an omelette, you have to break a few eggs.
In the communist system, and this I've known for a long time, right?
The highest value, okay, the principle around everything around which everything is organized, okay, basically post-Lenin, right?
This is he came is the party, the survival of the party and the supremacy of the party is actually viewed as the greatest good, right?
So this is why whenever we have communism applied, you always have mass atrocities.
Why?
Because the individual dignity of the human life doesn't have value.
Okay.
And in fact, it's only about it's value, it has some value because you don't want riots.
You don't want someone to compromise your ability to rule for the Communist Party to stay in power.
So, you know, you have to kind of placate them a bit, right?
But at the same time, you know, to make an omelette, which is the supremacy of the party, right?
You have to break a few eggs.
And that plays out in hundreds of millions of eggs.
Yes, the way that you're going to remind myself of this is I've slightly altered the aphorism so that I never fail to see that implication.
The way I say it is if you're going to make an omelette, you have to break a few legs.
All right.
That joke fell flat, but I like it.
So, you know.
No, I'm going to remember it.
But no, it's just, it's all these things.
You know, that's what was fascinating about writing Kill to Order is that I mean, I wouldn't have understood half of what I understand if I hadn't watched COVID play out.
Okay.
And even after COVID, I found a book called Culture of Death by Wesley Smith, which, if you haven't read, you absolutely have to read this book and you will thank me, I promise you, about that, because he wrote a book originally in 2000, I believe, and then updated in 2016.
He charted the development.
He's the guy, the one guy apparently in the world, I guess, who's been charting the rise of this utilitarian bioethics approach to dealing with medicine and human issues and public health and so forth.
So he was starting to see it in the academic journals, which is same with the gender affirming care, gender ideology, all of it.
It starts in the academic journals and then kind of bursts on the scene, if you will, right?
And so he's been tracking that all these years.
If I had read Culture of Death, and I mean, he just kept writing about it.
No one really listened.
And it just kept being built into society.
Also, as especially after we started having that deep engagement with communist China, as you pointed out, right?
Which, which direction did it actually happen, right?
But if I had read Culture of Death before the pandemic, I would have understood everything that happened.
Okay.
And he wasn't even thinking of it from any pandemic perspective.
He's just writing about what people are writing about in the academic journals, about greater good public health and medicine.
And he actually, I first reached out to him about this medically assistant suicide that they do in Canada, right?
Because he was one of the experts on it, because it fits into his whole kind of thesis that this is a part of utilitarian bioethics at work.
So pardon the rant here.
You will appreciate this book, I promise you.
And the guy is a genius.
I wish that he had an apprentice.
Apparently, he doesn't have one at the moment, but he's been doing this for a very long time.
And someone, if you're watching this podcast and you're interested in utilitarian bioethics, Wesley Smith needs people to work with him.
Okay.
He's an amazing, amazing researcher.
Oh, that's a great tip.
Appreciate it.
Well, I think it's time.
We could go on like this for a long time, but I think we've actually set the stage quite well to talk about what you have unearthed in your book.
And many of these themes are going to pop right out, you know, from the authoritarianism, the logic of communism, the utilitarianism.
All of these things will pop out.
And then at the end, I will try to put some context, some game theory context to it.
And I think it will make a very clear picture.
But why don't you set the stage?
What is the thesis of your book?
And then tell us what the evidence that we have is.
And, you know, there's a lot of evidence we don't have because of the closed nature of China.
But you paint a very clear picture and you're very clear about what kinds of evidence we do have and what the implications are.
So why don't you lay it out?
So just to be clear, the thesis of my book actually is that this forced organ harvesting enterprise, which I'll describe in a moment, is actually a feature and not a bug of totalitarian communism, which is all communism.
Okay.
And so, and I explore why that is like, in a way, it's the perfect lens.
If you want to understand how China works under communism, this is sort of a perfect lens to use to understand that.
And that's a big part of the exploration of the book.
But let me explain to you what it is, actually.
Can I say one thing before you do?
Yeah.
We have focused on Falun Gong because of your connection to it.
I should point out that some years ago, I hypothesized that organ harvesting from Uyghurs was likely taking place.
I was focused on Uyghurs because I knew there was a large population that was incarcerated.
And, you know, there were stories around the edges about these people being utilized for things like the bodies exhibit.
And so anyway, my point was: oh, it's a logical extension of communism and the totalitarianism that exists there and the oppression of the Uyghurs, Uyghurs being a, it's fair to say, a Muslim sect within China.
So I was thinking about this in terms of Uyghurs and hadn't yet gotten around to understanding what Falun Gong is.
But your book is about all of the people who are being victimized in this way, Uyghurs, Falun Gong, and political prisoners.
They're all covered here.
So anyway.
Let me just comment on that because this is incredibly important, in fact, okay?
And I'll explain to you what this atrocity is and how it works and what you need and why it's unique to China, this specific type of horse-organ harvesting.
But before I go there, right, they built it on the backs of the Falun Gong.
Okay, prior to 2000, Falun Gong persecution starts in 1999.
They put millions, again, we don't know the exact number.
They incarcerate millions.
And the whole Chinese transplant industry just grows geometrically for the next five years.
By 2005, they've created thousands of hospitals for transplant exclusively for transplantation or predominantly for transplantation with no known organs donor source.
Okay, they're kind of like quietly there telling people that they're using death row prisoners for it.
Okay.
And then it sort of stays at this, it reaches this level by the end of the 2000s of 60 to 90,000 transplants per year.
Just to frame that a little bit, right?
We're talking about 40,000 transplants in the U.S. last year, and that was a record, okay, that in terms of the numbers.
So it starts on the Falun Gong and it trucks along like that.
2014, 2015, really no one has really done much about it.
And actually, a lot of international organizations that should be charged with doing something about it kind of run cover for them in effect, or just accept official explanations, which are like, you know, just not even remotely credible, like bizarrely non-credible, right?
And, you know, one of those organizations was the WHO, which, you know, we don't need to go into too much detail.
People will be familiar here how, one, it's deeply captured by the Chinese Communist Party.
You know, and, you know, the way it responded in COVID was the perfect example of that.
What happens in 2014, 2015 is no one's done much.
So they dehumanize another group of people, the Uyghurs, and then they incarcerate perhaps a million, if not more of them.
And, you know, there's Ethan Gutman is my good friend.
He's actually publishing a book fairly soon called the Xinjiang Procedure on this, how this specific organ harvesting of Uyghurs is working.
And he's even documented situations where there is a hospital, there is a labor camp or concentration camp, and there's a crematorium.
And they're all kind of situated side by side like this, right?
As part of his, as part of his research.
So it's basically they added the Uyghurs as another vulnerable group, right, to be used this way.
And this is, they're particularly vulnerable.
You know, there's only about 12 million of them, if I recall the numbers correctly.
And they're in a military controlled zone.
And per the U.S. government, many other governments around the world, they're subject to genocide.
And so, you know, this term genocide is used so frivolously these days, but this actually has it's a very extremely serious designation.
It's supposed to be the worst thing that human beings do to each other, which is the attempted destruction in a whole of an or in part of an entire group of people.
Now, I would argue that this is actually being done to the Falun Gong and the Tibetans as well.
We could debate that.
And I prefer not to.
Let's just call it all a human rights atrocity, okay, or a crime against humanity or something like that.
But here, and today we're in a situation where we see active demonizing, incarceration, and dehumanization of house church Christians.
Okay, we have the Zion Church, which was just wrapped up.
It was one of the very successful churches that actually went online during COVID and saw massive flourishing that happened.
I just had the daughter of the lead pastor on the show.
We're going to publish on American Thought Leaders.
We're going to publish that episode fairly soon.
But now we also saw recently that Catholic clergy, and remember, the Vatican actually has a strange partnership deal it has with Communist China.
It's bizarre to me that they still have it because the persecution of Christians actually increased while they've had this deal.
But basically, Catholic clergy are even being put under control right now in a variety of ways.
So I'm worried.
Right that we're going to see the same thing happen?
We didn't.
It was built on the Falun Gong for 15 years.
No one really did anything.
Then they added the Uyers.
Okay, now it's been another 10 years 10, 11 years.
I'm worried they're going to add other groups, like the Tibetans, like the House Church Christians, to this mix and and I think, at small numbers, they probably have been used.
But this is it.
It always works on a larger, on a larger group.
So um, let me explain how it works.
I guess that's ultimately what you, what we, want to do.
And well, let me just say I heard something that's that's worth uh, noting.
It started with death row prisoners.
So let's imagine that there is some reason that people end up condemned to death.
I, i'm not defending it.
I don't know whether this is.
I don't know whether these are, you know, mass murderers who deserve such a thing, or these are really cryptically political prisoners.
But the point is, you can understand the slippery slope of utilitarianism if the answer is, well, that person is not going to live and organs are best harvested harvested from a healthy person under controlled conditions.
So why not?
Why shouldn't some person who has done nothing wrong benefit from the organs of this condemned person.
It's the naturally, you know, greatest good for the greatest number that person's going to die either way.
Why not save others with their organs?
That's the first step onto a slippery slope that then results in the picture you're about to paint.
A hundred, a hundred percent, and that's why, like i'm not a fan of even having death row prisoners being used for organs um, for this, for the exact reason that you just described um, but so what?
The way it works is, you need a state actor.
Basically, you need someone who can, is able, to push massive power, coercive power, through a system.
Okay, you need to be able to dehumanize a group of people, you know, and the reason you need to be able to do that is that you know most people there's, there's psychopaths in our midst.
Okay, there's people who have no conscience, that have no problem, you know, killing someone or hurting someone.
There's no moral kind of quandary that they feel, there's no revulsion, they feel.
But that's not most people okay, most people actually do feel bad about doing horrible things to people um, unless and this is some kind of a weird trick of our mind unless they start believing that these people are somehow less than human.
Okay, and this you know.
Skeptical Confessions00:13:54
We have textbook propaganda of this nature in the 1930s in Germany.
Okay, against the Jewish people that was used.
And in fact, this kind of almost exactly the same type of language is used against the Falun Gong by the communists in 1999 and 2000.
They put like, I remember, you know, seeing like literally like half a million individual pieces of mass media propaganda in this vein.
I mean, to the point where they would say they eat their children, they burn themselves alive, like really extreme stuff, right?
And in Falun Gong, you know, you're, you're, it's, it's nonviolent, you know, killing's not something you do, never mind your own life, right?
So like, it's just, I mean, just the whole thing was completely mad, but it's effective, right?
Well, it is a feature of every genocide, and I have looked at many.
It's a feature of every genocide that you dehumanize the people you will go after, and it leads to it is obviously triggering a primordial wiring that exists latent in people.
That there's something that you can believe about others that makes you feel entitled to eliminate them and makes you indifferent and sometimes beyond indifferent to their suffering.
So this is a feature of humans.
And what we see is the pattern of propaganda that reliably triggers it, right?
The language of disease, the language of the immorality of the people who are to be genocided.
So anyway, it's a feature of the landscape, and it's no surprise at all that it would show up here.
So once you've dehumanized this group, right?
And this is, they also incarcerated, again, a million, maybe 2 million Falun Gong at the beginning, okay?
Now, here's the really interesting part, right?
When Jeng Zemin said eradicate them, right?
He didn't mean kill everybody necessarily.
He meant get rid of it, brainwash them, force them to recant their faith, this kind of thing.
But it actually turned out that this is, they're unusually resilient to this.
Like they don't get brainwashed easily.
They don't recant their faith easily.
And to the point where there were rules which were set, unwritten rules set up in the prisons and labor camps, enforced labor cancer, re-education through labor camps.
They have a mass incarceration system.
Okay.
The rule was all Falun Gong deaths are going to be considered suicides.
Basically, meaning you can work on these people whatever way to get the to get to break them to transform.
And there were quotas.
Can you imagine?
There were quotas.
Like if you didn't meet your quota on re-educating enough people, you were docked.
You know, you got hurt somehow.
Pay this was like the beginnings of the social credit system and you were kind of being formed at this time.
Okay.
So now we have this mass incarcerated, dehumanized population.
Now they're starting to do blood typing, tissue typing, organ scans.
Okay.
This is all documented from the victims themselves.
Okay.
They're doing these invasive tests.
The victims at the time didn't even understand why all this was being done to them.
Okay.
But, and this is how prior to 2006, there were actually ads online, right, on websites.
We have archived versions of these that basically said for a certain price, let's call it $150 or $200,000, you can get yourself a new heart in two weeks scheduled.
Scheduled means you know exactly when someone's going to be dead.
What they would tell you is it's a death row prisoner.
That's how we know.
Okay.
However, the reality was, even if you took the most aggressive estimate of death row prisoners being killed, it was orders of magnitude greater, the number of transplants that were actually being done.
Yeah, let me say as a biologist, I know I'm talking to a fellow biologist, but as a biologist, the improbability of being able to schedule such a thing based on death row prisoners,
even in a country of a billion people, is obvious because what is going on, the reason that organs are so difficult to acquire for transplant is that you have this elaborate system in which your tissues have a signature on them that allows your immune system to recognize you and not fight you.
And what that means is that it recognizes just about every other human being as foreign because it's built to recognize anything that isn't you that's inside your system and destroy it.
So when they say death row prisoners, they are confessing more than the average person will detect.
The numbers cannot add up.
So they have to have a much larger population to draw on in order to be able to say, to have organs to order.
100%.
And so basically the only way it can work, right, for that person, for me to be able to answer that ad, pay my 200 grand and get that organ scheduled, transplant scheduled in China two weeks later, is that person is already blood type, tissue type, matched in a database to me.
And then the moment I pay that money and arrive in China, that person is shipped through a military type network.
That's the best we've been able to glean, and to be killed to order to give you that heart.
So that person is effectively living on a feedlot, waiting to be slaughtered.
100%.
If you, let's say that you were a person telling yourself whatever the best story was because you desperately needed a heart and you didn't want to die, even the story they are telling you speaks to something unholy because what they're telling you, if they're saying, oh, we have enough death row prisoners that we can find you a tissue match, and then you schedule your surgery, they're telling you, oh, we'll kill this person for you.
Even if it's a death row prisoner who's going to die anyway, the point is you still understand that somebody is going to die for you because there's no other way it can work.
You can't, you know, kill these people and put them on ice and transplant their organs.
For the big organs, that's not going to work.
So anyway, the idea that there is something being covered, even the story they're telling you, is obviously the result of some deeply morally compromised structure.
100%.
And so, you know, I was first convinced that this was real back in 2006.
I had heard some kind of rumblings of it a little bit earlier than that, but I kind of dismissed it because I'm one of these people that always wants evidence, actually.
I'm just like, it's a really, it's something I don't even like about myself in some ways.
I'm just skeptical, overly skeptical about everything.
And in a way, it's kind of a, it's kind of a sad life.
And you have to kind of always overcome your own internal skepticism to everything.
But yeah, so here I was.
And there were actually two lines of evidence that came in that made me realize this is in 2006, that this was real near simultaneously, but completely independently.
Okay.
One was a woman named Annie, that's a pseudonym.
She had a husband who was a transplant surgeon or surgeon.
And he was having nightmares and he confessed to her after she said, I'm leaving unless you tell me what's going on.
He confessed to her that he had removed 2,000 corneas from living people.
Okay?
Wow.
And she came out as a whistleblower, okay?
Basically.
At the same time, I mean, or slightly earlier, actually, this was in late 2005.
Jacob Levy, who was once the head of the Israeli Transplant Association, he was the, I think the dean of transplant surgery at Tel Aviv University.
He was a heart transplant specialist.
And he was aware, he told me, actually, I remember it was fascinating talking to him about this, but there were people going from Israel to China to get kidney transplants.
And he didn't, you know, he didn't think much of it because with a kidney, someone, you know, you can survive and often people do, right?
So it's not, there isn't this sort of obvious murder happening to get that organ, right?
Because we have two kidneys, lots of people.
Correct.
Especially in a system like China, you could imagine that people are giving up one kidney for money or something, you know.
Exactly.
And I couldn't be not thrilled about that, but this, it's not killed to order, okay?
And so, but he had a patient that told him, I'm tired of waiting.
I'm worried I'm going to die, right?
And they scheduled a transplant for me in China in two weeks.
And Jakob said, that's impossible.
There's no scenario, ethical scenario where that happens, except the guy went and got it done and came back, right?
And so that's when Jakob became actually one of the, I would say, you know, there's, there's really a handful of people that have done incredible work on this.
And he is really one of them, one of the heroes of this whole, let's say, movement to try to stop this, because he actually got a law passed by 2008.
Israel was the, I believe, the earliest, but one of the very, very few.
I mean, to give you a comparison, right?
The law was we will never pay, Israel will never pay for a China transplant.
There was a second part to the law, which was very smart, right?
Which was if you want to give one, you got to, if you want to get one, you have to be ready to give one because there were people in Israel who wanted to benefit from transplants, but weren't putting themselves into the registry.
So this law actually had two parts to it, okay?
But what year was that?
2008 was the year the law was passed.
And for comparison, there's now six states that have passed laws of this nature, but that started in 2021.
Like it took that long for America to kind of get in the game.
And there's actually, there's a Fed, Congressman Neil Dunn, who's actually retiring, I believe before at the midterms.
He is, he has in committee a law of this nature at the federal level where Medicare and Medicaid and insurance wouldn't be allowed to pay for these transplants.
This is one way to try to address stopping this, right?
Like, because basically it just means that there are a whole bunch of people who would be recipients aren't going to be recipients anymore.
All right.
Hold on.
It's the wrong place for this, but since you mention it, I'm going to do this here anyway.
I want to read to you my letter to the editor of the New York Times published on November 16th, 2003.
So well before the Israeli legislation you're talking about.
This was in response to an op-ed by Maureen Dowd in which she was describing somebody who'd been saved by a transplant and begging all of us to register.
So I wrote to the editor regarding a lyrical gift by Maureen Dowd.
Most of us would like nothing better than for our organs to save other people when we die.
Yet many elect not to register as donors.
Why?
Because doctors are human, and in allocating scarce time and resources, it would be remarkable if they were never affected by the knowledge that a particular death might save five or more other lives.
Organ donors get little benefit for facing that uncertainty.
And though the risk is presumably small, the negative consequences for an unlucky donor is potentially profound.
But the trickle of organs could easily be turned to a flood.
Eliminate the danger of conflicted medical interests by moving donor status out of one's wallet and into a controlled access database.
Then give priority to individuals seeking to receive an organ based on their history as registered donors.
It would surely be an effective incentive.
And what could be more fair?
So this idea that there actually doesn't need to be a dearth of organs, that there's an obvious way to solve this problem that does not lead to some sort of atrocity.
And what it is, it just involves recognizing the game theory.
I don't want to worry that a doctor is going to not do his best for me because he knows that I'm a donor and he knows other people will live.
I want him not to know whether I'm a donor.
And I want people who aren't willing to give their own organs under those conditions not to be eligible above me if I need one.
So the point is, all you have to do is see the game theory.
And what it does, if you recognize it, is avoids a ghastly scenario that you describe in your book.
So anyway, Brett, I'm going to have to ask Jakob if he maybe read your, if that letter to the editor was published, you know, well, it's quite, it's entirely possible he may have read it.
I mean, that's just something we'll have to find out.
All right.
I'm excited to find out.
So go ahead, continue describing what you unearthed.
David Matis And The Liver Transplant Mystery00:16:03
Well, and I mean, so that was the beginnings, okay?
And then two amazing human rights lawyers, David Matis and David Kilgore, may he rest in peace, peace.
You know, just to give you a picture of who these guys were, David Matis, he was Benai Birth Counsel in Canada.
He also was, he helped bring the last Nazi war criminal, actually Ukrainian, to justice in Canada.
And so that was his kind of acumen.
He was a human rights lawyer.
Okay.
And David Kilgore, unfortunately, passed during the COVID years.
He was Canada's law, I believe Canada's longest serving parliament member at one point.
He had actually switched parties multiple times.
I think he started conservative or progressive.
We had a party called Progressive Conservative back in the day.
I know that probably sounds funny, but I'm revealing myself as a Canadian here, right?
And then liberal, and then he went independent.
Basically, the parties were always doing something he couldn't accept, and he just left, ended up being independent, but was very popular because he was someone who was a very strong moral fiber, if you will, okay?
And he had also been a secretary of state at some point.
So he brought some acumen and some international relationships into the picture.
And they spent about, I think it was six months, trying to pull together all the evidence that actually did exist, including Jakob Levy's experience, including Annie's testimony.
They interviewed them.
Matis had interviewed lots of people for credibility around this sort of thing.
And so they came up with originally it was 17 lines of evidence.
Then they sort of grew that into 33 lines of evidence.
And they were able to find no lines of evidence that would suggest it wasn't happening.
Okay.
And they were able to find quite a few that suggest it did.
Now, why is it so kind of obscure, right?
Why, like, that sounds weird.
Like, Jan, tell me, tell me what the evidence is here, right?
The problem with these atrocity situations, right?
Always, is that the person doing them obviously doesn't want to be find out, obviously is going to deny them to the day they die, right?
Or close, right?
They're completely uninterested in having them revealed.
You know, for Annie's allegations, okay, back in the day, weeks after all this happened, they actually, China actually invited international observers to come view that alleged camp, right?
And, you know, they've just found, hey, there's nothing here.
Everything looks perfectly reasonable, right?
And it's like, well, okay, but couldn't like a month ago there have all this been happening.
But for some reason, we say, oh, yeah, okay, that's fair, right?
Like it's, it's, it's, there's a lot of this Potemkin village type stuff happening.
So the way that we have to get at the evidence is frankly indirect, right?
It's and and here's the crazy part, okay?
At the moment, we're about 26 years into this happening and about 20 years into us knowing with, I think, compelling evidence that it's happening.
And in 2020, there was a whole China tribunal held with Sir Jeffrey Nees, who had prosecuted Slobodan Milosevic, putting together an international people's tribunal with experts looking at all the evidence, very powerful body of evidence.
Okay.
In all of this time, there's even a survivor I can tell you about him.
It's an unbelievable story in itself.
I never thought we'd actually see one.
He came out in the last few years.
But the Chinese Communist Party has never provided any evidence to suggest it's not happening.
That's credible, right?
They pretended they started an organ donor registry, but then the data they provided was like a perfect quadratic equation in terms of growth.
Obviously, the data had been invented.
I mean, there's a sign Matthew Robertson in his recent PhD thesis demonstrates that very convincingly, right?
But they've just never provided a shred of evidence that it's not happening.
And it wouldn't be hard.
It wouldn't be hard to provide that evidence if it existed 26 years on.
Well, right.
And again, the logic is a little bit subtle, but if there was a decent explanation for what they are doing, then the system that allows that decent level of transplantation to be happening would be apparent.
In other words, if they have a source that isn't these oppressed populations, then you would be able to provide that evidence.
So the lack of ability to provide that evidence, the apparent scale of the transplantation and the scheduled nature of those transplantations tells us there's a source population that we don't know about.
So basically all the evidence we have paints a very powerful, if circumstantial case that it must be these oppressed populations, because who else would it be?
If you're able to schedule those organ transplants, then you have these people available at will, even if you had a massive, you know, even if you had every Chinese person registered and typed, the point is people, there aren't enough of them to die regularly enough that you can guarantee somebody that on this date you can have an organ.
Yeah, not even close, like not even close, right?
And there's all sorts of like just kind of really bizarre anecdotes that we had verified also that sort of, you know, kind of explain it as being the rule.
Like very early on, I remember when I first interviewed David Kilgore about his work, this probably was in 07 or maybe even late 06.
Can't remember.
But he had interviewed someone who literally had a rare blood condition and had gone to China from Taiwan and had the first trip.
He had four different kidneys fitted.
Okay.
The first kidney didn't work, got rejected.
Second one got drinked.
Third got rejected.
The fourth one got rejected.
He went back to Taiwan, got more dialysis, went back to China a few months afterwards, got fitted kidney five, six, seven, and the eighth kidney actually worked, okay, and didn't get rejected.
So imagine what you would need, the system you would need to have to facilitate that.
That was a verified case that David Kilgore observed by, you know, early, I would say, 2007 at the latest.
Okay.
And there's multiple examples of this kind of a thing.
There's a, you know, a double lung transplant that was done where there was a second double lung waiting to be used in case the first one was rejected.
That was fairly recent even.
That was during COVID.
Okay.
So there's just all of these, the kind of, let's say, anecdotal information that kind of proves the circumstantial evidence, the voluminous circumstantial evidence, including, and this is the survivor is kind of the most amazing thing because I truly never thought we'd ever find a transplant survivor of this because, you know, it's seeing as it's a crime against humanity and, you know,
the people kind of involved in it don't want to be tried for crimes against humanity.
You imagine that they would, you know, kill someone if they're remotely surviving after this happens.
But this guy actually is missing part of his liver and part of his lung.
And, you know, near miraculously, he lived to tell the tale.
He didn't even realize he had been harvested.
Okay.
He just knew he woke up with a giant 14-inch gash in his side and had like just felt horrible inside.
So wait, this is somebody who didn't have a liver or lung pathology.
And these are organs that you don't have to transplant the whole thing for.
Well, the lung, it's not even clear why they took part of the lung.
That part is a mystery, you know, but yes, they took basically a big part of his liver.
Yeah, exactly.
And you can do partial, the Japanese actually pioneered this technique where you take a part, partial liver transplants are possible.
Yes, actually the liver has such amazing capacity to regrow that something like 10% of the liver can grow a whole liver.
Yeah, exactly.
And so it seems like, you know, it's funny because I actually asked David May, David Matisse did the assessments of this survivor, right?
And he finds him completely credible.
And, you know, he's kind of an odd, odd, odd character himself.
I mean, I'm talking about the Cheng Pei Ming, the survivor.
But, you know, I asked, why would they do this?
Like, why would they take half of his liver when they could just kill him or something?
And David says, well, you know, one of the theories I've heard is that they were just experimenting on him to see if they could do partial transplants and have someone survive.
Because again, why not?
We have these kind of disposable people we can use for this purpose.
But then David said something very profound, which is stuck with me.
Okay.
And he basically said, you know, that, Jan, this is probably what it was, but the onus isn't on me to explain it.
The onus is on them to explain it.
They did it.
Right.
You know, why?
They're not providing any.
So the crazy part is they actually, this is one of the rare examples where they try to provide an explanation.
And in the process of this, okay, in effect, they said that they had operated on him against his will.
So, we actually have an example.
It's a kind of a complicated example, which I could relate to you in detail.
It's all kind of in my book, but they've actually admitted to operating on someone against their will.
They said they did it for a different reason, but based on organ scans, he's missing a big part of his liver, which is regenerated, and part of his lung, which is not.
And they admit to have having done that.
So, that's a pretty substantive piece of evidence.
Yeah, that is compelling evidence.
All right.
Before we get too far from it, I did want to say that the story you tell of people who are incarcerated having their blood tested, their tissues typed, and not knowing what's going on is chillingly reminiscent of the famous train platform at Auschwitz.
That effectively, the Nazis were exterminating the Jews, but they were doing so in, frankly, a utilitarian and practical way.
So, the point is they exterminated people immediately who they deemed to be more costly than beneficial, and the others they worked to death.
So, the sorting of people for do you still have value as a creature to the Nazis before you die?
This is a question that only a mind that has grown comfortable with genocide could ask.
But the idea that that, you know, there's no train platform involved here, but it's the same thing.
You're looking at people, you say some were tested and some weren't.
I would guess the ones who were tested were ones who were in good health, who would be a source for a healthy organ.
And people who were in compromised health or were too old, the answer is, well, that's not an organ that has any value.
Why type it?
Two things on this point, okay?
So, I made a film with my wife a while back called Finding Manny, and that was about her father's journey during the Holocaust.
He had survived Buchenwald and a number of other camps.
And so, we did, it was kind of a funny, it's an optimistic Holocaust documentary.
We say that in quotes because he was a really remarkable person and, you know, in a way, didn't judge a lot of people that he could have been very easily able to judge.
But he it's kind of a road trip film with the whole family goes back to Poland and Germany and kind of explores the whole thing.
But one of the things we realized over there while we were in Germany is you're often not taught this part that you pointed out, like how important the forced labor to death of the Jewish people by the Germans was to the Nazi war machine.
I hadn't realized that at all, right?
Well, maybe a little bit.
And I, you know, I know more than the average person.
I've bizarrely always been interested in crimes against humanity and countering them and things like that, just kind of a curiosity, right?
But it was huge.
I mean, just in the region where Manny had been, there had been a small town, really, kind of not small, let's say a medium-sized city in Germany.
There had been 500 camps, okay, of people doing forced labor.
It was unbelievable to discover this.
And so, the second part is Matthew Robertson, who's been, again, one of these heroes over the years of doing the empirical research around these issues, okay, is he actually coins this in his recent PhD thesis, which is excellent.
I would strongly recommend reading it.
Extractive repression.
Okay, and this is kind of this is that this is the Germans did, right?
And at that sorting station in Auschwitz, right?
You had, you know, if you had gold filling, you know, or I guess that happened after they were, they would pull those, right?
But they would take all of their, you know, because people would come, they didn't realize they're going to their desks.
They thought they're being relocated somewhere.
So they bring all their possessions.
And then all of those sort of possessions would go, I believe it was called the Canada, oddly, the Canada Pavilion.
I can't remember.
I think it was why that was nicknamed Canada because Jews found Jews who were not killed outright were given various jobs.
And the ruthless logic of the camps involved Jews doing much of the ghastly work on threat of death if they didn't.
So the extracting of fillings from cadavers and the like, you know, the emptying of gas chambers.
This was done by people commando as the Sonderkommando.
Yeah, meaning special detail.
And those people were worked to death.
And at the point that they were no longer productive because of the horrible conditions that they were working in, they were killed, often with cruelty, special cruelty.
Like the Sonderkommando were forced to race each other in a foot race to see who was going to die and be replaced.
And then the new, newly recruited Sonderkommando, the worst job in the history of humanity, I think, their first job was to deal with the body of their immediate predecessor so that they sort of experienced their own ultimate fate on their entry into this horrible thing.
But the detail that sorted the belongings of the Jews who were exterminated was called Canada because it was a comparatively easy, it wasn't the wet work.
Priorities Of The Politburo Central Committee00:15:31
It was, you know, sorting people's clothing and other worldly possessions.
So, anyway, I think Canada was like this mythological place in which it was nice.
That was the idea that you were a slave, but in Canada.
Well, you know, one of the with this extractive repression idea, it's actually really fascinating that another thing I realized in the process of writing this book, I had interviewed this amazing scholar at Stanford named Cheng Yang Shu.
And Chengang was actually a communist scholar originally who went into the countryside to see how communism could be applied in the countryside and came up with a bunch of conclusions that the ruling party didn't like.
So he went to jail for a long time.
You know, it's getting one of these types of people who got to understand communism viscerally, you know, after having been liked it originally.
And he ended up making it to the U.S. and became a scholar at Stanford.
And he recently has published, I think it's 800 pages, a massive tome called Institutional Genes.
And those institutional genes are the genes of communism.
Okay.
Like the it's it's a it's a fascinating work, which I haven't read in its entirety.
It's a very kind of a deep study of his life's work.
One of the things he explains in there, which is absolutely fascinating, is how what distinguishes Chinese communism from Soviet communism, which has allowed it to survive, okay, longer.
And he calls this phenomenon or this approach rat, regionally administered totalitarianism.
Okay.
And this is fascinating because it actually, when the moment he kind of explained his theory to me on American thought leaders, I saw directly how this would work with the organ industry.
And so this actually featured and played importantly into the book.
Basically, you know, as you, as we discussed earlier, communism is, I like to describe it as obscenely hierarchical.
Like we think we know hierarchy.
No, the communists know hierarchy at a deeper level than almost anyone.
Or maybe there are others that I'm not aware of.
Okay.
And so in a typical situation, it's literally like directives that are passed from the top all the way down, right?
But the innovation, and this is a little bit simplified or glib here, okay?
But the Chinese innovation through this regionally administered totalitarianism was: no, we're not going to do that.
We're just going to set kind of the goals from the top, okay?
The approach from the top.
For example, right, one of the top seven priorities that Xi Jinping has elevated.
This is something for the national security people who are wearing their national security hats.
Military-civil fusion is something that the CCP has been applying for years, but Xi Jinping elevated into the top seven national priorities, which made it so it's almost impossible to find anything that's being done in China that doesn't have a military application that there isn't people involved in that industry or company or whatever trying to find it because they know they're going to be rewarded for having for doing it and they're going to be penalized for not doing it.
Okay.
Now, how does this apply to our scenario with the forced organ harvesting?
Basically, what you're creating through this, okay, is you're creating, in a way, a twisted market around implementing the goals of the Politburo Central Committee of the very top.
So if you are, and I actually theorize in the book, I think I make a strong case, in fact, if you understand the characters about who started this and how they started this.
But I think in one place, right, all you needed to happen because of this regionally administered totalitarianism, you need to have someone who thought to themselves, hey, wait a sec, okay?
I can, one, get rid of the Falun Gong.
That's obviously a top priority of Jiang Zemin.
It was one of his absolute top priorities.
He was obsessed with it, the dictator at the time.
He even gave Bill Clinton famously, or, you know, at least among the people in the know, famously, a whole book about it, about why he's justified in doing this, right?
And he was passing this book out to all sorts of world leaders and so forth.
So, one, number two, you know, make money.
It's always a big thing, right?
To be rich, to be glorious.
That was all the way back from Deng Jiaoping, right?
And the third part is grow the transplant industry.
And that was actually a priority.
That was one of their priorities.
That was a named priority.
Right, right.
And so, and so now someone thought to themselves, wait a second, I can do all of this at once, right?
And all that needed to happen is for them to actually implement that and show the proof of concept and show we're eradicating Felen Gong.
We're making money.
Of course, we get a nice graft on the side from that money, I might add.
That's something I didn't mention yet, right?
And we're building the transplant industry.
And that's how you get the geometric growth of the transplant industry at the beginning, because everybody that's watching this province now, right, Laning, let's say, right?
Everyone that's watching, that's my theory, right?
Or pardon me, that's my hypothesis.
Bingo.
You've brainwashed me successfully now.
Okay.
I have cleansed your brain of bad brainwashing done by others.
That's right.
That's right.
So, but all you needed to do is for that to be quote unquote working.
And now everybody else either gets in on the game or gets penalized.
Okay.
And so that's how, and that's how you achieve this geometric growth was because of this twisted regionally administered tolerance.
It was such a profound revelation.
I'm so glad Cheng Gong, you know, through his years of study, figured this out.
All right.
I got a bunch of things I got to add here.
I am persuaded that much of the failure in the world can be understood by virtue of the fact that we have lots of people who are expert in something highly complicated,
who are then put in charge of something complex, and they don't understand that they've stepped into a realm that functions by entirely different rules, that complex systems have to be managed in a different way because they're fundamentally unpredictable.
And I think what you've just described is the innovation that keeps Chinese communism from collapsing the way Soviet communism did in less than 100 years is the recognition that it has to be structured in a ironically decentralized way, that you can centralize the objective, but you have to decentralize the administration.
And that the mechanism for doing this is simultaneously incredibly insightful in the sense that actually that can work in a sense, but it's also a recipe for criminality and atrocity.
And I would just point out that the structure is not unlike what happened at Enron, where the people at the top realized that all they had to do was tell the people below them, bring me a profit on paper.
Don't tell me how you got it, and I will make you rich.
And if you don't, I'll fire you.
And the point is, everybody then starts innovating the crimes below you.
You don't necessarily know what's going on.
You don't even want to know what's going on because you don't want to go to jail.
And so the point is, it gets the value accomplished.
In this case, in the case of Enron, the value was we want the stock price to go up, right?
We don't care if we're hollowing out the company to do it.
We want the stock price to go up.
And so whatever shenanigans you come up with, that's between you and you, just bring us a profit on paper.
So by saying, by basically outlining these priorities, you're guaranteeing that somebody is going to figure out, hey, those people have no power.
They do have organs.
It's a priority to neutralize their power.
It's basically begging for somebody to put those dots together in a way that will create a genocidal reaction.
Yeah.
I mean, I'll just add one thing here.
I don't think it can be successful in the long term because for the best that we can see or the best that I've been able to glean, the major reason why the CCP continues to stay alive today is massive infusion of U.S. money, technology, IP, goodwill.
I mean, it's still continuing to this day, although it's, you know, that big structure is starting to shift, right, away from that, especially through these recent tariff policies and so forth.
But which actually, I am no authority on Chinese history, but I believe the following thing is true.
One of the things that has allowed China, and I'm not talking about the Chinese Communist Party, I'm talking about China as a nation and as a culture.
One of the things that allowed it to survive as long as it did was that it actually rejected the idea of being expansionist, that it became insular.
And if I understand the history correctly, it actually intentionally destroyed a fleet of ships that might well have discovered the new world from the Pacific side.
So there's a whole different history that might have happened.
But the point is, the wisdom inside of China was to not plug into the rest of the world in ways that would endanger the country.
And what you're describing is that the CCP approach has actually plugged it into the rest of the world in a way that opens real questions about the sustainability of China as an entity.
Well, the crazy thing about it is, I'll just, this is a brief commentary, you know, a topic perhaps for another show if you want.
Sure.
But the Chinese economy had a few different prongs, okay, to it.
And the major prong that we would have, say, in the West, in Canada or in the U.S., is consumption, is domestic consumption.
That is not a significant prong for the economy in China.
In fact, for a whole lot of reasons, and it has to do with how the CCP has governed that country in significant part, okay?
That people, there isn't a lot of that among a lot.
There are very few people that do it a lot, right?
But the vast majority of the population are not involved in what we would consider consumption in the West.
There was a huge real estate and development-based economy, which has now collapsed for a whole lot of reasons, mainly because it was unsustainable.
It's sort of like building stuff you don't need.
It grows your GDP, but then you got to pay the piper down the line, okay?
Basically.
And the third part is export.
And that's essentially the major part of the Chinese economy that's left.
Like major, I mean, like, I don't know what percent, but it's like a huge portion of it is export.
So they're in this situation where they have to sell.
They have to sell.
And they're ready to sell at fire sale prices because they need the money now.
Okay.
And this is, so as these tariff regimes came in, they started flooding Europe with stuff and so forth.
Again, it's a kind of, this is communists, it's a predatory mindframe.
Okay.
They do not believe in win-win.
You know, I kind of joke that winning for the Chinese Communist Party and its leaders is two wins for me.
Okay.
It's all they literally have a concept called comprehensive national power, where they rate every country that exists.
I talk about this a little bit in the book just to kind of put some color to how the system works.
But they always measured a U.S. is the top.
So that's the kind of one.
And every other number is kind of lower.
And they're always either trying to increase their number relative to the rest or lower yours, right?
It's never like let's both let rising tide lifts all ships.
That just is not the, it's a very weird zero-sum logic.
And that's also why you get these catastrophic lockdowns that they implemented during COVID, because that's the totalitarian mindset at play, right?
How else are we going to control this?
Well, of course, we're going to basically impose the most coercive measures we can to try to control things.
And in fact, obviously those were the worst things that you could actually do.
Well, there is a, again, I do want to get to the game theory eventually here, but I will.
I'm going to shamelessly lift up my book here if I may.
I just realized I kind of forgot to do this.
I've been advised that it's important that people, you know, killtoarder.com.
This is where if you're interested, if you're liking this conversation, I want to strongly encourage you to pre-order.
Is it okay if I say that?
Can I be a little bit commercial here?
Sure.
I will again advise people, get it with a chair.
So there's something about the logic of communism.
The explicit logic of communism is from each according to his ability to each according to his need.
There is something about the particular story you tell about organ harvesting that is a perversion of this.
It's a transfer of health rather than wealth.
And the idea is if you have a healthy organ, but we don't like you and somebody else needs an organ and they have money that will enrich us and make us more powerful, then they are entitled to your organ.
It's the natural logic of things.
So you have this, you know, brutal utilitarian logic in play underneath this system.
But I would also point out, I don't want to give the West a pass here because I think our elites feel the same way.
They actually are quite willing to tyrannize us.
And they, of course, would imagine that the organ is better spent on them, right?
The purchaser of such an organ is going to make the same kind of calculation about its value.
And while it's not exactly communist, it does have this element of, you know, well, I'm entitled to it because I need it and I'm powerful.
And therefore, what's the problem?
Well, so the epitome of what you're talking about, and I'm going to take it back to China for a moment, but I'm happy to explore here with you, okay?
Is, you know, again, so many things I learned during the writing of this book.
Do you remember there was this hot mic moment between Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Kim Jong-un walking in Tianmen Square?
Did you catch that?
If not, you may want to pull it up.
Organ Transplantation Controversies00:08:58
When was this?
I'll explain this.
I would say, I have a terrible sense of the passage of time, but I would say five months ago, if I was going to guess, okay?
I think I missed it.
But so what happens is it's kind of the whole thing is remarkable, and many Chinese don't believe it could possibly have been, you know, unintentional because everything is so controlled over there, okay?
But basically what happens is, I mean, this is going to be a summary, okay?
She says to Putin, today for us, when you're 70, you're just a baby, okay?
Putin says to Xi, through continual organ transplantation, perhaps we can achieve immortality.
A little more than that, but that's the idea.
She says back to Putin, our target, again, you know, summary, our target is 150 years.
And for me, first of all, my phone was ringing off the hook.
They talked about organ on a hot mic.
Anyway, you can imagine, right?
But I realized something that was just in front of my face, but I hadn't seen until this exact moment.
Okay.
That so 150 years is kind of a code word in a way for them because they have something and they like to name their sort of projects with numbers.
So Project 981 is the elite longevity project.
And indeed, Chinese elites live a lot longer than the average person.
And, you know, there could be many reasons why.
But it had never occurred to me, having looked at forced organ harvesting for 20 years that forced organ harvesting was a piece of that puzzle.
And of course it is.
It's kind of an obvious piece the moment that you hear it, right?
And they literally just said it on Live Hot Mic, right?
And there's this, this 981 project.
Obviously, organ transplantation is an element of that.
And there's even, again, I was telling you, you get these sort of odd anecdotes that come up that are just kind of weird or unexpected that kind of validate the idea.
But I remember someone had sent me this weird eulogy that was written publicly about a Chinese superelite who had died.
And someone was, you know, kind of eulogy.
Again, this sounds sort of weird in macabre, but they did it, right?
The eulogy talked about how amazing it was that this person had had multiple organs transplanted before ultimately they passed away.
So again, I was like, oh, yeah, now I understand what that was about, right?
So anyway, just the oddest things.
And when it comes to American or Western elites, you know, I don't know.
I haven't been studying them as much as you have, perhaps.
But my inclination isn't to believe that they are as monstrous as the Chinese elites have become under the rubric of this communist ideology, which essentially allows the ultimate utilitarianism.
I'm worried that this, you know, you were talking about this sort of transfer of ideology or approach that happens through engagement.
I'm worried that we've really adopted too much of that.
This utilitarian bioethics, to be fair, has been growing in the West, not just purely through engagement with communist China, but I think it's fueled through it.
And the thing is, and a central piece, and I talk about this in the book quite a way, of how the Chinese elites have created power over us, leverage over us, is by compromising us in various ways.
I mean, the obvious ways are honeypots.
And, you know, the United Front Work Department, which I have a considerable, I spent a considerable amount of time in the book talking about.
I mean, the last I know, it was a $40 billion budget to compromise people.
Like, literally, it's like a ministry of the Chinese government designed to do that, right?
But the best way to do it is you get them in bed with you.
Hey, I'll set up a transplant for you in two weeks.
No problem.
It'll be clean and good.
And then now you're on the hook for life because you know what you've done, right?
So I'm just giving you examples of how they operate.
Yeah, I would also, one of my notes to myself was that the system of incentives is insidious here because let's suppose that you begin to get an inkling from out here in the West that this must be what's going on in light of what's on offer.
And then some part of you thinks, how do I know I'm not going to need an organ at some point?
So your incentive to blow the whistle on this, to do the investigative journalism, whatever it might be, is reduced because as soon as you understand this, it becomes like an insurance policy.
I had never, Brett, if I may jump in, I'm sorry to interrupt you, but honestly, this had never occurred to me what you're describing.
And I'm feeling kind of horrible, horrible about what you're just telling me, but I think you must be right.
No, I mean, you know, that's the thing about game theory is you got to know where to stand to see it, but it's not hard to understand once you do.
So anyway, I think a lot of this functions in that way.
To your point about Putin and Xi, I think one of the things that us little people need to grapple with is that the global elites have a culture or two or three.
I don't know how many it is.
But the point is when Xi and Putin are talking peer to peer, there is a way in which they are united, even though it is China and Russia, which are not historically united.
They are part of a de facto cabal of people who have power over others.
And so my guess is that part of the transfer of or part of the infusion of some of this insidious utilitarian ideology is coming through this narrow band of elites that share above all else a sense of entitlement, that they are powerful because they are entitled to be and that that gives them, they are above all of the rules.
And anyway, I hear you saying that you don't know if our elites are this corrupt and diabolical.
I think we're finding out through the Epstein file release that they absolutely are this diabolical, maybe different topics, but I would guess that the idea, you know, if you're in a strata that feels entitled to destroy children, then you're certainly in a strata that feels entitled to appropriate organs.
Yeah.
And, you know, so this is actually an incredibly important point.
You just made me realize something else that I bring to light.
You know, there's a little known book that is incredibly important, and it's a little bit obscurely written, so it might be difficult for a lot of people to read.
The book is called Political Ponyrology, written by a guy named Andrei Wobachevsky, or Andrew, I don't know how to pronounce it in English, English pronunciation, but he was someone that watched.
So what happened after the Iron Curtain came down, right, and after World War II in Poland was that, you know, Russia or in Poland, we viewed it.
I'm also my background's Polish.
We kind of viewed it as a Russian occupation because the Russians always liked to occupy Poland.
It wasn't a new thing.
Okay.
And so, but it really was Soviet, so Soviet occupation.
And there was this kind of time period between sort of the war ending and the Iron Curtain fully coming down where there was a little bit of freedom.
And Andrei Wobachewski watched as, you know, this kind of the Soviet, the commissar type people started taking over in Poland.
And he was at the Jagiellonian University studying psychology.
And he had this commissar come in and basically take over the classroom.
And he described the whole situation.
And this kind of launched him on this journey to try to understand communism.
And he does it through this very interesting lens.
He believes that communism is a pathocratic system, okay?
That what it does in effect is much more so than any other system, it allows people who have these anti-social personality disorder or cluster B traits or whatever to basically rise to the top, which is another reason why you have this situation that you get mass atrocities always in communist systems, aside from the utilitarian bioethics ideology.
It's sort of like pathocracy plus utilitarian bioethics together leads to mass atrocity or something like that.
Well, I would push back in one way.
Communism's Pathocratic Nature00:10:55
I think all power systems have this defect for a fairly simple reason.
And the reason is because amoral people, people who have no moral compass, have at their disposal every single tool that moral people have.
They can behave morally when that's the productive thing to do, and they can defect at will.
And moral people are constrained by morals.
That's what morals are.
They are constraints against doing things that would be profitable.
So all systems have this tendency for people who are unconstrained to rise above others.
The only system that corrects for this properly is a system with a strong democratic component where you actually are empowered to discover the criminality of the people who rule over you, to throw them out and replace them with better people.
How well does it work?
Not well, but better than anything else.
But the sad part is that our democracy has been hollowed out.
It doesn't function like a democracy.
And so this self-correcting aspect, even though it's crude to begin with, isn't even there, right?
What we effectively have is some other system of power that doesn't have a name in which we have these psychopaths who are, you know, joking over email about torturing children.
Like, how does that, how do we, how are we not revolting against a system that allowed that to happen?
I actually, you know, I agree.
I think we've been pushed in that direction.
I agree in a sense.
I think we've been pushed in that direction significantly.
But here's what struck me, okay?
I was thinking about, you know, when you're, you know, these DEI loyalty oaths.
I just had an AH director, Jay Bhattachari, on the show, and we were talking about how like literally any grantee needed to do this DEI loyalty oath, just kind of incredibly insane stuff, right?
For in a scientific community, right?
But okay, so, however, okay, this is the thing that struck me about just these, I'll call it Marxian, you know, kind of woke, different critical theory structures, okay?
They're not particularly, first of all, they're all very arcane, very difficult to read about and study.
You know, this is why James Lindsay is so brilliant because he can read like insane amounts of this kind of stuff and kind of figure out what it actually means.
And most of us would be banging our head against a brick wall pretty quick, right?
But it allows you, the logic of it is always very relatively simple.
It has to do if you can, you know, sort of performatively say you're on the side of whoever the oppressed is in the context.
I mean, I'm being a little bit maybe oversimplifying slightly.
That's what's going to get you the laurels.
That's what's going to make you an ally or whatever.
Okay.
And when I was, I've been learned, I learned a little bit about psychopaths too.
And apparently, like people that are psychopathic, right, they don't know how to deal, they don't have to, they don't deal with society normally.
So they kind of, it's almost like they're play acting, right?
And play acting like another, like a normal person to be able to function and not be ostracized or whatever, right?
So I do think there's a natural function of ostracizing people who behave in incredibly antisocial ways naturally in society.
And this is why I think this idea of communism functioning as a pathocracy has merit.
But if you're one of these people that has antisocial personality disorder, as it's now called, and you're pantomiming whatever, trying to live, the woke sort of structures are perfect for you in a way, because you can pantomime crazy stuff and be with great conviction.
Everyone praises you and elevates you for it.
Right.
And as I understand it, I've never lived in a communist system aside from a short stint when I was five.
And that's a whole discussion for, again, for another day.
But it's a really weird incentive structure, I think, that uniquely allows people who are willing to adhere to a kind of a crazy, makes no sense ideological position and behave as if it were perfectly reasonable and in fact a great, right?
That allows those people to rise to the top a lot faster when most people, right, you know, especially the working class, I would say, because people who actually have to face the consequences of their actions and their work every day would be like, this makes no sense.
This is stupid.
There's no way I'm going along with this.
Does that make sense?
Yes, although I don't know if we have time for it, but I have a kind of different version of this in which there's a cycle.
I think we frankly give Marx too much credit for inventing communism.
I think communism self-invents and it self-invents.
I completely agree with you.
I can't wait to hear what you're going to say.
This is super interesting.
So I would argue that a market-based system has incredible capacity to be productive, but that it tends to produce a large number of people who are ill-equipped to win, right?
In our system, we have people who are not well-educated.
They may be malformed because they've been exposed to chemicals in their developmental environment that reduced their IQ or distorted their bodies.
And that if you have a number of people who can correctly detect that they don't have the tools to win in a system where the whole idea is you're supposed to be trying to win, then they don't have any investment in that system.
So, of course, the idea of ganging up on that system, destroying it, and transferring the productivity of that system in your own direction is a natural.
And I will say that the outgrowth of that thought is that those who favor the market system, and I am among them, I believe that a market-based system, markets are the best tool we have ever discovered for figuring out how to do things.
We should never ask them what to do, but how to do things, they're brilliant at it.
But in a market system, we need to do a good job of making sure that everybody is armed to compete and that the instinct to hobble your competitors so that they can't compete produces an overthrow that creates communism.
So there's stinginess on the right, an unwillingness to recognize our collective responsibility to take care of people, to immunize them from truly bad luck.
I don't want to immunize anybody from bad decisions, but truly bad luck, medically bad luck, or whatever it may be.
Those are things that we should collectively take care of because it's in our enlightened self-interest to do it.
If you want to preserve the market economy, you have to preserve it against the communist overthrow that inevitably happens if too many people detect that they have no stake in the future of this system.
You know, what's just jumping to my mind, right, is I think there's, I've read a whole bunch of research over the last however many years that kind of helps us understand what those basic building blocks are, right?
Of, you know, the success sequence, I believe it's called, for example, right?
If you follow the success sequence in life, it doesn't matter how poor you were at the beginning, your likelihood of doing really well in life is very high.
It's astonishing that that's the case.
To me, it's actually, I was kind of shocking, right?
But it's a reality.
So I think we can, you know, as we try to, you know, have a good, decent, humane, and at the same time, you know, a society that creates individual accountability, because I think that is critical, right?
For people to have, we understand that their individual agency is critical to securing their well-being while giving them the core basic building blocks and allow as many people as possible to have access to them.
I think that's highly doable.
Think we have the information we need to affect that, right?
I don't even, I don't think there's a dearth of that.
I think the dearth is that there's grifters, there's crazy ideologies that people are pushing, there's demagogues, there's all sorts of stuff, right?
That's sort of pushing against that and people just sort of wanting to preserve the status quo.
Well, there's a lot, there's a lot of work being done by preserving the status quo.
I would say that the driver here is largely that when you have succeeded in a competitive system, sabotaging potential competitors who are not yet winners but have what it takes to win is a natural strategy.
So when you look at something like the crappy state of public schools in America, you say, well, there is power.
Those with power do not want to be dislodged from power.
So why would they agree to a system that armed other people to become powerful?
And the answer is they wouldn't, but they can't say that.
So they say other things.
And we have these nonsense battles about, you know, what the best way to fix education is.
And we end up with, you know, a dystopia in our schools.
But that if we recognize that the enlightened self-interest of those who think that capitalism is the best system involves making sure that it does not let powerful saboteurs hobble their would-be competitors.
The magic of capitalism is most magical when the largest number of people have access to the market so that they can create wealth.
And instead, what we get is a system in which people become personally wealthy by destroying wealth, right?
You make millions by destroying billions.
Incredibly, but that's very compelling.
And it also explains, you know, sort of the pernicious nature of this, what I describe as the financialization economy that really emerged hard after 08, where people were making money.
I mean, of course, it started before that, but a lot of people are just making money just by manipulating money as opposed to making something that people, it's actually useful to people at large, right?
Increase Your Slice00:08:25
And so that makes no sense to me because that, you know, it provides value to people who have access to mass amounts of capital, i.e., elites, right?
So of course they like that because they keep getting richer, but they're not actually providing value at a level which would be consummate to the amount of profit they're getting to everybody else, which is kind of the incentive structure that you would like to have, right?
Well, let me, I think in the waning minutes of this podcast, in light of your point here, let me just outline the basic way that I think evolutionarily the picture you paint about organ harvesting in China fits with the larger picture of genocidal impulses and the way they shift history.
And let me just get your take on it.
So it has to do with a system of frontiers.
One thing we don't do well in biology is we don't leverage pie charts.
We think of pie charts as something that exists in business typically, and we don't use them very much.
But we should use them because they properly deal with the question of resources and their distribution.
So one thing to realize is that your people, whoever they might be, have a slice of the pie.
And the evolutionary objective is to increase the slice of the pie that you have, increase the absolute amount of it.
There are many ways to do that.
The best ways, evolutionarily, are to find what I call a frontier.
A frontier can be a continent that doesn't have any people on it.
So when the natives of the New World discovered it at the end of the last ice age, there were no people in it.
And a population that was literally a few thousand people at most grew into a population of something like 50 to 100 million people before Christobal Cologne rediscovered the new world from Europe.
So that's a massive growth in a population, a huge increase in the slice of pie for that tiny little population that grew into 50 to 100 million.
That's a geographic frontier.
You can also do it on a technological frontier.
You can discover a way of extracting resources from the environment that's just vastly more efficient.
So you go from hunting and gathering to farming and your population goes from, you know, 1,000 to 100,000.
So those are the natural ways.
And what they do is they actually increase the size of the whole pie.
You discover farming, the slice of the pie that your population has access to grows immensely, but other people learn farming from you.
The whole pie grows.
We all get richer.
The last kind of frontier, though, is a transfer of resource frontier.
If the objective evolutionarily is to increase the slice of pie that your people have access to, one way to do that is to find somebody who can't defend their slice of pie and to come up with excuses, the very rationalizations you were pointing to, describing these people as unworthy or dangerous or diseased or all of the above.
And then liquidating whatever they have, taking their land, taking their stuff, taking their organs, as you point out.
And the point is, this is not an activity that grows the size of the pie for planet Earth.
It's growing this one slice at the expense of another slice.
It's a go-to strategy, and it shows up again and again and again in history.
And to the extent that we see an obvious analogy between what the Chinese seem to be doing with the Uyghurs and the Falun Gong, that looks like what the Nazis were doing with Jews and the Roma.
It looks like every case of genocide in human history.
And there's a reason, which is it's a strategy, it's under the surface, and it gets rediscovered again and again.
I mean, what's really fascinating about what you're saying is I think this is one of the, there's two parts to this.
On the one hand, I think it's a huge kind of flaw in communist thinking, okay?
Because this is, and it's also part of the sell to people that are disenfranchised that you were describing.
Basically, the sell, right, to get every communist regime that's ever gotten into power and to power to take power is it's those people that took stuff from you.
That's the reason they're rich, right?
And it might be partially true in some cases that that's the case, right?
But that's how they sell it.
There's no, like, there's no, you know, I'll tell you something funny, right?
Having been educated in, you know, biology for 10 years in the higher education system and before, I really was never taught where prosperity comes from.
Like literally, I found out where prosperity comes from within the last five years of my life.
Okay.
I'd never had to grapple with this question, right?
But the prosperity comes like, you know, division of labor famously, right?
Innovation.
The point is that prosperity comes from increasing the pie every time.
But what the communists tell you is there's no increasing the pie.
Every time someone gets rich, it's because they took it from you.
Now it's your time to take it back.
You're the one that's oppressed.
You've achieved your critical consciousness and now take it back.
And that's how these monsters get into power.
And of course, very quickly execute the true believers in that ideology because, of course, it doesn't make a ton of sense and it's kind of doesn't and it doesn't get fit with their totalitarian designs once they have the power in the first place.
So I think it's very interesting what you're describing because it's also a fallacy.
What you're describing is a way that people get resources, but they also use it, they use it as an explanation as to why they have to.
And the final thought I have here, okay, is that I think we have this unbelievable capacity to self-brainwash.
Okay, this is something that dawned on me watching COVID happen, right?
The Canadian truckers movement.
I think that was one of the most consequential moments during COVID.
I think they changed the world by getting the Canadian government to so overreact that they started freezing bank accounts and all this stuff.
And everyone said, whoa, whoa, okay, this is more totalitarian than we're ready for or something, right?
But I think what happened was, you know, in Canada, our media are very, let's say, financially dependent on the government, not just the official state media, right?
CBC.
And so I think that in a way, the government at the time told the media that they kind of wanted to believe that the people who were like the most grassroots people you could imagine, right?
People just like, we don't want these mandates.
Let's change things.
Let's go to Ottawa.
I know people who were there.
I know people who were journalists had been embedded in there.
It was astonishingly grassroots, okay, compared to any movement I've ever come across.
Okay.
But they were compelled.
I think they told their media, they kind of have this expectation to discover these are whites, some sort of white supremacists or far-rightists that are coming to take Parliament Hill.
Okay.
And then these media just kind of obliged them in a way, you know, by reporting that way, despite the reality.
Again, they're not truth-seeking media, many of them.
They're these what I described earlier as activist journalists, right?
What are trying to push a certain vision?
And I think the Canadian government actually believed at this point after the cycle happened, right, that these far-right people were coming to seize Parliament Hill when, in fact, these were people who just wanted to get rid of these mandates, which really kind of make no sense for anybody and never did.
So a crazy reality, right?
Crazy Reality: Medically Assisted Suicide00:07:26
So now, if you're living in a communist system, there's some portion of people that are self-brainwashing themselves into believing in this zero-sum view of the world, which is obviously unbelievably destructive and can never lend itself ultimately to prosperity because, well, prosperity isn't zero-sum.
You can't achieve it in a zero-sum world.
All you can do is take it from people.
There's only so much.
Whereas here you have people innovating.
Here you have people who are creating this division of labor, which, again, the rising tide lifts all ships, right?
I think you and I have experienced as part of the health freedom movement exactly how the self-delusion works.
We in the health freedom movement exited, but as we exited the system, we were demonized by others, which meant that lots of people who hadn't taken a position could detect very well what their fate would be if they looked at, you know, a Robert Malone or a Pierre Corey or you or me.
And they, once they realize, well, I could, you know, do my own research and see what's there, but what will my fate be?
It will not be good.
So the point is they can't stand the cognitive dissidence.
They don't want to lie because it doesn't feel good.
So the way to not lie is to accept the prepackaged nonsense that they were being fed because that explains their behavior.
So all they have to do is convince you that they believe it.
And then we don't see a moral compromise.
We see, why are you so confused?
How are you not seeing the evidence?
It's right in front of you.
But the answer is, this isn't about the evidence.
This is about me trying to convince you that I actually think this is true so that you will understand why I'm treating you like a crazy person.
Fascinating.
I had never known.
I mean, I've never thought of it that way, Brett, to be perfectly honest.
This is, you know, perhaps, you know, perhaps, again, a topic for another discussion.
I can see so many different vantage points to this, okay, what you just described.
Fast and absolutely fascinating.
Yeah.
Well, I look forward to a future discussion.
Before we go, you want to hold up your book?
When will it be available again?
So March 17th.
But, you know, like, how about I just be perfectly transparent about what my agenda is here?
Okay.
And this, by the way, and thank you for inviting me.
It was a just, I didn't know you, I truly didn't actually know you were interested in this.
And I just loved getting the invite, you know, so thank you.
And I mean, I didn't realize you've been thinking about organs all these years.
And I'm going to be calling Jakob Levy soon to find out, you know, if your work has influenced him somehow.
Before you go on, let me just say all of the game theory and the particulars of the story of organ harvesting in China and the logic of genocide and pie charts and all of that.
Take that lens and start looking at Canada with its medically assisted suicide.
And you can figure out where this is going in a hurry, right?
You're looking at the beginning of something utterly ghastly.
And, you know, it will have a particular Canadian flavor.
I'm in, just on this point, right?
I'm incredibly concerned about this because basically wherever it's, there's various types of this medically assisted suicide in different places in the world, including in the U.S.
I think there's another state that just passed it.
But it's where it's a medical billing code where it sort of explodes.
And that's what happened in Netherlands and in Canada.
It's a very difficult reality.
I just checked, okay?
And it's now become, I was saying it was the number five cause of death, but I decided to fact check myself to make sure I wasn't leading someone astray.
As I was saying that it's actually the number four, given the recent statistics, as far as best as I can tell.
So that's crazy.
That's like, you know, we're talking about like heart disease and like these kind of like common things which cause cause cause death.
So, and that's, you know, this medically assisted suicide.
So I'm very worried about that development.
I really, I really, I want to, I hope that we can kind of come back from that in Canada.
We need to push back on these laws.
Can't keep going in that same direction because it will lead to this sort of very extreme kill to order situation.
I completely think that.
I mean, you can just see it, right?
Oh, you know, on the one hand, many of us believe you have a right not to suffer, that nobody can force you to suffer if your life is unbearable.
But, you know, most people who commit suicide are taking a permanent solution to a temporary problem.
So the whole idea of turning this into a governmentally sanctioned phenomenon is frightening in its own right.
But once you have such a large number of people availing themselves of this, it inevitably leads to that same first step onto the slippery slope of the condemned person in China.
Well, what's the harm if the person's going to die anyway?
And then it gets to the question of what kind of incentives will be given to people and what kind of propaganda will induce them to think maybe if I die, my organs will help people.
And people are going to be able to do that.
100%.
100%.
This is exactly what I was thinking about because you can imagine, right?
Especially with the breakdown of our family structures and that, you know, children not caring as much for the parents as they once did historically and for since time immemorial, right, for humanity.
You can imagine a situation where a parent, you know, is older, elderly parent living alone, you know, not having a lot of interaction, and then is being given an advertising, you know, essentially propaganda that says, hey, listen, you can actually make a difference.
Like there's people that need organs.
You know, you're not really making much of a difference now.
Why don't you make a real difference and help these people?
And it kind of almost sounds compelling, doesn't it?
Right.
Yes.
And you can imagine the guilt that will be created in people who actually just want to live out their lives as they are fully entitled to do and thinking that they are being selfish in wanting to live their own life.
I mean, this becomes ghastly so quickly.
The metaphor of slippery slope is apt because it takes almost nothing once you begin to go down this road for the utilitarianism to lead you into madness.
100%.
Well, okay, so yeah, my agenda.
Yes.
My agenda, I want to try, you know, the idea is this issue, so it's so macabre and crazy, like that for most of my life, I really couldn't even talk to people about it terribly effectively because people would just kind of clue out in the middle of the conversation, like they didn't really want to know.
And I was sympathetic to that, by the way, because it is very extreme.
But something, and I think it might be COVID, to be perfectly honest, but possibly other things, possibly Epstein files more recently.
People Now Ready To Grasp Reality00:02:10
I've been thinking about that a bit actually, is that people seem to be now more ready than ever to understand that this is real, that this is something that's happening.
And there's a whole lot of things that we can do to at the very least stop our own complicity, but even stop some of the scale of it that's of that is happening in China right now from happening.
So my goal is to make this thing a bestseller, you know, get knock the pre-orders out of the park, knock the, you know, just, and, and, and, you know, let millions more people realize that this is even real, because that's been the hardest part all these years.
It's just such a, you know, and of course, the Chinese regime always says that this is just all propaganda and you're against us and how dare you.
And as I mentioned before, never provided any evidence at all that it's actually not happening.
I think we have to, I just, I think it's, it's the perfect time.
And I want to encourage people to participate with us in helping stop this.
Yes.
Well, I think your book is going to be a big success.
And I think the careful and sober way you approach it and your obvious decency as a person is going to is going to make a huge difference.
Thank you for that.
So the book is Killed to Order.
You said it's out March 17th.
That's right.
Available to be pre-ordered now.
And you, Jania Kellek, are findable on American Thought Leaders, the podcast at the Epoch Times.
And anyway, I hope people, if they're not familiar with you, will go check those things out and buy your book and maybe we can raise awareness and turn the situation around.
And my main social media is X. I'm there at Jan Ya Kellik.
That's at J-A-N-J-E-K-I-E-L-E-K.
And also the book, you can get it, you know, the Amazon link right away, killtoorder.com.
And Brett, this has been just an absolutely wonderful conversation.
Thank you so much for it.
I mean, really, really wonderful.
Yeah, I have appreciated the conversation a great deal too.
And I always appreciate your insight and humanity.