Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: Sure. Hi, everyone. Welcome to the 326th episode of objectively speaking. I'm Jag, CEO of the Atlas Society, joining you from Naples, Florida. I'm very excited to be joined by Jan Yakelik from the Epoch Times to talk about his new book, Killed to China's Organ Harvesting Industry and the true nature of America's Biggest adversary. Jan, thank you for joining us,
[00:00:31] Speaker B: jag. I'm thrilled to be here. Thank you.
[00:00:34] Speaker A: So, Yan, tell us a little bit about how you first became interested in the persecution of the Falun Gong in China. This is quite personal for you, isn't?
[00:00:45] Speaker B: Absolutely is. And I actually was in a situation. So I, like, I had a number of kind of career shifts that were substantial in my life. Okay. And at one point, I was actually studying, well, on my way studying to be an evolutionary biologist.
And what happened was the last time I came back from Madagascar, you see, I was studying lemurs. You know, I'm just not going to throw that in so casually, but I would. I would work and I would collect these DNA samples from the animals in the field in Madagascar. And I had a lab in Edmonton, Alberta, you know, kind of the cattle province or the oil province in Canada that many will be familiar with.
And the last time I came back, I ended. I started getting kind of ill and I ended up. It turned out that I had something called Guillain Barre Syndrome. And this is like this weird autoimmune disease where your body turns on itself and starts attacking you.
Your nervous system, specifically your immune system, attacks your nervous system and you lose control of your body. And that's what happened. And so a lot of this fine work that I needed to do, like you were pipetting, there's all this lab desk work that you're doing. I couldn't do that anymore. And also I was like, slow, tired.
It was a mess. And it really killed my career. It ended my career.
And it was at this point that I started trying to figure out, what am I going to do with myself? Because this doesn't look good, right?
And I met this guy who had had chronic fatigue syndrome. It's funny that I'll just mention a funny thing from.
From the Fountainhead, okay, Because we're talking to the Ellis Society here.
When I read the Fountainhead as a kid, the thing that I remember most right is there's them smoking for some reason, right?
And just these moments after probably the most controversial scene in Fountainhead, and there's the smoking anyway, and everyone probably that's watching knows what I'm talking about, but I was also into smoking in the same sort of romanticized way at the time. And the guy that I met, actually we met, we would talk film at a coffee shop in Edmonton called the Sugar Bowl.
And this is where this guy told me I had something called chronic fatigue syndrome.
And this unusual type of slow motion exercise system and meditation really helped me. And you should check it out because it was. Might help you too.
So. And I decided I would give it a shot. And what it was was something called Falun Gong.
And I didn't know most people have heard of Falun Gong in the context of a very persecuted group in China, for example, but I didn't know much about it. I was very focused on biology in Madagascar and so forth. And so I just kind of tried it on a lark to see, you know, I had this grainy VCD that I, that I watched and I started mimicking the movements and it made me feel a little better. So I committed. I'm going to work on this every day. I'm going to do a little bit by bit. And to make a long story short, two months go by, I have my stat appointment. I had an arrangement with the hospital that things went downhill. I would check myself back in, but they weren't. I was getting better. And I. So I went for my SAT appointment with my neurologist and she basically told me, you're in complete remission.
Congratulations.
I will never forget it.
You're in complete remission. Congratulations. Whatever it is you're doing, keep doing it.
And that's.
And I already knew I felt well, but I just. To get. It was this kind of bizarre validation right. From the medical field.
And it was incredible. And. And I only then really started trying to understand what is it that I was doing. Okay. And so Falun Gong is this ancient meditation, kind of qigong practice. You can think of it like a yoga, but there's also principles that you live. Truthfulness, compassion and tolerance. Those are the core principles.
And so mind and body working together and spirit. Right. And I don't know how many people watching believe in spirit or not, but the idea is mind, body and spirit all work together, right? And that you need to be kind of healthy in each area to be healthy and happy and flourish and so forth. Okay.
And so I just, at this point, I was already healthy, but I was starting to learn about it. But the big thing I learned, and this was this moment that, this was the kind of the pivotal moment that actually really shifted my life.
This woman was a postdoc at the university.
She was like a chemical engineering postdoc or something like this. And her mother had just escaped from China. This woman had been persecuted in horrible ways. She had been tortured. Okay. And, and I was, you know, in the room, she was just explaining what had happened to her in this, you know, small group of Falun Gong practitioners at the University of Alberta.
And, and she was explaining, you know, and I was like, so why did they do this to you? You always have to think like, there must be some reason, right? Why? Why? What did you do? Right? And she said, well, they gave me this piece of paper. And the piece of paper basically said, you know, I renounce Falun Gong. I acknowledge it's evil or something like this. I'll never do it again. And I promise to re educate others because they have this program of coercively, you know, basically all communist societies. And I'm sure viewers here will be familiar with this, have this program of. There's an out group. There's a group that they target as a kind of a black class. That's their language. And they try to re educate that group, to transform it, to break them. These people often. There's many reasons. We could talk about that a bit more, but I didn't fully understand this. See, my parents had escaped communist Poland in the 70s. I knew communism was bad. You know, I didn't need to be taught that. But I didn't. Like, I didn't grasp it. I grew up in a very free society. This was before the safety ism had set in. You know, this is. I grew up in Canada in the 70s and 80s and I lived. You know, I basically almost did what I wanted. My parents are sort of, you know, tangentially there.
But this moment, this bolt shot through me and I just understood, as this woman was explaining to me, wait a second. You have done nothing wrong.
You have done nothing wrong. The only thing you've done is you've refused to be coerced by this evil communist system.
Why would the system demand that you transform your mind?
And if you don't, they're gonna torture you. And then there's an unwritten rule that Falun Gong deaths in prisons are gonna be considered suicides.
Because these people are known to be difficult to break, to transform, as they called it. I hate that word. But so anyway, I just thought, okay, this is how I'm gonna give back.
I'm gonna help these people somehow. I'm gonna figure out some way, right? And that's what pulled me into the human Rights field for a number of years. And it led me to Epoch Times, because Epoch Times was one of the very few media at the time that would actually had an honest view of China. Right. There was this weird narrative at the time, and the narrative was, we're going to democratize China. China is liberalizing through all the money and know how that we're putting in there. And this, almost everyone believed this. This was left, right? Republican, Democrat, maybe Libertarian, I don't know.
But most people, I would say 95% of people believe this. And I knew that this was a big lie because they were literally killing people for exercising what we call First Amendment rights. Okay. They were killing people for that, for the most fundamental protection of. From government that we have in this country. So that was not a liberalizing society, that was a sham. So that, that's actually what, in a way, pulled me into journalism because I realized we have a lot of work to do here. We
[00:08:46] Speaker A: have
[00:08:46] Speaker B: to, like, explain to this huge group of people, and many of them very well intentioned, by the way, you know, not, not hostile at all, but, but they really believe this. And you have to say, like, no, it's gonna, it's gonna go very badly for you if you start making friends with people that are totalitarians.
[00:09:03] Speaker A: Yeah. So let's. Let's talk about your book, Killed to Order. And also we can put the website killedtoorder.com and all of the chats. It investigates what one of the most disturbing allegations about the Chinese Communist Party, that people, specifically prisoners of conscience, are being killed for their organs. How did you first come encounter this story and what convinced you that it was credible enough to pursue?
[00:09:33] Speaker B: So the idea that this was happening on a small scale, we already knew about it back in 1998, before I was even thinking about China. Right. There was a hearing held in Congress, I believe Congressman Chris Smith held it, that looked at a scenario where a young Chinese soldier was used as an organ donor for an older officer.
Okay. And so we knew that this kind of thing could happen. We knew, you know, for the people that understood how communism works, we knew that it's logical in the system and the way they, they kind of, they're very utilitarian in their view of human beings, especially the ones that aren't party members, let's say. Okay. So we knew that's possible, but the idea that it's happening at scale, that was a whole different thing. Okay. And we, I started hearing rumblings about this in the early 2000s. This is now when I'm getting involved, but quite frankly it's. So if, when I, you may want me to explain how it works at some point, but when you can see, just conceiving of what's happening is really horrifying, frankly. And I think, you know, you just, it's very natural for most normal sane human beings to be like, ah, no, that's science fiction. And in fact there is that. There are few science fiction books and movies that people often allude to when they hear about this. But, but
[00:10:55] Speaker A: yeah, I mean, you describe the challenge of gaining broader awareness of these evil practices is that these, the horrors described by escaped dissidents aren't, quote, aren't easily absorbed by the rational mind. Could you talk a bit about the cognitive barriers that early on weren't even an impediment for you?
[00:11:21] Speaker B: So I'd say there's kind of two things that, and this is, you know, I've thought about this a lot, right. This is, you know, reading Viktor Frankl, reading all sorts of psychology. I actually wrote quite a bit early on about why people don't respond to atrocities or what we call crimes against humanity. This class of very extreme violations.
And there's a few reasons. One of them is, and this is the nicest one, if you will. Okay. But simply, most people are, have a, most people that grow up in normal societies have kind of a natural propensity to expect that people around them will be decent too.
Okay.
That's the best way to describe it. And of course that doesn't happen in failed states, in places where war is the norm and so forth, or in communist societies where, you know, everybody's spying on everybody else. It's kind of part of the system. There's a sort of fundamental sense of distrust that functions.
But that's the first and primary thing I realized. It took me a long time to understand this, right, that we just, it's just, it's out, it's beyond the pale, it's outside of the Overton window of what we are ready to accept.
But there's a second reason. And we encountered this Jan Karski, for example, actually, you know, same name as me, was a Polish nobleman who During World War II, he saw the large scale killing of Jews happening in Germany and Poland. I think in Poland where the Germans had set up the camps and so forth. And he traveled to many places to try to explain that this was happening. And so many people, including in many cases Jewish leaders didn't want to believe him. Okay. And one of the conclusions was that, well, it's one thing that you don't want to believe it, but it's another thing that when you realize that something this extreme is happening, right, either large scale killing or, you know, using people, eliminating a group of people by using them for body parts or whatever, that then you kind of feel like you have to do something.
And that itself is a barrier because now you find a feel this kind of responsibility.
And if, you know, there's this. We have a tendency as human beings to not necessarily want that, okay? Especially in bureaucracies and so forth. And actually, you know, Ayn Rand writes about this recall quite a bit. But
[00:14:04] Speaker A: yeah.
So the Chinese government, of course, denies these allegations.
It alternately claims it's reformed its transplant system.
What refutes that account?
[00:14:20] Speaker B: Can I take a moment before I answer your question? I don't want to avoid it because I'll address it for as long as you like. I just want to kind of paint a picture of what's happening, okay? Because I think like some people hear about it, you sort of imagine some cartel operation that. And by the way, those exist and are horrible, right? Where people pay and a cartel delivers an organ to you and so forth. But, but this is a very different scale. First of all, it's the state doing it, okay? That's one big difference. But it's also industrial and let me kind of paint the picture. So I mentioned earlier, right, how there's these black classes, right, that are always function in communist societies. I'll illustrate this, okay, Just very quickly, the Original Black Class, 1949 Communists take power was the landowners, right? No private property, right? Well, the property becomes the property of the people, right? Really the animals who are more equal than others, to paraphrase Orwell a bit here. But, but, but basically. But there's all these people in society that have property, so they earned it, they, you know, developed it or they inherited it or something, right? They're not going to give it to you just because you say there's no private property right now. So what, what do the communists do? They seize the tools of information dissemination. That's the number one thing that communist parties do when they're starting to take power and they push this mass dehumanizing propaganda out against the target group, in this case landowners. And they say these landowners are evil. They took that land from you. You deserve it, you should have it. You should hold them in contempt. They're actually evil people. They're dangerous people, you should fear them. And over time, this conditions the rest of the society to be kind of at the, at the least, kind of wanting to keep a distance from these people or just that bad things are being done to them. And there's even a small portion of the population that sometimes goes crazy and starts attacking that group too. And so this is a phenomenon. There's been different groups over the years. Landowners, rightists, as they called them, intellectuals in the Cultural Revolution, Students and Democracy movement people in 1989, right? And Falun Gong became the group in 99 that was targeted.
Okay? So this is the background. And remember, there's always this way you can get out, you can kind of, if you genuflect at the altar of the party, if you will, and say thank you for emancipating me from these evil ideas of private property. And I give it to you freely. And all this, you know, you kind of allow yourself to be re educated, you might live, your family might not be harmed too much and so forth. And so the, there's been these movements year after year in this society.
A second piece of the puzzle is how it's done in an ethical society. So here in the US it also has problems, by the way. But if you need a new heart, okay, someone has to have a catastrophic accident.
And that person also needs to have an accident of the sort that you have to be pretty sure they're not coming back from that accident, okay? Because if there's a chance they're going to come back, then you're killing someone, right? And in fact, we're actually seeing. This is one of the problems, you see New York Times op eds where doctors are saying we should, you know, lower the stringency of the dead donor rule, you know, because, because the supply of organs, we don't have enough organs. Because you need these catastrophic accidents. And also, by the way, they need to match, right? So there's blood type and tissue type. If you have a rare blood type, it can be very hard to find an organ because that, that catastrophic accident has to be someone who the size also has to match. There's all these things that have to match, right?
And so the bottom line is, okay, it's rare to find the perfect match for you. There's a whole waiting list of people and there's an algorithm of sorts these days that determines who kind of gets to the top list and gets the organ, okay, when that, when that organ appears, okay? But in communist China, it's in a way, it's the exact opposite. In a way, it's like the reverse.
And so if I want a new heart in communist China, or if I'm ready to go to communist China to get a new heart, I can get it in two weeks for 150,000 or $200,000, let's say. I don't know the exact going rate right now, but these are some of the numbers that we've seen over the years. Okay, and how is that possible? Right, because there's two things that are happening. One is that that heart transplant is being scheduled, right? So you actually, you don't survive donating a heart. So you know when someone's going to be dead two weeks down the line, that's a huge red flag, right? Because it means you're, you're, you're making someone dead, basically. And the other part is this short wait time. How is it that you're finding that perfect match that'll actually work for the person in such a short time and by the way, two weeks, sometimes it's been done in four hours, like in hours, and sometimes it's longer too, but it's unusually short. People wait months or years in most cases in an ethical transplantation system.
So here's what happened, okay?
When the Chinese Communist Party decided to use Jiang Zemin, the dictator at the time's words, eradicate the Falun Gong, okay, they did the same. They pushed this mass dehumanizing propaganda out into the population. But the Falun Gong did something unusual and they basically, at a significant scale, they refused to be reeducated at a greater scale than any group in the past had at a significantly greater scale. And so what that led to is the party panicking and incarcerating a massive group of people.
It might be a million. I don't know exactly the number, but State Department in 2005 said that half the people in one of these incarceration systems called re education through labor systems, which is now, it's kind of defunct or been shifted into others. But half of the people in that system were Falun Gong. And I believe that it was actually a similar ratio in the broader system itself. So massive numbers of people and then some very evil person got the idea right that hey, wait a second, I know we have this priority to eradicate Falun Gong didn't always mean kill everybody. It just meant you have to break them or re educate them. But if that doesn't work, other methods can be used.
And then also we have a priority to grow our organ industry. And so here there's in this twisted logic of the Communist Party, it's a win win situation.
And so now they've started so they basically started blood typing, tissue typing and organs getting people in the camps themselves where they were keeping them, or the prisons or the black jails or whatnot. And that's how you can get a new organ in two weeks. Because if I come in, I pay my 200 grand, that transaction is made.
The so called donor, a living prisoner of conscience, already incarcerated, ready to be killed to order so that I may live. Okay? And this happens, and I'll give you the scale, okay? And this scale was figured out.
You have to take every statistic out of Communist China with a massive grain of salt, okay? Because it has a primary propaganda purpose. And secondarily with a reality. That's a different question, whether it has anything to do with reality. But 60 to 100,000 transplants a year is the number that three of the heroes of the kind of research around this issue, David Kilgore, David Matis and Ethan Gottman reached in 2015 or 2016. And that was assuming that every hospital that was doing transplants, that we knew for sure was doing transplants, was just doing, had one transplant team doing one transplant a day, which is a very conservative estimate given what we know many of them were doing. But this was like, you know, sort of assuming the minimum throughput that you would expect that would get you to 60,000 a year. And the reality is more significant than that. Okay, so now I've given you a picture, okay, of how this works and how it's different than your run of the mill, also very horrible car cartel operation.
So you want me to. Would you like me to talk about some evidence or.
[00:22:28] Speaker A: No? I mean, I think that is kind of what I wanted to get to is what were the triggers and the clues that made you think something is not adding up and there's something deeply, deeply amiss. Now, one of the most gruesome revelations in the book is how senior Communist Party officials are exploiting this forced transplant pipeline in pursuit of life extension. What are some examples of that?
[00:23:01] Speaker B: This is really crazy. So there was this, I don't know, some of the viewers, you might remember this, okay? But it was. Now it's been over a year ago. I think it was September the previous year.
Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, three dictators, were in Tiananmen Square watching the PLA military parade and they get caught on a hot mic. I don't know how many people remember this. I remember it very clearly because basically my phone was ringing like crazy because people know I work on this issue. But here's what they talked about, okay.
She says to Putin, you know, when we're 70, we're just babies.
And this is. They're Both just over 70, or I think it may be 74 now. But Putin responds, he says, I mean, this is paraphrased, just to be clear, through continual organ transplantation, perhaps we can achieve immortality.
And she responds, our target is 150 years.
And this was another one of these moments where I got kind of hit with a lightning bolt, so to speak, because we had been following, we had been reporting on something called the project, the 981 project, as they call it in China. And this is the Chinese Communist Party's elite longevity project.
And they advertise this project publicly like it's available. We have, we've reported quite a bit on the Epoch Times based on publicly open source materials. They would allege that people live, I think it's 16 years longer that are part of this project. Again, you have to take that with a grain of salt. But directionally, I think it's true. And I always, you know, it's not entirely clear what they do to achieve this, right?
And you know, I imagine like transfusions from young people or, you know, driving drugs, all sorts of stuff.
And I hadn't occurred to me, it hadn't occurred to me, okay, basically that this other thing that I was working on, the exposing the forced organ harvesting industry in China, that these two are so deeply connected
[00:25:01] Speaker A: and
[00:25:02] Speaker B: this is what revealed it, right? So in a way, it was just like I felt a bit dumb, but it was also incredibly important because, you know, like I said, If I have 200 grand, if I'm rich and I have very limited moral boundaries, I can get a new heart if I need it, right, Very quickly. But if I'm a Chinese super elite now, it's in a whole different level because I have basically unlimited organs available to me in perpetuity, right?
Because as long as there's that incarcerated population.
And here's the thing, right? So right around the time you mentioned that they said that they fixed the. Their system, right? Right around the time that they said they fixed their system, and there's a bunch of evidence we could talk about that shows they didn't, but they actually started persecuting a second group of people and did the same process. And this is the Uyghur Muslim people in the northwest of China, what the Chinese call Xinjiang province.
And so this is an ethnically different group. They're different religion, they.
The Communist Party pushes this kind of Han supremacies They're very easy to demonize to other eight, because for these reasons, and the region is very isolated and separate, and most of the people that are Uyghur live there are there. So basically you've got a population of 12 to 14 million, where they turned it into a police state itself. They incarcerated. We think it's north of a million people. But then they also started collecting the data, the genetic and blood data from. From people in their homes to be able to do the typing.
[00:26:37] Speaker A: Yeah, we've covered that. Actually, on the show, there was a book about how the Chinese have perfected the surveillance state by using the Uyghur population and installing surveillance videos inside people's homes. So
[00:26:55] Speaker B: 100%
[00:26:55] Speaker A: going back to we the living and how living under communism makes it just impossible to breathe. To think.
I think the transplant that these leaders over at the CCP need is a conscience transplant. All right, we're going to dip into a couple of questions, and I wanted to forewarn everybody in the audience that Jan, first of all, just got back from Austin. He's got another interview that he's going to be doing directly at the top of the hour. So we are going to let him go a few minutes early. And tonight he's going to Taiwan. So.
[00:27:32] Speaker B: And. And do you know why I'm going to Taiwan, by
[00:27:34] Speaker A: the way? Tell us.
[00:27:36] Speaker B: No. So they're publishing my book in Chinese. It's coming out today as we speak. The Chinese translation of the book is coming out in Taipei. So it's a big day.
[00:27:46] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a very big day. Well, congratulations. Okay, I'm going to take a question from Lock, Stock, Barrel. Big question. Have American businesses and politicians been willing to overlook human rights abuses for the sake of economic relationships?
[00:28:01] Speaker B: I think you've hit the nail on the head. That's 100% right. And there's a little bit more to it. Okay. And you can think of it like this, right? And this is.
I'll string together a few different thoughts, okay?
One of the things that Mao called his magic weapon, it's something called the United Front Work Department.
Okay? The United Front Work Department. Imagine it like a department in the government now, like the Education Department, for example, or the Department of War. And one of the best funded. Okay. But its whole purpose is to either subvert or destroy civil society, both within the country, even before the Communist Party was in power, in other groups that it was so called allying itself with. Okay. And also overseas.
So there's this whole approach, kind of soft power Approach of building relationships, of kind of, you know, basically getting your hooks into different types of people through favors, through financial relationships, through good old fashioned honeypots, all of that stuff, okay? And what they figured out at some point, and I have a whole kind of hypothesis about how this exactly happened, but they realized, I think Americans, one of our. And I say our, I'm Canadian on the way to being American, but I think of myself as American.
One of our kind of Achilles heels is that we maybe like money a bit too much, okay?
[00:29:33] Speaker A: And
[00:29:33] Speaker B: what I mean by this, and this can be leveraged, and I think the Communist Party leveraged it.
See, the moment that you started creating cushy financial relationships that maybe weren't so good for some portion of the population, but were very good for, you know, the business relationship, it's a lot harder now, you think now your friends, they know how to wine and dine you very well. They know. They figured out because they're these united front people, they're kind of experts at, you know, the term they would use.
The people that were the sort of the experts of doing this, they would bamboozle the barbarians, right? This was like the Westerners were called the barbarians and would kind of fool them into achieving their goals. And so once. So this basically started really developing in the 90s, the early thousands. And in the 90s, right, we then we gave them permanent trade relations status and we gave them World Trade Organization accession. And they never, ever followed the rules, right? They just kind of used that system against everybody else that was there. But the key part here is when those financial relationships were formed, and I kind of. I have disagreements with people about how much it was the greed of the elite Americans and how much it was the very Sun Tzu war, fighting without firing a shot approach of the Chinese, I think it was more that. But a combination of this was these deep, deep financial relationships. And at this point, when 1989 happens, right, the Tiananmen Square massacre happens, we're supposed to respect human rights.
What we don't know is that Scrollcroft National Security Advisor is going to China and telling them, hey guys, don't worry, we'll ride this out. We know you had a little problem, but it's going to be business as usual.
Because those business relationships had already been secured as early as 1989, right? Or enough of them had been. And it only just kind of skyrocketed from there.
[00:31:35] Speaker A: So you describe Chinese Communist rule as a pathocracy in which psychopaths and those with dark triad personality traits rise to the top. Can you elaborate on that?
[00:31:50] Speaker B: So there's multiple ways to look at it, but the same simplest way is it's not a reality oriented system, it's an adhere to ideology oriented system. Okay. So it's not hard to figure out what you need to say and do to win. And this is frankly a bit similar in what we would call Wokeism as well. Right.
Once you understand what the rules of the game are and you don't mind the morally compromising elements of that.
Right. You can become very successful. And that's kind of the simplest way to describe why communist societies. And this is developed incredibly well in a book called Political Ponerology by Andrzej Wobachevsky.
Kind of a whole story I write about him, explain him. It's not a particularly well, but he, he basically developed this whole idea. But that's the essence of it. The essence of it is when reality isn't the check, but there's some kind of fiction in which you function. But if you follow the rules very carefully, then you'll always be successful.
Adhering to the ideology kind of breeds success that will elevate people who have these antisocial personality traits because they're willing to do that and they're in fact very happy to do that, whereas a lot of kind of normal people won't be and will feel somehow compromised by having to do that.
[00:33:24] Speaker A: Mymoderngal asks, do you see parallels between how Western media downplayed Soviet atrocities and how they cover the CCP's human rights abuses today?
[00:33:36] Speaker B: A whole lot of parallels, yes. And this was the thing like we see, we kind of forgot during the Cold War, up Until the early 90s, there was a lot of clarity, despite there being a lot of softness right, on communism and so forth. And I know probably everybody watching is very familiar with this.
But relative to how we viewed communist China, there was still a lot of clarity that this is a society that is diametrically opposite ours. And actually Ayn Rand was, was incredibly important, I might add, in helping people understand that right. Through a bunch of work, because she had lived it right, and she brought that information home. But somehow through this called the Frankfurt School, I think primarily the influence of these communist intellectuals who realized that they couldn't do the revolution the traditional way because the working man wasn't really interested.
So it was actually quite happy doing things the traditional way, so to say. Especially in America, where you can make your fortune right, and be successful and change your lot in life, they just figured out a different system where they could pit different, in some cases, legitimately disaffected groups against each other or against the system to basically create that same oppressor, oppressed phenomenon which allows communists to take power in the end. So. Yes, I see. And I think your question was sort of about media specifically and similarly to how the Chinese Communist Party managed to figure out how to kind of game us, if you will, with our financial elite and so forth with the media. It's a very, very similar.
Very similar story, in fact. And I just. I find it so fascinating that we. It just, you know, they took advantage of this. Remember, there was Francis Fukuyama, the end of history. There was this whole idea that democracy was the natural endpoint. And it's just things are just going to naturally go there. And we sort of let down our guard. And at that point it was like, yeah, and the Chinese are becoming democracy too. Right. And of course that was ridiculous, but we kind of believed it. And so it was, I think, a combination before between of what we wanted to believe and also just some very effective information warfare, let's say, on the Chinese side.
[00:36:09] Speaker A: So in your book, you connect China's organ harvesting system with its more broad approach to public health, including, of course, the extreme lockdowns during COVID locking people inside their homes. Could you elaborate on that?
[00:36:26] Speaker B: Well, so I actually think I noticed a shift through Covid time about the people being ready to accept this. So, remember we were talking about how it's hard for people to believe it, right. Just on its face.
And I mean, I had conversations with so many people over the years where literally the lights would kind of go out in their eyes when I talked about it too much and they didn't want to hear anymore. Right. But something shifted. And this is actually what kind of got me interested in writing this book and talking about this stuff more again, because, you know, I've been kind of on and off. There were times I was pretty despondent about trying to change anything with it. But I think it was exactly what you said, that there's that. I think it was that phenomenon of watching people being locked, welded into their homes and all sorts of totalitarian policies being actively implemented in this pursuit of this impossible zero Covid goal.
That was part of it. I also think we had a totalitarian streak in our own society. I think we actually looked at Communist China and said, hey, look, they've got it right. We should copy some of that again.
I think everybody here will understand that this is not something we should ever do.
How does it go? You can't trade liberty for safety. It just never works out very well.
And that's a very broad paraphrase.
And I forget which founding father now,
[00:37:54] Speaker A: so I think it was Benjamin Franklin. But people can correct me if I'm wrong.
Talk a little bit. You know, we talked about American corporations and their incentives and their hunger to get a piece of the total addressable market in China, but it doesn't always work out so well for them. Talk about the company segue and what happened to them, how that's kind of a cautionary tale for other companies that are turning a blind eye to these predatory practices.
[00:38:30] Speaker B: Well, thank you for mentioning Segway. So, you know, one of the great sort of carrots, if you will, that the CCP used against us or against American companies is just this idea of the market, right? Like if you can get into Communist China, you'll get access to this massive market.
But there's a whole bunch of reasons why it was extremely unlikely that there was going to be a strong consumer market that would develop in China. And we could discuss that.
That's a whole different episode that we could do. Okay. Segways is a particularly interesting case because basically what they did was. You remember Segways, right? It's this sort of machine that you kind of on two wheels that you kind of ride around on with these handles. It never was particularly commercially viable. It was just you know, kind of a little itself, a little bit of an elite product, I guess.
But what happened was the Chinese Communist Party ended up stealing the technology. They, you know, we. Arguably, they've stole half a trillion to a trillion dollars worth of intellectual property a year for quite a number of years. And those are. And I'm not saying that casually, these are numbers that people have calculated, right. As part of their strategy. Right? Now, we could talk about their dumping strategies, but in this case with Segway, they just simply stole that technology. They built their own company based on that technology, and then they sold that product on the open market at a much discounted rate to the point where Segway was started to go under. And then they bought Segway
[00:40:06] Speaker A: and
[00:40:06] Speaker B: it became part of that company. So that's. I mean, that circle obviously doesn't happen in every case. Right. There's other scenarios where, for example, with steel. Steel is something that's big in Ayn Rand's mind and probably in our viewers minds. And so how did they completely gut the American steel industry? Well, it's not even that complicated as a matter of industrial policy, they basically dumped Steel and dumping just means that you sell at a rate that's actually below cost in many cases for you. Right.
And because it's part of your strategy. And then of course, everyone buys from you because you can get something at such a great price. And then the moment that the last producer or most producers are gone or have shifted to China or something like this, then you raise prices again. Now you've cornered the market.
So that's another strategy that was very common for them.
[00:41:00] Speaker A: So we have about 10 more minutes until I'm going to let you go and catch a moment of a breath before your next interview.
So I wanted to kind of give this, give you an opportunity if there's something that you really wanted to focus the rest of our time on.
But some of my other questions include recent legislation to highlight this problem.
How you think what happened last night in terms of the election is going to either, you know, mean more attention and more focus on this or less.
What do you think?
[00:41:35] Speaker B: Sure. You know, I'm so glad you asked about this because we kind of have a historic opportunity here when it comes to legislation. So I think the first time that this issue was raised in Congress in the form of a resolution, like a non binding resolution was in 2012, where, you know, however many congressional members realize this is real. Right. Because that was the first hurdle that you had to overcome.
In recent years, there's been a number of pieces of legislation that have been run to try to tackle this. There's actually six states that have passed legislation that says Medicare, Medicaid can't pay for China transplants. That's good.
There's a lot more that you can do.
It would be great to have 44 more states pass that legislation. But the Senate for the first time has passed a piece of legislation called the Falun Gong and Victims of Forced Organ Harvesting protection act. That's S4009. Okay. And this legislation is, it's very simple in fact. Right. It's sort of a modified version of a House bill that came through.
And what it does, it does, it does very targeted sanctions against people who are involved in this. That's one thing. But the second thing, which in a way I think is even more important is it gets the State Department and the intelligence community and HHS to collaborate on a report that establishes the veracity of this. Because again, we keep the problem that we keep having, the CCP just says, and frankly, some institutions which are, you know, have kind of been, I think co opted in the same way. We've just been Describing with business and media and stuff like that, kind of, there's people always people say, oh no, this is, they've dealt with that. This is a conspiracy theory. I encounter people who are well meaning or often who have that view because they feel like they've been convinced. And I have to try to say, look, I wish it were true, but I can still go to China and get that new heart in two weeks.
So this is a bill that now has been sent back to the House. It's at the desk, so to speak, in the lower house in the House of Representatives. And it could be passed and there's a few weeks yet of Congress to be had in this existing Congress and it's kind of a no brainer. It doesn't even need to go to committee. It doesn't need to go to markup. If the Senate version of this bill is passed by the House, we could have for the first time federal legislation.
And why is this important? Because we Americans are complicit in this in a whole range of ways. Okay. We've trained some of those surgeons that do this stuff. We provide various technologies, including some of the anti rejection drugs and instruments that are used in organ transplantation. We have research partnerships through NIH grants and just university, university hospital, hospital.
And the moment that we have this kind of the veracity of this established officially by the US government, which isn't hard because the amount of evidence that's available is considerable and been litigated quite a number of times, then the institutions, like for example, there's something called a federal wide assurance, right. That HHS gives to institutions overseas. It's kind of like a seal of approval, if you will. So you could yank those, for example, right, from hospitals that are involved in transplantation and communist China. That would be a very good thing to do. And I would actually save some lives right off the bat. And so even if you're not someone that's into, you know, I don't like intervening, let people do what they want.
I don't agree with that. I think crimes against humanity, this level of extreme human violation, these things spread just like they spread from the Falun Gong to Uyghurs and maybe are spreading to other groups. I don't know. Like, I don't know for sure, but it looks like it might be, at the very least we cannot participate. Right. Not be in any way involved. To be on the safe side. Right. And this would help really facilitate that for US institutions.
[00:45:35] Speaker A: Do you see any technological changes that could possibly lessen what they perceive as their need for our organ harvesting.
I mean, I just was at a technology conference and there are groups that are working on technology so that once they have an organ, right. That it could possibly survive for months rather than just hours or even artificial organs. Organ printing.
[00:46:07] Speaker B: Well, so the artificial organs and even pig organs, which is another thing, actually a childhood friend of mine actually did his PhD on this in that space. But you need to profuse the organs properly. And at the moment, up until very recently, most of the profusion technologies, like the kind of box that you see that you put an organ in and these things don't work very well. Typically when you're doing transplantation, you really want the body to be close that you're transplanting from and putting it in. Because the moment that circulation stops, that perfusion stops, you get a situation where the organ degrades very quickly.
Now there is technology now that I've learned about in the last year, which the FDA is actually working with, that allows you to room temperature perfuse a kidney for I think it's 48 hours, which is an amazing, it'll be a life saving breakthrough for people. Okay. The problem is that if this technology doesn't have strict export controls, okay, now you could potentially ship an organ from China where someone is being killed, to order and ship it somewhere else and to be implanted elsewhere. And so this is the technology. Now if we could actually get to the printed organs, if we could get to that, to the pig organs or whatever, maybe that's, that would be a solution to not need to be using these people. But that doesn't solve the entire problem because the Communist party picks groups and targets them for eradication. I believe there's at least three groups that's trying to actively eradicate in China right now. So that wouldn't solve that problem, would solve some of the Oregon problem, maybe. Does that make sense?
[00:47:51] Speaker A: Yeah. One final question before we let you go looking. Putting your science fiction hat on or your fiction hat on, prognosticating hat on.
Is there any scenario in the future in which the CCP either reforms itself or would be actually actively removed?
[00:48:13] Speaker B: Yes, there is.
I can't predict the timing. Okay. The timing is very difficult because even when you look at the Soviet Union, okay, my mother told me, you know, she escaped from communist Poland occupied by Russia. That's how they polls always viewed it.
She never imagined in a million years that this regime could ever fall. It was way too powerful. Except that in a matter of a very short period of time, it all fell Apart why? Because it's not a sustainable system. It's not a sustainable system in any scenario, right? And even in this case, it's had untold trillions of dollars, you know, transferred from the United States in a variety of forms that's helped it. Helped it survive. And, and intellectual, not just property, but intellectual brilliance and so. And so forth, like people, like human resources and everything, right?
So.
The economy is in extremely rough shape in China. It has one leg left, and that leg is export, right? So that's why they have to flood markets in some cases below. You know, when. When there are these tariffs went up in the.
The Trump tariff, so to speak, went up. They had to flood the European market at below. Below market prices because they have to sell their export. If they don't sell their export, their economy collapses.
So it's. And, but. But at the same time, they're very integrated into the global system. And this is by design. So it's like, you know, try to make yourself too big to fail.
My point here is that Falun Gong practitioners have actually done something super interesting, and they have this whole movement they created after some years of trying to get the regime to stop. And they realize the problem isn't really that just people misunderstand us. The problem is it's communism, okay? And so they have this project where they talk to people, and now they've done it to over 400 million people in China, okay?
They have this project, and this is over 20 years. Over 20 years. And they say, look, if you agree that this system is bad, and here's the evidence, and here's from your past, you know, family history, because most Chinese have that in their family history where they've been persecuted, too. It's not like very few people escape this.
You quit the party, Quit the party, quit the Young Pioneers. If you were there in the young, when you were there in your youth or the Youth League or something.
And so you have this. They've created this situation where there's a whole bunch of people in China, I mean, a significant portion north of 400 million that have decided to mentally leave. They don't have to do it publicly, by the way.
This is something internal where you say, you know what? I'm done with that system. Thank you very much.
And I look forward to the day when I can live freely. So I see a lot of hope in that. On the one hand, that these systems collapse because they need. They're kind of parasitic on other.
Other societies that have the innovation, that have the. Know how that have the kind of creativity this, the Gulp. They're the, the Galts Gulch. Right. I don't know if I'm using the exploration here, but all of that. Right. All of those types of people, they. Not all of them, of course, but they need to kind of import that because totalitarian system don't lend themselves to having, you know, kind of these types of people flourish. Right.
[00:51:32] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:51:33] Speaker B: So. So I. It could be short, it could be a while yet. I don't know. But I see frankly a lot of hope and seeing that system just sort of, you know, I think. And here's the best part, okay. When this Chinese Communist Party collapses.
Chinese. The stereotype is work very hard, very entrepreneurial. This is all true. Okay. And so you'll have finally, I think America, I think we've gotten a bit soft here. I think a free China would give America a run for its money and it would kind of bring out the best in us, if you will. And I would love to see that happen.
[00:52:10] Speaker A: Well, I love that we are ending on such an optimistic note with such a grim and disturbing topic. So again, killed Order.com, jan, congratulations about your book being. I mean, talk about reasons for optimism, right. I wouldn't be surprised if this happened into. Into China. So thank you and thanks to all of you for joining us here today. Make sure to join us next week when Noah Rothman joins us to talk about his book Blood and A Century of Left Wing Violence. We'll see you then.
