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April 25, 2025 - Epoch Times
01:00:32
He Got a Chinese Heart in 2 Weeks
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Time Text
If I told you that I could schedule a heart transplant, would you believe me?
You would have to know when someone would be dead to schedule that, right?
I think it was 2005 or 2006, Yakub Lavi, he was the head of the Israeli Transplant Association, his patient was tired of waiting for a heart.
And he told him, "Hey, I've got an opportunity in China."
And the Israeli, they have socialized medicine, so they would pay for, you know, the necessary operations.
Jakob said, you know, child of Holocaust survivors, no way this is possible.
But the guy goes, gets the heart, comes back.
Got it.
I just got it done.
Scheduled as promised, right?
Jakob realized there's something horrible.
Jan Jekielek is senior editor with the Epoch Times, host of the show American Thought Leaders, and was co-host of Fallout with Dr. Robert Malone and Cash's Corner with Kash Patel.
Years ago, Jan studied the evolutionary biology of lemurs in Madagascar.
When his life took an unexpected turn, exposed to the realities of human rights violations in China, he ended up working with an underground railroad bringing Chinese dissidents Through the Golden Triangle to Bangkok and ultimately to Western countries.
It was then that he realized that telling unknown heroes' stories was transformative, both for him and audiences.
Determined to tell true stories, Yan started working with the Epoch Times almost 20 years ago, at a time when popular narratives in the West hid the dark underbelly of communist China.
He did some of the earliest reporting on the Chinese regime's continuing practice of forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience.
Over the last five years, he's interviewed over 1,000 thought leaders on camera, including head of state, multiple U.S. cabinet secretaries and agency heads, and congressional members.
Jan specializes in long-form discussions that challenge the grand narratives of our time.
He's also an award-winning documentary filmmaker producing DeSantis, Florida vs.
Lockdowns, The Unseen Crisis, Vaccine Stories You Were Never Told, and the optimistic Holocaust documentary, Finding Manny.
So we're going to talk about all kinds of stuff and have Q&A for you.
So give it up for my friend Jan.
Thank you, sir.
Thank you so much.
This is awesome.
Thank you.
Thank you.
And you know what?
I feel bad.
I even brought a sports jacket to wear and I forgot to put it on right now.
I'm wearing my T-shirt.
If you want me to do that at any point in time.
I dress down quite a bit for this.
Yeah, yeah.
You're usually in a suit and everything.
So first off, thank you for being here.
This is great.
You were just in D.C. when?
Well, yesterday.
Yesterday.
I was supposed to be here, but I had an appointment I had to keep.
And as it turned out, you know, as Bobby Kennedy was being sworn in, I happened to be at the White House at the same time.
I wasn't there for that, but as it played out.
Yeah, which is why.
And you and Bobby are friends.
So, yeah.
So we're going to come back to what's going on in D.C. We'll go over a couple of different things.
Let's talk about...
So I've got some printed physical versions, even though most people that read Epoch Times, oops, I'm dropping stuff.
They actually still print a newspaper.
Let's talk about what is the Epoch Times, all the different things from Epoch TV to all the American thought leaders.
You do a lot of stuff.
So let's talk about what it is and then your origin story.
How did you get into that?
Okay, this is great.
This is my favorite thing to talk about.
So Epoch has a really interesting background.
Everybody here knows what happened in China in 1989, right?
June 4th, 1989, the Tiananmen Square Massacre.
Okay, there was a very popular, all across China, there was a huge democracy movement.
The regime decided, we're going to cut this down.
And by doing a massacre in Tiananmen Square in Beijing, the whole movement died because people understood what would happen.
Some of these students afterwards, they found scholarships, they were really smart, and some of them made their way to Georgia Tech in Atlanta.
And now, in 1999, when the Chinese regime turned its attention on a new group of people to be the public enemy, this was a spiritual discipline called Falun Gong, truthfulness, compassion, forbearance, living these principles.
It had grown to be 70 to 100 million people in China doing it.
So something like 1 in 14 Chinese were practicing this, and the dictator at the time decided, we're going to, in his own words, eradicate this practice.
And, you know, everything that happens when you decide to eradicate a group of people began.
And unfortunately, Joe talked about grand narratives a bit earlier.
The grand narrative around communist China at the time was that if we put enough money into the system, it's going to become a democracy.
And a whole lot of really well-meaning people, I might add, really bought into this.
It wasn't just sort of, you know, greedy people wanting to exploit China.
A lot of people were, you know...
Reasonably, wanting to create change there.
But in 1999, suddenly terrible things start to happen.
The Falun Gong turned out to be very difficult to re-educate, as they call it, to transform, to being forced to recant.
So they start torturing them, and there's this unwritten rule in the prisons that all deaths of Falun Gong will be considered suicide.
In other words, you can work on these people, whatever way.
And meanwhile, in the West, in America, never mind the Chinese language, the American media are basically taking Chinese Communist Party talking points and representing them as if they were reality.
And these people at Georgia Tech, they saw this and they thought, hey, listen, someone needs to tell the truth of what's happening over there.
They started a website, and that was the initial Epoch Times in the basement of a student's home in Atlanta.
It started as a website.
In a couple of years, there was a print newspaper that came out.
Chinese liked using...
And this was, by the way, all in Chinese, originally for Chinese Americans, and then, you know, beyond as well.
And, you know, but then they realized there's a lot more that needs to...
There's a lot more narratives that need to be challenged.
And an English edition was born in 2003.
I started working them with 2005.
I can tell you a bit more about how that happened.
And somewhere along the way, maybe about 10 years ago, the English edition eclipsed the Chinese edition and became kind of the dominant language.
We're actually in 22 different languages around the world, with English being number one, Chinese number two.
We've got Spanish, French, German editions, which are pretty sizable.
I've actually, in our bureau in D.C., there's a Spanish edition reporter for the White House, dedicated to that as well, in addition to our regular bureau people.
That's a little bit of the broad background of where it came from.
I'll add this one other point.
Back in 2016, you remember, are you familiar with something called Russiagate?
Does that mean anything to people?
Basically, what had happened was...
In order to attack the presidential candidacy of Donald Trump back in those years, the Clinton campaign manufactured a narrative that he was a Russian asset.
And this thing is basically completely fabricated from the ground up after exhaustive research people did over now a decade.
Basically a decade.
There really was never anything there.
But you were supposed to believe that there was some truth to it.
And to this day, there's still people that believe that.
We reported on that honestly.
Our tagline is truth and tradition.
We're always truth-seeking media.
And that's when we started getting attacked like crazy because how is it that you have this different narrative?
We're like, well, there's nothing here.
And as we learn more, there's even less here.
So that kind of changed.
We were a lot more similar aside from our health section, which was always very, let's call it progressive.
Talk about traditional Chinese medicine, alternative methods.
Our whole kind of way of being changed because all these other media, that was the story that you had to be right on.
And if you weren't, you're going to get attacked.
You're going to get...
Your Wikipedia page is going to get rewritten.
Your advertising dollars are going to get taken away.
All of that started happening.
So that's just a little background.
But all along, the Chinese regime really hates the Epoch Times from its very beginning.
Why?
Because we were exposing them from the very beginning.
And increasingly effectively, I would say.
So that's basically the Epoch Times origin.
How did I get into it?
Well, as you said, I was studying to be an evolutionary biologist back in the day.
I worked in Madagascar on several long trips.
I had a parasitic worm infection.
Some things went really bad.
I was in a bad relationship.
I had mono, actually, it turned out.
I ended up with something called Guillain-Barre syndrome.
Some of you may have heard, especially in the health professions, It's an autoimmune disorder.
Your immune system attacks your own body, and you lose control.
Your nervous system, you lose control.
And basically, I was doing a lot of fine work.
I was a geneticist as part of my work, and I couldn't do it anymore, and it killed my career.
It was done.
All these partnerships I had built up were gone, and I started trying to heal myself because there was no treatment for Guillain-Barre.
Now I think there might be some more, but back then certainly there wasn't.
I met this guy who had had chronic fatigue syndrome in a local bookshop, and the guy that I basically talked, it was kind of a cafe bookshop, we talked film, and he was wondering where the heck I had been for ages.
He had had chronic fatigue syndrome, and he told me that basically he had been able to heal himself from that with Chinese meditations.
Being very open-minded, I said, I'll give it a shot.
Whatever it is, I'm up for it.
Started doing these slow-motion movements, this meditation, and basically in two months, I went to see my neurologist because the deal was if things start going badly, I'll go see them.
I'll check myself back in the hospital.
But I have to go for a checkup, and she told me I was in complete remission after two months.
And the experience was fascinating because I started doing it, and I did it seriously because it really changed.
I sensed something was going on.
That's why I kept doing it, right?
I didn't really believe in it, but I was open-minded to it.
And she's like, keep doing what you're doing.
I don't know what you're doing.
Keep doing what you're doing.
Which is also very interesting because she never asked me what I was doing.
And apparently that's kind of common.
If it's not in the menu of the things that doctors expect, right?
They're like, I don't really want to know.
That's weird, right?
But anyway, my wife still pointed that out to me for the first time, right?
No, I always find that as strikingly weird.
Because I have a lot of situations where people will go to doctors and they'll literally be cured.
They'll be in remission.
And they don't inquire.
It's like...
It's almost like the propaganda from their field has just closed their minds off to possibilities, even though the evidence is right in front of them.
The thing is, I didn't even notice that.
I've told this story to people in various ways over the years.
My wife was the first person that asked this.
Did she ever ask you?
No, she didn't.
That's interesting.
The meditation was the Falun Gong, okay?
It's probably kind of obvious at this point.
And I started learning about what it was, right?
And then I realized there's this persecution happening.
And actually, there was a postdoc.
I was at University of Alberta in Edmonton, Alberta, in Canada.
And there was a postdoc there whose mother had escaped from China.
And she had been tortured, basically.
And I remember she was translating.
This post-doc, Nying, was translating for her mother.
And this woman's telling me, basically, that they gave her this piece of paper.
And they said, if you sign the piece of paper, you can go home.
But if you don't sign this piece of paper, we're going to work on you until you sign.
And the whole thing was so...
Does that sound reasonable to anyone here?
To me, it was really cosmic.
My parents had come from communist Poland.
That's why I have this unusual name.
I knew communism was bad.
They escaped that.
We had all these kind of weird family traditions in a way because of those realities.
I didn't grasp it.
But when this woman was telling me all this, I had this, like, and I'm getting shivers up my spine right now, a transformative moment because I suddenly got it.
Like, you know, I knew about it in theory, but I didn't get it.
I didn't get this sort of the twisted nature of the system.
There's no justice in this.
There's no way you could have done anything wrong if you could sign a piece of paper and walk away.
That doesn't make sense.
Oh, it's this system.
It's communism.
In the process of all of this, I don't know for those of you that have been in this situation, if you've ever...
When you're very sick or you wonder if you're going to make it, I've learned a lot of people are like, God, if I make it, I'm going to do something.
They call it dealing, right?
And that's what I said.
What I knew to say, and I was basically like, you could say agnostic, I dedicate my life to service.
And when this happened, I knew what my service needed to be.
That I needed to tell these people stories.
That I needed to help them.
And that started, that put me into human rights work.
I know our clock is running here, so I'm not going to give you...
We're going to do Q&A too, so we can go longer.
Hey, I hope you're enjoying this video, and I want to let you know that I have a new book that's come out, and if you'd like to get it absolutely free, there's a link below in the description, or you can wait till the end of this video, or you can simply go to joesfreebook.com, and you can get a copy there.
Yeah, I mean, so basically, we went, my wife and I, I was always a good writer.
I was a good grant writer.
That's how I was able to do all these projects.
So I took that, and I started, you know, writing.
These people's stories.
We got really good information from China.
We would give it to these UN special rapporteurs on torture, on forced involuntary disappearance, and so forth.
There was kind of a useful UN mechanism.
But then we went to the UN with my wife, and we were kind of really disappointed in Geneva, the Human Rights Commission, because most of the people there seemed to be determined to maintain the human rights violations, you know, not actually help.
And so we ended up, and again, sort of Providence, my life...
By the way, since this time that I made this vow, I feel it's been magical.
All these amazing opportunities manifesting themselves.
And I ended up getting a job in Thailand.
My wife happened to have worked in Thailand.
She's a small Jewish woman.
She's not Thai.
But she happened to have worked in Thailand.
And she spoke the language.
So we ended up landing there.
I was working in the countryside.
And she discovered this underground railroad that you were talking about.
And we realized that we can use our skills to make sure that none of these people that made it through this Underground Railroad ever get sent back to China, because China was always pressuring the Thai government to do that.
So that was kind of our role there for a while.
So we ended up doing basically direct work, and I wanted to tell these people stories.
I wanted to tell the stories of what was happening.
And no media.
Because of this narrative that we were talking about earlier, I would tell people, sorry, what are you talking about?
People would tell me, what are you talking about, China?
They're almost a democracy.
And I was like, no.
Let me tell you.
They didn't want to know, but Epoch was the exact opposite.
We were like, no, we were made for this.
This is like, give us all your stories.
Everything you got.
More stories, please.
So we kind of fell in love with it.
So it's now been almost 20 years, and we've done various things with them over the years.
And most recently, the last five years or so, American Thought Leaders, which has been kind of my absolute dream job that I could possibly imagine.
I get to interview people I'm fascinated with.
I'm just very fascinated with lots of things.
Talk about some of the people that you interviewed a while back who are now in these positions.
Oh, yeah.
Actually, one of my favorite interviews on the China question, this was maybe a couple years ago, was with then-Senator Marco Rubio.
And I knew him a little bit, and his office was actually, I had a deep respect for his office, because since he got into office, that's like 13 years ago or something like that, he was always helping persecuted people.
And there's no political benefit to doing this, by the way.
Like, none.
There's, in fact, a lot of pressure to not do it.
But his office from the very beginning was doing that.
Not just Cubans, right?
But Chinese and so forth.
So, you know, I knew he was decent.
But when I interviewed him, I was like, you know, basically, we did an hour.
And, you know, senators usually get, like, you get 15 minutes and you're supposed to be happy about it.
It was an...
I mean, he knew his stuff in a way that, and understood the depth of the, and this is so, you know, I feel this is still the most under-told story in a way, you know, the sort of the real true gravity of the China threat.
But I could tell that he understood this very deeply.
That made a huge impression on me.
What about Kosh?
Well, so Cash is a bit of an unusual story.
I interviewed him.
Actually, if you go on YouTube and look up Cash Patel's Spygate, maybe my last name, if you can spell it, you'll find there's a video we did about three, maybe four years ago, about, we called it Spygate then.
And I was there live when you did it.
It became Russiagate.
And this video, for whatever reason, I think it's up to like 1.3 million views now.
It just keeps getting it since he's been up for FBI director.
But Cash struck me as this really interesting guy that never...
I get people on TV, right?
People kind of blow smoke a little bit.
Not everybody, but there's always...
We fact-check everything we do very deeply, so I know when someone's going a little bit further or just isn't very good on the facts sometimes.
Well, Cash was very good, and he never went beyond what he believed he understood.
And that's rare.
Especially in D.C., people like to bluster a bit, you know?
And so I proposed to him that we start a show together.
And so we did about, I think it's 81 episodes, which is kind of an American thought leader, except Cash is the guest every time, on different topics where he's an expert.
And he actually has quite a few topics, right?
Criminal defense, prosecution, terrorism, counterterrorism, you know, a whole range of deep investigations.
Cash was, by the way, the one who really played the...
Key investigative role of uncovering this whole Russiagate thing.
He figured out how to depose a whole lot of these people that were publicly claiming, yes, I have tons of evidence that Trump is a Russian asset, but when asked the correct questions, unfortunately in a skiff, so this was years before this actually became public,
100% of those people admitted they had zero evidence.
That's what he was able to do.
So anyway...
That was a ton of fun.
And then he became more involved in the campaign.
And we're a 501c3.
We don't take sides.
We don't pick political candidates.
So as he became very, you know, sort of, you know, let's get Trump elected.
We had to pause the show.
And now, if he does get confirmed, probably we won't continue the show because he'll have more important things to be doing.
It's great, though.
I mean, you get to see...
You get to see so much.
And there's so many stories and things that you cover that are so valuable.
Having gotten to know you, you really care about humanity.
You really want to reduce human suffering.
There's so much commonalities in just going about it and the way you go about it in different ways.
So let's jump into a topic that I often don't get into.
Ten years ago...
At least 10 years ago, I interviewed a fallen god, a meditator who was basically captured, thrown in prison, tortured.
I never released the interview, which I had challenges, and I had to make a really tough judgment call saying, huh, I didn't feel there was enough momentum.
Maybe there's something that I can do in the future.
If I release this interview, I'll probably never be able to step foot in China.
Maybe that'll happen now with this interview.
We'll see.
Basically, it's horrible what has been done to so many people and no one knows about it unless they're in the know.
That's not most people.
I know you have been at this for a long time to expose some of these horrific Things that are happening to people.
So, you know, some stats here at the moment.
Communist China's murder for organs industry, estimated to be valued at $9 billion annually, continues.
So I'm going to ask you about how does it work?
So can you explain how the organ harvesting industry in China operates?
Like, who are the people being targeted?
Why is this practice still ongoing despite international condemnation?
It's happening.
Explain this, because I think some people would be like, what are you talking about?
Is this real?
Yeah, I know, and I still come across people that have...
I remember there was a film called Coma years ago that was kind of in this vein.
Another film called The Island, which is more of a sci-fi thing with some really A-list actors.
But yeah, so once you become a public enemy in communist China, there's...
Whatever vestige of your humanity was left, from the perspective of the regime, you're just material.
And that's actually written in a few places.
It's a very weird, twisted way to look at things, but basically there was this huge effort to demonize these people in the eyes.
By the way, Falun Gong practitioners, very healthy.
People had the kind of experiences that I did.
It's non-violent.
They kind of felt like it would be an easy target.
In communist regimes, there's always an enemy.
To keep everyone in line, making sure they don't become that.
So they had to kind of convince the populace that these people are evil.
Because it's hard to turn in your neighbor when they seem like a decent person.
There's this whole kind of demonization campaign that happens.
And when that happens, and then there's this piece of, you know, you're no longer, your humanity isn't really worth anything anymore.
I think some very evil person, and I have a theory about who this is, but I'm not going to say because I don't have evidence, but came and thought, hey, listen, we can monetize this.
You know, we just put a million people in the labor camps and prisons, right?
At least.
I mean, we don't know the exact numbers, right?
And these people are very vulnerable, too, because they're not telling their...
They're not giving up their names, because if they did, maybe their family member will get taken in and stuff.
So they're kind of keeping quiet.
And meanwhile, they're just starting up their organ industry.
They're just starting to build.
They're starting to learn.
We have all that evidence.
By the way, on this point, I'm not going to be able to give you an exhaustive picture, but there's something called the China Tribunal, the chinatribunal.org.
This group chaired by Sir Geoffrey Nice, who was the...
A guy that prosecuted Slobodan Milosevic back in the day, he created a people's tribunal where they assessed all the evidence around this, and they found definitively that this is happening.
You can check out the evidence for yourself, because I'm not going to be able to give you the whole picture here in its entirety.
But the bottom line is that, well, listen, if I told you that I could schedule a heart transplant, would you believe me?
Right?
You would have to know when someone would be dead.
To schedule that, right?
I think it was 2005 or 2006, Yakub Lavi, he was the head of the Israeli Transplant Association, his patient was tired of waiting for a heart.
And he told him, hey, I've got an opportunity in China.
And the Israeli, they have socialized medicine, so they would pay for, you know, the necessary operations.
And Yakub said, you know, child of Holocaust survivors, no way this is possible.
But the guy goes, gets the heart, comes back.
He got it.
I just got it done.
Scheduled as promised, right?
And Jakob realized there's something horrible.
So this is just one example of an anecdote that gave us a hint that this kind of stuff is happening.
There's no ethical scenario where that could have happened.
There were allegations that there was a camp where people were being held.
Turns out there was a lot of camps with hospitals associated with them.
And so what happens is, as the Falun Gong persecutions begins in 1999, The whole organ transplant industry in China skyrockets, and Chinese hospitals are advertising in America, all over Asia, Taiwan, Seoul,
all these places, but also in America, we can get you a new heart, new kidney, new liver in a couple of weeks.
Two weeks, right?
That is very attractive to people.
That have been waiting for years for an organ, and they can't get it, because in a civilized society, you have to find the right match, it has to be the right size, and someone has to have an accident and not be entirely dead, just brain dead, right?
Because if you can't transplant from a cadaver, at least most organs.
So, you know, people started doing this, and they would tell those people that it was a death row prisoner that was being used, because there's actually people that went in and tried to investigate this, is what they were told.
And we're talking something like 60,000 to 100,000 transplants a year since the early 2000s.
Still going on.
Still going on.
And what's really interesting, there was this New York Times reporter named Didi Tatlow, who I would always have the deepest respect for.
She was a Hong Konger.
Looks like an Irish girl.
But she speaks perfect Mandarin.
She went to a meeting with the head of the Chinese CDC, Huang Zhefu.
I think that's his name.
And he was just announcing that we stopped our practice of sourcing from prisoners.
And some doctors go up to him, and she's there, and starts saying, hey, really?
We stopped sourcing from prisoners?
When was that?
And so she hears this.
And the way I read it anyway, And she's a very, very humble person.
But she got the story, just the idea that this could be happening into the New York Times.
And this was a big deal because if it's in the New York Times, it has some gravity.
At least that was the case back then.
But then she got kind of pushed out from the look to my eye, even though I don't know if she would say that exactly.
So I might add, the New York Times, I have to mention this, since 2001, They were actually blocked in China.
And Salzberger and a team of his editors went to China, interviewed Jiang Zemin.
And since that time, on this issue, and Jiang Zemin was obsessed with this Falun Gong question, he was the one that started this whole persecution.
Since that time, the New York Times has not done a single reasonable story on the question since 2001.
Just FYI.
This is the broader picture.
In the American Journal of Transplantation, I sent this to Joe a couple of years back, there's a paper titled, Execution by Organ Procurement.
These two researchers went into the Chinese scientific literature, and this is by no means an exhaustive search.
They found 72 instances where the dead donor rule was violated.
In other words, and the way I read this, what that means is that the method of that person was Killed or died was by the organ extraction itself.
And to me that means that this whole thing has become so normalized among the transplant surgery in the country that the people doing the research don't even realize that what they're doing is unethical.
And this is the problem when you allow this sort of thing to happen.
And by the way, we train in America and Canada, all sorts of countries, we train some of those surgeons.
And it continues today.
Why?
Because there's been absolutely no meaningful pushback.
In the last few years, there's been a few states, I think four off the top of my head, that have passed legislation that says insurance will not cover transplant costs if you did it in China.
Four states only thus far.
And there was other legislation in this vein, federal legislation, that might have made it, but just kind of didn't make it at the last minute in the last Congress.
So I imagine they'll reintroduce it.
This year, and try again.
But it was very simple, just like, yes, this exists, and let's sanction the people that are involved in it, you know, that kind of thing.
But that's where we're at.
Yeah, so let's talk about, you know, so who are the people being targeted?
So Falun Gah, meditators, how's that happened?
And so the bigger thing is they had to first start a propaganda campaign, and they had to create, they had to first identify who are the people.
How do you put them in the situation?
I mean, I can't even imagine the evilness of who architects and masterminds this sort of thing.
But this is heavy propaganda, and even what you just said, people not even realizing what they're doing is unethical.
How does this happen, from your perspective?
In any sort of genocide, I've studied this extensively, because I was trying to...
You know, understand it myself, especially in the early years.
I did seminars on this.
But any genocidal-type behavior, you can debate whether it's genocide, right?
We've established that what's happening to the Uyghurs, what the Chinese regime is doing to the Uyghurs, is actual genocide.
What that means is that destruction, deliberate destruction in the whole of a part or of a group of people.
And with the intent to destroy, right?
So the debate, this is the irony.
When you look at this China tribunal thing, I'll just mention this.
They had some discussion about whether it's genocide or just crimes against humanity, which, of course, would be enough, right?
But because of the profit motive, right?
So if the motive is profit and not the deliberate destruction of Falun Gong practitioners, then it's just crimes against humanity, not genocide.
Genocide is very specific, and that's why I really hate to hear that word used in the construct of Gaza and so forth.
What's happened to the Gazans is terrible.
Calling it genocide is not right because it reduces the value of that term.
It's one of the worst things human beings can do to each other.
Total eradication of a group of people.
They targeted the Falun Gong first because they were easy targets, and there were a ton of them, and they were already designated as enemies of the state, and they just pushed that demonizing propaganda.
If you believe that, in this atheistic society, it's easier for surgeons to do this.
Could not participate in this kind of medical activity, but obviously people do.
But actually, one of the earliest whistleblowers was a woman whose husband was having nightmares and confessed to her that he had been extracting 2,000 corneas from people.
That was years ago.
I just remember I haven't talked about that in ages.
But really, really, really extreme stuff.
But really, it doesn't specifically need to be Falun Gong practitioners.
And the fact that because the international community did not address this at all for so many years, it looks like they've shifted to the Uyghurs now because they have likewise the same intention of wiping out that as it's been established.
You know how hard it is to get the State Department to issue a designation of genocide?
That was an unbelievably difficult lift, right?
There's so much extreme resistance to that ever happening.
They did it the last day.
I think they did it the last day of Trump 45, right?
But it's very serious, right?
So if we don't deal with these kinds of extreme human rights violations, the idea of genocide, the concept is it's supposed to be never again, right?
It's the Holocaust that taught us that.
So if you don't actually act on that, You get Rwanda.
You get situations like this.
If there's one place where the international community should work together, I would say it's around these sorts of really extreme human rights violations situations.
And now we have another extremely vulnerable group, much smaller than Falun Gong.
I think it's 12 million Uyghurs.
And from what I've heard, there's situations where there's...
Hospitals and prisons being built right beside each other, right?
And I don't know of specific evidence of individuals with Uyghurs, but one thing that was really remarkable in the last few years is that there's actually a survivor of this organ harvesting that actually lived to tell the tale, and I never,
ever thought we would ever see one.
The whole thing was so incredible to me, but the guy has a 14-inch gash in his side, and he took part of his liver and part of his lung.
And the scans show it, and he exists.
And by multiple miracles, like many Holocaust survivors, and I've spoken with many, they all have these stories where certain death, oh, but I took a slightly different direction.
Certain death, oh, yeah.
And in the end, you made it to the end.
This guy has that same kind of story.
He's alive to tell it.
And he's not even such a great witness, to be perfectly honest, but he exists.
This happened to him, and he's a living, living proof.
The smoking gun.
How do you pronounce his name?
Cheng Peming.
Peming?
Yeah.
Okay, where's he at right now?
It's a little bit quiet because they have an intent, from what we know, they've been trying to lure him back to China in various ways, and there's orders to kill him, from what we hear.
I mean, again, I can't...
And there's videos of him now, because I've seen the videos.
There's this guy named David Matus, a Canadian human rights lawyer.
He was kind of tracking down some of the last Nazi war criminals in Canada.
This has been his issue for the last however many years.
He called it an evil yet to be seen on this planet.
One of my most recent interviews on this issue is with him, talking about his interviews with him and how he understood, how he explains all the...
There's craziness around this guy even being alive and also some of his own testimony.
So I would recommend checking that out.
I can send that to you.
Maybe you can send it to your list.
Totally.
It's not just this issue that I cover, by the way, but it's the issue that I've been probably most knowledgeable on.
I've been covering it for 20 years, almost.
What's fascinating to me about this, because there's so many things we could talk about and that you talk about and that you cover.
The thing that's fascinating for me is that...
How someone has to view another human with a total disregard of even them being human, of the same species.
What sort of, call it brainwashing, what sort of, you know, I mean, I spoke to, Dr. Jamie Hope connected me early on when I first met her with a podcast that goes out to a 50,000
emergency room.
Doctors and physicians and nurses, trauma doctors and nurses.
And so they're seeing the worst of the worst in emergency rooms.
And I was the first non-doctor that they ever interviewed.
I'm not a doctor.
And one of the things I started talking about was about how to view an addict.
Because what do you do when you see someone that is a drunk driver or someone that is...
Hurt themselves or hurt others as a result of being intoxicated under the influence and how doctors, if you're around pain all the time, they have, you know, compassion fatigue.
You know, what happens is you just see all of the people in pain and you have to numb yourself to it.
Now, when you start killing someone for their organs and someone is doing that and someone knows it's happening and then it's like, what the hell?
So, like, I don't know if you ever read the book Blitzed, Drugs in the Third Right.
There's a couple of films made about Nazi Germany before that book was written.
One was called High Hitler, H-I-G-H, and then another one was called Hitler's Secret Drug Habits, which you can watch those on YouTube.
And Nazi Germany invented crystal meth, and they called it, I believe, perpetine.
And Hitler, there's evidence from his doctor that he was taking it.
Almost daily.
A whole cocktail of stuff, vitamins and drugs.
To allow yourself to do these inhuman things.
Exactly.
And so they were given the whole German army, most of them were being given methamphetamines daily because they would eat less, they would be more aggressive, they would sleep less.
So sleep, food and aggression are very important.
To deal with when you are sending people out to kill other people.
And then long-term exposure, which was discovered many years later, to crystal meth removes empathy.
So, so much of the ability to do these, what we would consider inhuman things, is because they zap their empathy through the constant drugs.
And I think if you were to look at any wars going on anywhere right now, they're probably feeding a lot of methamphetamines.
It's interesting because Nazi Germany also created MDMA.
And so what I look at is what the hell do you have to do from propaganda or to the system, the nervous system, to shut off the caring about others at a societal level?
So I look at the whole big picture of that's the effect, but what the hell is happening and how do we...
How do we, what needs to happen to change it?
Because you're on an educational and exposure mission, which you've been for years, and these are some of the most peaceful people, the Falling God meditators.
They don't drink, they don't smoke, they're in good physical shape, so of course they're going to target them because they're in a state where they can get their organs, and then they put them in prison, and it's just like, it's...
You raise something very important, right?
They are not susceptible to being drugged up this way.
That's very interesting.
I hadn't really thought about that.
That's something to explore.
You can't change their psychology very easily.
They're very committed.
This is part of the reason why this persecution escalated so much because they imagined by using these unbelievably coercive methods they could basically destroy these people.
They didn't want to necessarily kill them.
They just wanted to break them.
But it turned out very hard to break.
Right?
Yeah.
This could actually be part of the reason that's very thoughtful.
Yeah, and I try to look at the lens of...
I look at addiction through the lens of pain.
You know, I think addiction is a solution to pain, and people are just trying to get out of pain.
But it doesn't really get them out of pain in the moment it does, because addiction works in the moment.
But I think we're culturally addicted to war.
I read a book years ago called...
War is the force that gives us meaning about how we're culturally addicted to war.
There's a dopamine hit.
And so I look at the pandemic through the lens of addiction.
I look at a lot of these, what I would consider people doing evil things as being severely addicted, and they're hurting people as a result of it.
So you've got this deep underlying, desperate, you know, societal human pain, and some people...
Address it by healing, others healing themselves, and others just perpetuate war, internal and external wars.
It's a really bizarre thing to me.
You know, something was said earlier, I think, by your perennial coach over there.
Mr. Sullivan?
Mr. Sullivan, that communism kind of fosters anti-humanism.
Maybe I'm embellishing a little bit here.
That's exactly right.
This is one of the big challenges that we have, actually.
From the perspective of the Chinese regime, they're also very supremacist.
People describe it as Han supremacist or something.
They view any Chinese, it doesn't matter whether they're in America or wherever, as they own them.
This is why they...
How they're trying to lure this survivor.
They view it differently.
They look at them like pets, probably, huh?
Basically, never mind that it's a threat, but just people that aren't particularly a threat, right?
But now if you become a threat, almost any method can be used.
And so I mentioned how we were...
You know, Epoch Times has been kind of under attack by the regime.
You know, we published a book called The Nine Commentaries on the Communist Party.
I recommend reading it.
It was this, like, fiery expose on the realities of communism in China, the first one written by Chinese for themselves.
It has always been Westerners that had written these things.
In a day, it became the number one banned book in China, right?
And they also started this movement to quit the Communist Party.
This is also very interesting because it wasn't like you had to do it publicly, although you could if you wanted to.
It was more like people would go and say, listen, here's the reality.
If you believe what's in this book or if you've had family that's been persecuted, just quit the party.
You can do it quietly.
We'll set up an encrypted database for you to put your name down.
Then years down the line, when things change, you'll be able to say, I did that.
With communism, it's almost like we have a...
A book called The Specter of Communism is ruling the world as well.
That's kind of an interesting translation.
It almost is like a kind of weird thing which possesses your mind, if you will.
It's a very particular ideological way of thinking.
I think that's part of what allows for some of these incredibly inhuman things to happen in every communist society that exists.
But that gets extended because they have this view that whatever is overseas is kind of ours.
I'll give you an example.
I think I mentioned this earlier.
The Epoch Times Chinese had 60% of the Chinese market for cars at one point in America.
It was the largest independent Chinese language media in the world by a long shot.
If you wanted to sell those ads, if you wanted to go to, I won't say which, but a large car company, National, they would be, we're here, whatever you want, how much do you want?
It's an easy contract to get if you have 60% of the market.
However, what they figured out is they have to pre-bank this reality that someone from the Chinese government was going to come to them and say, You should not work with these people because they're against China and they're hurting the feelings of the Chinese people.
So now, in your equation, if you're the person who's doing the ads, you have to decide, do I really want the Chinese government against my company?
Do I want that exposure?
Let's just say they lost a lot of business.
There were still some that did it, right?
But they had to tell people ahead of time.
And so, you know, the thing that was...
Really most terrible, in a way, is that when we became kind of well-known for publishing these counter-narrative reporting on, say, Russiagate and a whole bunch of other things that followed, because so many media in our country became not truth-seeking,
and we could discuss why that happened, but more kind of what I call narrative enforcement arms.
It's like, you know, Americans started attacking us, right?
And we got all these hit pieces, you know, in 2018, NBC comes after us, you know.
This is the thing that drives me insane, okay?
They took the CCP's talking about us.
They couldn't attack us because we are very good on the facts.
Just like I fact-check all my episodes.
Like, everything we've done has aged, as they say, aged very well.
Can't really attack us.
What did they do?
They attacked the Falun Gong.
They say, oh, these guys are actually just some kind of weird.
Weird thing.
Maybe cultish.
And this is how you demonize people over time.
So that's the narrative that they create against you guys.
100%.
And not just us.
Against Shen Yun.
How many of you here have seen Shen Yun?
So if you haven't, please, please see Shen Yun at your earliest opportunity.
If you've seen it, you know why.
Talk to your friends about it, okay?
It's a beautiful show.
Traditional Chinese dance.
It was almost destroyed during the Cultural Revolution in China.
In upstate New York, they created a dance school.
And over years, they built basically eight companies with full Western mixed with Chinese orchestras that travel the world.
A million audience a year.
This is it.
Thank you very much.
It's S-H-E-N-Y-E-N.com.
And this year, what's been happening with Shen Yun?
Bomb threats against theaters.
Death threats against dancers.
Lawfare of a whole variety of sorts.
They even tried to bribe IRS officials.
These people actually got charged and found guilty and they're in jail.
They tried to bribe IRS officials to basically take away the tax-exempt status of Shen Yun.
And now there's kind of crazy lawfare happening.
Actually, this is something I wanted to mention.
In 2003...
Out of the Sun Tzu tradition, Sun Tzu, you're familiar with the art of war?
They developed something called the Three Warfares.
Three Warfares is psychological warfare, public opinion warfare, and lawfare, or legal warfare.
And this was the method that they're going to basically go after whatever they perceive to be problematic in the West.
So since 2003, this has been the People's Liberation Army's Tactics, if you will, of attack.
Because a lot of this is about attacking.
You know, Xi Jinping has called the People's War Against America.
I don't know how many people know this, but publicly he says, we are in a People's War Against America for some years now, right?
These are some of the tactics.
So what do they do?
They do lawfare, lawfare against the Epoch Times, lawfare against Shen Yun, lawfare against basically anything remotely...
You know, that's damaging to them.
Anything that's effective, I mean, basically, is what they dislike the most.
But that's kind of the reality.
And what we learned recently through a dissident in Australia, who still has links in their high-level context, is that they elevated in the last year, they elevated this whole...
Destroy the Falun Gong, destroy Epoch Times thing to the level of the Minister of State Security.
And that's why there's this kind of barrage of attacks through all three warfares in the media.
And the New York Times most recently actually has written, I think it's like 12 articles in five months trying to demonize exactly this show.
So if there's any reason why you should go see it, it's because the New York Times is trying to...
I mean, it's really sad.
The way I read it, right, is that there's people who, you know, and I feel responsible in a way because there's people that didn't like what the Epoch Times was doing, telling the truth when it was extremely inconvenient for people telling a lot of falsehoods.
And the Chinese regime saw that and said, hey, three warfares, baby, here we go.
We have these willing tools, fellow travelers, right?
That's how I read it.
That's my opinion.
You know, you can read it as you see fit.
There's some awful things going on in the world, and I really admire people that try to help it, try to stop it in spite of massive resistance.
And there's so many media channels that have been bought off, paid off, co-opted, captured.
Like USAID, when Bobby...
Was in his speech yesterday when he got confirmed.
His father, was it his father that started USAID, right?
His uncle.
His uncle, okay.
And how it's been captured.
If I can comment on that very briefly.
There's something very important, right?
USAID, obviously huge issues, right?
We know that.
We have some of the receipts.
Huge issues, right?
What the Chinese regime is doing is they're saying, what they're broadcasting to them, to everybody, basically, is they're saying, look, look how corrupt America is.
Look how bad they are.
Look how evil they are.
Some Americans even kind of buy into this, right?
It's not true, right?
It's not true.
Aren't there huge systemic problems?
Hells yeah.
That's from a film.
Yeah, huge problems, right?
The thing that they don't have, that the regime doesn't have, is legitimacy.
Their whole construction is around trying to confer legitimacy for themselves by taking it away from what remains the freest country in the world for people, and is actually trying to deal with its problems and be transparent.
They're going to use it to say, oh, look how horrible America is, and look how great we are.
So I hope there's some way to, aside from Epoch Times, trying to explain that reality, yes, there's huge problems.
This is actually a testament, the fact that this is happening with USAID.
It's a testament to the success of this system, not the other way around, which is how they're going to sell it.
It's a huge narrative battle happening right now.
And I think it's very important that we play a good part in it, because some Americans buy into it.
I'm very concerned about it, because they haven't seen what real evil looks like, frankly, which is what we've been talking about today, right?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
And I mean, look, the reason I wanted to talk about this topic out of all the others is, I think, how many of you until now had no idea about this?
Just had no clue?
How many of you were aware?
Okay, yeah.
Epoch Times subscribers?
No.
So, how does one subscribe to the Epoch Times?
I'm going to come back and ask you about DC, and we're going to do Q&A.
We'll do some questions from you.
Theepochtimes.com.
There's a big subscribe button.
Yeah.
And by the way, you know, we did a very, very extensive audit recently.
Not that our cash flows are very difficult to track, but because of some of this lawfare to protect ourselves.
We are 95% funded by individual subscribers.
That's where our money comes from.
A little bit from larger donors, maybe 2% to 3%.
A little bit from advertising, 2% to 3%.
But mostly, and I think that makes us by far the most independent news organization in this country, like by a margin, I would guess.
That's great.
Really, that's awesome.
So please subscribe.
And that would not be happening if the people did not like what you do.
100%.
One more thing, okay?
Our biggest problem, and someone asked me about this earlier.
I really thought about it.
It's because we've been so attacked by, you've started with NBC, New York Times, whatever.
Name your narrative enforcement legacy media type that did this.
We're actually very reasonable.
We're right of center, but we're very reasonable.
We don't even like attacking people very much.
We try to present information in ways that almost anybody could accept, right?
And I think we do.
I think a whole lot of people would be reading if it wasn't for slander and exactly this public opinion warfare, media warfare type stuff out of the three warfares.
If you want to know, as a media, I think our biggest challenge is to just let people...
We're kind of normal.
We just cover stuff that other people won't cover for some reason.
And you should read us because you'll get good information, right?
So I was going to ask you, as senior editor, your job is to edit.
Your job is to determine what stays in and the harder thing of what to keep out, right?
And you also...
You are extraordinarily prolific.
You cover a lot of things.
You talk to a lot of people.
I think your brain is fascinating.
I've had conversations with you telling me about stuff going on in the world from the food supply to fascinating things I had no idea about that I'm not reading anywhere, right?
So you're always trying to find information to share with people.
What do you read?
How do you fuel your knowledge, your education, and know what for you?
To pay attention to and what not to.
Because I think one of the greatest ways to save time is to quit living in an echo chamber and reading stuff you already agree with, that you already know to be true, but it keeps that dopamine hit of like, oh, I hate Republicans, I hate Democrats, whatever.
Well, you already know that.
So do you need more news on that?
To expand ourselves versus contract ourselves, how do you take in information?
There's so much of it.
Just as a small aside, The way the media business model works today is by validating people's preconceived notions, exactly what you just said, right?
And this presents a very big problem for media that want to do something different like us because there's less.
It just doesn't work as well as the business model.
And your marketing team, because you guys are like genius marketers all here, literally, right?
100K genius marketers.
Your marketing team's always going to try to market the content that works, which is the stuff that's going to be validating people's preconceived notions.
But you're like, hey, but we want to actually reach the people who don't already have the notion.
We want to educate.
This is part of the purpose.
So if anyone has ideas on how to have a successful business model that doesn't involve validating people's preconceived notions, which is what almost every media does today that is successful financially.
I would love to hear about it.
Because that is something that has not been figured out.
And we need it.
And I worry if it goes the other way, we're going to have a huge problem.
Because we can't talk to each other.
We have such different ideas.
We're going to fight each other.
You just talked about another one of my favorite topics.
That's why I had to jump in.
How do I decide?
Well, first of all, people send me.
You should see my office.
I have stacks of books everywhere.
We've got a lot going on there.
I've come to find that there's...
I look for people who are, you know, sort of experts in areas.
And one example of this actually would be Dr. Robert Malone.
Some of you might be familiar with him.
So he's a good friend.
We did a show together.
He's great.
But Robert, the thing about him that I really like is that, of course, he's, you know, he arguably...
He developed the technology for mRNA vaccines, and a lot of people have a lot of opinions about that, pro and con, and he's kind of not happy about the way it's being used.
But his area of interest, right, he's a medical doctor, his area of interest is very broad, and he became most interested in...
It's the psychological warfare that we've been talking about and actually protecting ourselves against it.
It's a very broad range of issues.
I've sought out people like Robert who are experts in the field because I know I can go to him for certain topics but also have this expansive level of interest.
Joe, you have a very broad area of interest as well.
Of course, marketing, I don't know how many people are better than you.
I'm not an expert on this, but my point is I try to surround myself with people who are like that, who are both a subject matter expert, so to speak, but also have this broader interest.
So I'm always getting these, hey, did you see this?
Check this out.
We're even in a little group of about five people that does this with Casey Fleming.
I saw someone in here also has him on.
Yeah, we had him come to Genius Network.
Casey is one of these people who understands the China threat extremely well.
I would recommend inviting him often.
Yeah, we're on a thread together.
It's great, though, because you have these, as you say, subject matter experts that just present you with stuff that just cuts through all the crap and says, here's what's going on.
Yeah, so that helps me a lot.
And a lot of it is just, you know...
Sometimes just digging a bit.
I'll do it.
I'll say I use X a lot.
I find there's a lot.
You can fall into echo chambers on X, but there's a ton of varied information on there.
Except you don't want to get into just...
I think I'm a little addicted, to be perfectly honest.
I think that's the one thing I have a bit of an addiction to.
No, you're in the news business, though.
I mean, I could understand that.
It's just sourcing what's going to give you the awareness that you need.
Okay, I hope you found that video awesome and useful.
So if you want to get a free copy of my book, I want you to click here.
And if you want to watch some more videos that will be useful and awesome, click here.
Go ahead.
Get her over here.
Do it now.
Come on.
Thank you.
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