In today’s episode, Jenny Beth Martin sits down with Jan Jekielek, Senior Editor at The Epoch Times and host of American Thought Leaders, for a powerful conversation about the Chinese Communist Party’s human rights abuses, propaganda networks, and global influence campaigns. Jan shares his remarkable personal story—from escaping communism through his parents’ experience to uncovering the CCP’s persecution of Falun Gong and the shocking system of forced organ harvesting explored in his upcoming book Kill to Order. He also breaks down how the CCP manipulates media, suppresses free speech, and exports censorship tactics into Western society. This illuminating interview exposes the realities of communism, the dangers facing Americans today, and what we can do to defend freedom, human rights, and the principles of the Constitution.
In this episode, Jenny Beth Martin interviews Jan Jekielek, Senior Editor at The Epoch Times and host of American Thought Leaders. Jan shares his extraordinary journey—from his parents’ escape from communist Poland to his own unexpected path from evolutionary biologist to investigative journalist exposing the realities of the Chinese Communist Party.
Jan explains how he first discovered the CCP’s persecution of Falun Gong and how this led him to uncover extensive evidence of forced organ harvesting in China, the subject of his forthcoming book Kill to Order. He details how the CCP built a state-run organ extraction industry, why Western governments failed to confront it, and how new legislation in the United States may finally begin to address the crisis.
Jenny Beth and Jan also discuss the CCP’s propaganda system, media control, and how censorship and narrative manipulation have seeped into Western institutions. They explore the dangers of dehumanization, the assault on free speech, and why preserving America’s First Amendment protections is essential to resisting totalitarian influence.
Topics discussed include:
• The persecution of Falun Gong and the rise of China’s organ harvesting industry
• How communist systems rely on propaganda, coercion, and dehumanization
• The CCP’s influence on Western media and political narratives
• Lessons Americans must learn to protect liberty, human rights, and free speech
• Current U.S. legislation targeting forced organ harvesting
• How Jan’s investigative reporting and personal history shaped his mission
For more from Jan, visit American Thought Leaders on The Epoch Times and pre-order his book at KillToOrder.com.
Narrator (00:14):
Welcome to the Jenny Beth Show,
Jenny Beth Martin (00:19):
From Tiananmen to TikTok, from Hong Kong's freedom fighters to the hidden prisons of the Chinese Communist Party. The battle between truth and tyranny defines our times. For decades, courageous journalists, survivors, and truth seekers have risked everything to expose the darkness behind the Chinese regime. A system built on lies, control and fear. Today, one of those truth tellers joins us. Jan Ya Keek, senior editor of Epoch Times, host of American thought leaders and author of a forthcoming book, uncovering the CCPs Crimes of Forced Organ Harvesting. I'm Jenny Beth Martin and this is the Jenny Beth Show. Jan, thank you so much for joining me today.
Jan Jekielek (01:02):
Jenny Beth, I'm thrilled to be here.
Jenny Beth Martin (01:05):
So before we talk about China and Epoch Times and your upcoming book, I've learned a lot about you while I was researching for this episode, and you have a really interesting story. How did you first begin to realize there were issues with China? What were you doing then and what did you do initially to help begin exposing those issues?
Jan Jekielek (01:26):
Yeah, it's an absolutely crazy story. If you asked me 25 years ago that I would be doing what I'm doing today, I would've thought you were crazy because I was an evolutionary biologist studying lemurs, going to Madagascar regularly to do field work and working in a molecular biology lab in Edmonton, Alberta. So that's the staging area for the story. Basically what happened was the last time I came back from there, I ended up getting very ill and I ended up with something called Guion Barry Syndrome and Guion Barry, people in the medical professions will be familiar with it. It's basically your immune system is going haywire, is attacking your own nervous system and you lose control of your body. And that's what was happening. And basically I couldn't do my desk work anymore. Some people actually die from this disease because they can't breathe anymore.
(02:19):
It gets that bad. I didn't have it that bad for me. Everything was just kind of shutting down basically. And I couldn't do my basic work. I didn't have reflexes. It was walking weird, double vision, all this kind of stuff. I started looking, it killed my career. It really did. And I started looking for alternative therapies and I came across, there's this guy that I knew who had had chronic fatigue syndrome I hadn't been around for while. He asked me, Hey, where have you been? And I told him I've been very ill and if things aren't looking good. And he basically said, well, look, I had chronic fatigue syndrome at one point and this particular Chinese meditation me. And so the Chinese meditation was Fellon Gong. And I just kind of tried it with an open mind. I didn't know anything about it. At that time.
(03:09):
I wasn't thinking about China at all. I wasn't thinking about, but I was open to alternative methods and basically I started mimicking these slow motion exercises and meditation. And very quickly, I think it was basically about two months, I healed myself. I knew I did because I had an appointment with my neurologist and she basically told me, congratulations, you're in full remission. You don't need to see me anymore. Keep doing what you're doing. That was the conversation. And for me, I mean I felt like I'm healed. It was one of those kind of moments. It was slow. So I didn't fully grasp how thoroughly I had become well in that two months, but there it was. And I guess in the process people do this when they're facing their own mortality, they ask themselves, well, first of all I was like, okay, maybe there is a God up there, maybe there isn't.
(04:08):
But on the off chance there is a God up there. I said, if I make it, I'm going to give my life to service if you set that up for me in case you're up there. And it worked out. And at that point I kind of knew that I had gotten a kind of new lease on life and I have to live this service, but I didn't know what it was going to be. There was a young woman who was a postdoc at the University of Alberta where I was doing my lab work. Her mother had escaped from China. And as it would happen, this Fellon Gong meditation, which had given me back my life, basically the Chinese Communist Party had just started persecuting these people. And just super briefly in the nineties, this practice, it basically was introduced publicly for the first time in 92.
(04:58):
It's very unusual and it's actually very kind of difficult for us in the West to really understand it very well because it's unusually grassroots. It's unusually, there's no hierarchy in it, okay? There's no sort of fund, there aren't a lot of rules. There's a lot of teachings about how to live it. There's a deep spirituality, but there isn't worship. So that would be a rule, or there isn't a hierarchy actually, right? There isn't a collection of funds. You can't kind of enrich yourself from it Anyway, so when you add all this up together, it's unbelievably grassroots. It promotes a very unusual level of agency. And this in this very grassroots way grew from basically a small number of people practicing in 1992. And by the way, the other rule would be the principles are truthfulness, compassion and tolerance. This is what people are living in their lives grew to a hundred million people and 10,000 practice sites of Fellon Gong, kind of looking a bit like daichi in Beijing alone and just across the country, one in 13 Chinese, everyone knew someone who was a Fon Gong practitioner.
(06:03):
The regime didn't like that, the dictator in charge at the time, Ziman decided in his words privately, he said, we're going to eradicate this. We also heard that he was kind of jealous of the founder of Phon Gong Honshu who had kind of the love of the people. He could never have all of these things together. And the other part, and this is that I only really understood this in the last few years because of this unusual grassroots nature of Fallon Gong and this unusual focus on individual agency. And instead of living the teachings as you understand them and so forth, it didn't fit into this. I describe communism as being obscenely hierarchical, and it really is. I mean, everything that the supremacy of the party is the top priority of that society. Human life is a very, very distant lower priority. And everything stems from the top like this in these societies.
(06:56):
Well, here you had a hundred million people practicing truth and compassion and a deep reverence for the divine and God in an atheistic society, which was, as I said, obscenely, hierarchical. And this just basically as they started persecuting these people who were entirely apolitical, but they simply would not allow themselves to be destroyed. And basically through this persecution, jman basically created arguably the largest civil disobedience movement, peaceful civil disobedience movement in history, which is ongoing today, 25 years later. And to make a long story short, I realized through this woman who was telling me that she had escaped from prison, she had been tortured for refusing to give up her faith. And as she explained this to me, and I swear every time I think about this, I get shivers down my spine. Of course, I've told this story and advertis it for him. It's happening again like a bolt of lightning. This shot through me, my parents had taught me having escaped communist Poland in the seventies, this is what communism is, it's bad, but I absolutely didn't get it. But at this moment, as this woman told me her story, I understood this is communism. And I realized that my service needs to educate people about the realities of communism and to help these people who are being tortured and persecuted, basically simply for refusing to give up their faith.
Jenny Beth Martin (08:21):
And your parents escaped communism?
Jan Jekielek (08:24):
Yes. So my parents were very polish. Actually, they left in the seventies. They left separately because before they were married, if the government had known the communist government in Poland that they were planning to get married or planning to leave, they would've never let them out. But they were able to leave and ended up getting married in France. And in the process, I ended up in Canada, but I learned Polish as a first language because basically I was one of these fresh off the boat literally kind of came out upon arrival people. But basically my mother had been put in this situation, this actually speaks to communism a bit. See my mother was not one of these huge dissidents that goes out and tries to fight communism directly. She was like, there's another group of people a little bit larger that just are passive resistors.
(09:21):
They're not trying to put alert the regime to the fact that they're not participating or freedom and so forth. They're just kind of quietly. For example, one way people would do is they wouldn't learn Russian because Poles always viewed it as Russian occupation there, or they wouldn't, and they would try not to participate. And my mother was put into one of these no-win situations where she gets called in by the security services and they say, Hey, so Comrad, we'd like to know what this and this person that well was doing last night. And of course you can't refuse them. This is like my mother to explain to me, you can't say no because that would get you in jail. But she said, I'm just not really made out to talk about things like this. But what happened was, so they didn't lock her up right there, but they pulled her passport and they pulled a lot of her privileges. And that was already, they started to kind of put the screws to her. And that was the point where she resolved, I have to figure out how to get out. There was some very high quality or alcohol involved. There was, anyway, there a whole bunch of things happened for her to be able to get out and then later invite my father out independently and they were able to escape.
Jenny Beth Martin (10:33):
Wow, that is so amazing. Jan, my kids who are now 22 years old, they have friends from high school whose parents escaped from communism. One of 'em, I think his father was from Cuba and his mother was from one of the Soviet block countries. And then another friend, her mother was from one of the Soviet block countries. And what you were describing, how you recognized communism, having heard about it from your parents, and then you recognize what you were seeing with China when you were exposed to that as an adult. It reminds me a lot, some of the stories I've heard them talking about when they would be over hanging out with my kids. And I remember one time very distinctly as you were talking about this, it just made me remember it. I won't mention the kid's name, I don't have his permission to do that. But he was sitting there and one of the other kids mentioned something about socialism and I think a OC and this kid whose both his parents had escaped from communism, he lit into them and just went through every single bad thing about communism. And I think that the children of immigrants who had to escape communism, not just because they immigrated for economic prosperity, but to escape tyranny, they seem to understand and appreciate freedom and liberty more than even people who are born into freedom and liberty.
Jan Jekielek (12:05):
Absolutely. That's been my experience. But there's also something very interesting, and this is something that the COVID years exposed to me, I guess, is that not everybody is wired in the same way for this issue of freedom. And so with my parents, I know this, again, they weren't these big activists that were basically, the Chinese version would've been right by the statue, the goddess of freedom in Tiananmen Square. They weren't those types of people, but they were people who, and I know this because I experienced this myself, this feeling right? The moment that you feel those totalitarian screws coming down in different ways, you feel it and it's incredibly uncomfortable and you want out. Okay? And they're both people, they're both completely different people. By the way, my parents, they got divorced around the time I graduated high school. They didn't see eye to eye and everything, but on this, they saw completely eye to eye. And the curious thing is that that is, I actually a bit unusual to have that deep need for that freedom. I don't think all of our society is quite wired that way, but there is a subset of people who are, and I think those people are very important. Our society, at least that's how I view it.
Jenny Beth Martin (13:25):
I think that you're right about that. So you began to see what China was doing and you recognized communism, and then what happened? Because your career took a completely different turn from a molecular biologist.
Jan Jekielek (13:43):
Absolutely. Completely different turn. But the really interesting thing about it was that from that moment where I basically committed myself to service, and as best as I could understand it, I dunno, obviously I'm not kind of perfect, but it's more like making the decision where you have the shining, tantalizing, attractive thing that it will give you immediate gratification here. And the thing that you're like, I think the service is this other thing. So I really made a point of going for the other thing. And in the process, I just ended up having a pretty unbelievably, at least for me, a life that I just never expected that went well beyond anything I could have imagined. And this included meeting kind of the perfect woman. Now it's 21 years on, and it's exactly that perfect doesn't mean exactly the same. Perfect means you're on the road together and you're figuring things out and you're committed to doing it.
(14:41):
And she puts up with your various idiosyncrasies along the way. So there's that. And what was really interesting was I basically threw myself into trying to help some of these religious believers who were being persecuted. And to make a long story short, I also needed to make money somehow people don't pay well for the human rights work. So I ended up running these international youth programs. I'd done international work and this other way I could also help share that international experience with young people, which really changed me in very positive ways. I felt that was another way I could basically be of service. I started with Poland, a native speaker, but as it would happen, I got a job in Thailand, and I don't know why they gave me the job in Thailand, except as it would happen. My wife, I got married along the way.
(15:32):
My wife happened to have lived in Thailand before and spoke the language. So when we landed in Thailand, I was off in the countryside doing my thing. She was in Bangkok and she discovered there was an underground railroad that was bringing Chinese dissidents out from China through the golden triangle, which is this treacherous area of lawless area, kind of the northwest of Thailand and Burma and that whole area. And then into Bangkok where they could get where refugee status and actually get to free countries. There were six countries that were accepting them at the time. And so I was there. By the time I finished my work, Cindy had figured out how all this worked and she realized that they actually, this is a place where we could be of service, where we could actually help. And the way, again, things had been organized. Thailand's a cheap place to live because of what we knew, because of our ability to communicate with government entities, we were actually able to help this whole system function and especially prevent repatriations because the Chinese would pressure the ties to send these people back because especially the Fallon Gong refugees, they were unusual.
(16:40):
The typical refugee will kind lay low. They don't want any trouble. Let's get to that free country. A lot of the Fallon Gong refugees would go to the Chinese embassy, big banner, stop murdering people, that kind of thing. And once in a while, and the ties would tolerate it sometimes. And then other times what they would do is they would say, well, if you come on this day, the special branch police is going to arrest everybody. And people would still go sometimes on those days and they end up in immigration detention. And then you had a very tense situation because there's only one way out of immigration detention that's either to your safe country or back to China. And so there were these just kind of moments where it was touch and go. We didn't know how it would go. But all those years, I can say Thailand never deported a single person.
(17:27):
There were even countries that in error like Germany and things like that did in those times. I remember it was kind of shocking. It was very, so that was when I actually came across epoch times because we live in this world as we've also learned perhaps during COVID or earlier in the Russiagate days and so forth, where there's powerful big narratives being kind of foisted on society. And the powerful narrative at the time was that if we pump enough cash into communist China, they're going to become a democracy. They're going to liberalize, it's going to be like South Korea or Taiwan or something like that where we put our energy, we put our hard-earned money into the country and things change. We changed them. Except that communist China never had any interest in this. It was all a subterfuge basically. So this approach, you could roughly call it the Kissinger doctrine.
(18:21):
I sort of lightly call it that because Henry Kissinger was one of the biggest advocates of this kind of viewpoint at the time. A lot of people believed it. A lot of people had Jenny Beth, you and I know well, that even quite highly positioned actually believed this, that this was the case. But at this point, I already knew because I saw what they were doing to base it to people of faith who just wanted to peacefully practice their belief. They were literally killing people for doing that. And there's no way you're liberalizing if you're accelerating into religious persecution. So I wanted to tell the stories of these people that had these amazing escapes from China through these treacherous places and so forth. No one wanted to publish these stories. Why? Because it went against the narrative. I mean, really it's when I look back, it's unbelievable. And then I came across epoch times and Epoch times was the opposite. Epoch times said, Hey, look, we were actually made to do these kinds of stories. You're not giving us enough stories, more stories, Jan, please. Right? So because they had been founded, and actually as it would happen, Atlanta, Georgia at Georgia Tech by Chinese Americans who had escaped tyranny themselves, never went back. And then when this fell and gong persecution came along, they thought to themselves, Hey, we can actually tell the truth here with the First Amendment in America, or pardon me. Yeah.
(19:49):
Basically it was kind of a marriage made in heaven where they wanted for us to work. It was a tiny operation actually at the time. And they were just sort of happy for almost, in a way, they were happy for anyone to actually be interested in participating because this narrative was so powerful and we just kind of fell in love with it. And so basically, both my wife and I have been working in various ways, the Deepak Times for the better part of the last 20 years.
Jenny Beth Martin (20:19):
That is such an amazing story, Jan. Thank you so much for sharing it and letting people learn more about your history. Now as we're dealing with China right now, today, they obviously didn't do what all that money we hope would do, which would make them less communist and become more geared towards democracy. What are some of the most significant problems that you see that we face as Americans? And I know you're in Canada towards China, and then I want to talk also, I don't know if this is one of the most important ones or not, but I definitely want to talk about the subject of your new book as well.
Jan Jekielek (21:02):
Maybe it makes sense to talk about this organ industry in China first, because the case I make in the book is that actually in a way, it offers a perfect lens to understand how communism works and maybe what we can expect as a society as we engage, right? Because the argument is never cut off all communications, no talking, no, people say decoupling all this stuff. No, it's not that. It's being able to look at a society just realistically what are they about? What do they want from us? How have they worked with us? What is the evidence of the last 40 years in terms of good faith, bad faith, all these kinds of questions. So when it comes to this organ industry, maybe I'll summarize it because I mean this whole topic I could easily talk for a couple of hours about
Jenny Beth Martin (21:54):
Which is what your whole new book is about,
Jan Jekielek (21:56):
Correct? It's the book that's called Kill to Order. And I'll explain why it's called that. I mean, basically in 2015, pardon me, in 2005, there was a man who was the head of the Israeli Transplant Association. His name was Kovi, actually, I think he had just stepped down from that role, but he was a transplant surgeon still. And he had a patient who had a serious heart condition, was waiting for a heart transplant, but it wasn't coming. Basically, the guy went to Dr. Levi and said, Hey, I actually just got an arrangement. Someone set this up for me. We scheduled my heart transplant for two weeks from now in China, and how is that even possible? So Jacob, and it might not necessarily be obvious to every single viewer, but the reason it's difficult in a civilized society to find a transplant is because you have to, first of all, you have to have the right kind of blood type, the right tissue.
(23:00):
There have to be the histological issues. There's the size. You can't transplant a tiny heart into a large person or the other way. And you also have to have an accident where someone dies but dies in a very specific way because you can't transplant from a cold body either. So it has to be a death where their body is still kind of warm. And the typical way that's determined is through brain death, even though there's some contention around that designation itself. But anyway, you actually have a whole team of ethicists and doctors who figure out, is this person really not coming back so we can take their organs and give them to someone else to save someone else's life that's in a normal civilized society, but to be able to schedule it means while when someone's going to be dead two weeks from now, how are you doing that?
(23:48):
There's only one way you're making them dead. That's one, right? And two in two weeks. I mean, if you have this kind of unusual blood type or tissue type or even a normal one, to be able to find the person who will match is very hard. That's why you have to wait so long because the right accident, the right type of person needs to happen. And so none of this made any sense. And so I'm going to kind of fast forward here and give you the punchline. We can dig into it as much as you like. But what we figured out in China, this black market, what typically we think of as a black market organ industry, which happens unfortunately all over the world, it's kind of like a whole different level. First of all, you need to have a large population that's been dehumanized through propaganda.
(24:40):
Kind of like what was happening in 1930s. The Nazis were pushing in this propaganda about the Jewish people so that when they eliminated these people in various ways, the population wouldn't feel as bad as they would as if it was their fellow German that they're supposed to feel a feel kinship with. So that's one, you need to incarcerate that population. You need to put, let's say a million people or something like that into a system where now you can do that blood typing, get their vitals, do high level testing across a very large population, and pull all their vitals, all of that information you would need for the transplants. And now you have this setup, and this is what happens. You can basically, when someone comes in and says, Hey, I need this kind of, these are my details for heart, or of course it's the middleman saying this, not the patient themselves.
(25:35):
You can basically find the right person in your database, ship them and kill to order, which is why my book is called Kill to Order. So people say Yes, yes, there's horrible black markets in Oregons in many places in the world. This is a whole different scale. This is states sanctioned. This is an estimated 60 to 90,000 transplants a year. Congressman Neil Dunn in a recent interview I just did with him, tells me that the US Intel community estimates it's a hundred thousand. I'm still verifying that number a year transplants we're talking about. So the scale of this is something beyond, when you think about it, it's just kind of sends a big chill down your spine. And in a way it's very hard to believe. And actually one of the best documentaries on this topic made a few years back is actually called hard to believe, and this has been part of the biggest issue with why we can't, it's been so difficult to get the word out about it because it's just, you think about it for a moment, you go, wow, that is an unbelievable level of evil, right? It's really hard to fathom. And we have this revulsion, but the only way that we can actually deal with it and prevent it from influencing our own transplant system, which I argue in a recent op-ed in the Baltimore Sun, is to not engage with that system, not train their transplant surgeons, not send them materials and ECMO machines and other things that they need for these because I call it murder for organs. And I don't think that's an exaggeration.
Jenny Beth Martin (27:09):
Jan. This is a really difficult topic for people to hear about. And if they've been listening to my program, they probably heard an interview from Janice Trey that we just aired last week, where she talks about what's happening with the organ transplants in China. I know it's very difficult, but I think it's something we have to address and face so that we can figure out how we don't make those same kind of mistakes in Western societies and also how we can try to help prevent this from happening to fellow human beings across the globe.
Jan Jekielek (27:48):
Well, and so here's to validate everything you're saying here, right? Because no one really addressed this when this was started on the backs of this massive fell and gong persecution that started in the year 1999, and between the year of 2000 to 2005, there was this massive, almost exponential growth in the Chinese transplant industry. That's actually one of the pieces of evidence because it's not like the death row prisoners. They would tell people that were going, there was this Korean film crew that did an underground documentary about it, sort of hidden camera and everything. And they would tell the people who are getting the transplants are supposed to be getting the transplants that these are death row prisoners that are being executed. But there was no change in the number of, in fact, the number was going down of the number of people actually being executed by best estimates.
(28:37):
Of course, remember, all these numbers are state secret, so it's difficult to know the exact numbers, but the number of hospitals and hospital beds and transplant exponential growth to 2005. And this was the time when we actually first really understood that it was real. At least I felt that the evidence was compelling enough to take someone like me who also didn't want to believe it, who also had this revulsion to understand that it's real. But what happened 10 years later, give or take a little bit longer, then now they incarcerated a whole nother group of people, the Uyghurs and Xinjiang province of China, and it's similar situation, dehumanize them and incarcerated them. And we believe that now this Oregon harvesting industry has shifted in some part or expanded in some part to them. And there's even a market for what you would call halal organs, organs that Muslims prefer getting Muslim organs.
(29:34):
And so it's nightmarish. And the problem with, there's a reason we signed a genocide convention. Part of the reason is when you deal with these extreme human rights violations, I mean, these are some of the most extreme things that you can kind of imagine happening. They tend to spread, right? You don't deal with them if people of conscience, people that live according to the Judeo-Christian tradition or have that embedded in their societies or similar, if they just turn a blind eye and don't want to know it spreads. And right now, and this is what I argue in my recent op-ed Bobby Kennedy Jr. As HHS secretary has had to decertify two organ systems in America recently before regular dead donor rule violations. A dead donor rule violation means in effect that the way the person was killed was their organs being extracted. So it means that's how most, I mean in China, you look at the Chinese transplant literature, there's a paper in the American Journal of Transplantation titled Execution by Organ Procurement.
(30:45):
They found at least 70 scientific published papers in the Chinese transplant literature that were violating the dead donor rule. They become so desensitized to this that they publish it in the scientific literature, these violations of the dead general killing people by organ extraction. But this has actually come to America as well in some transplant systems. The softening basically of the determination of death. And I believe, and that's also because of that deep engagement. We kept saying, we're going to change China, we're going to change China. But actually it happened in the other direction. It made us more sort of start to have this kind of weird admiration for the totalitarian approach, this weird, and this is really kind of the antithesis of everything that America is really about and what it was founded on, what Ville talked about when he saw that this civil society, this emergent civil society where people got together alone in a grassroots way and figured out the problems they needed to do without someone coming in and saying, this is how you do it.
(31:44):
That was actually the thing, the engine of America. And I agree with him, and this is the thing I admire most about America and why I'm kind of on my way to hopefully becoming an American in the not too distant future, but we've kind of taken on some of these, or maybe it's, you can think of, we have an impulse. The line between good and evil cuts through every human heart, as s said famously. And so I think that we've been sort of toying with these totalitarian ideas a lot too much. Perhaps they're a little bit too much, even though in comparison to what's happening in communist China, it's a whole different ball game. But I think they've influenced us in this direction and that manifests in all sorts of different ways, including in the transplant system.
Jenny Beth Martin (32:35):
So what other ways do you see them in influencing us and America too much rather than America influencing them?
Jan Jekielek (32:46):
Well, a big way, of course, is the way that media works. I was actually just in this recent documentary, which I would recommend watching, it's fascinating. It's called God Complex, and I talk about, it's about the sense, what they call the censorship industrial complex that really kind of fueled a lot of what we saw during, in COVID in particular, and sort of prevented from a lot of good information about how to deal treat people properly or quickly and easily in COVID. And anyway, this is a whole bigger discussion, but in China, there is no freedom of press whatsoever. In fact, it's all state media and the state dictates things will be what will be talked about, how often it'll allow a little bit of so-called free expression in areas which aren't as sensitive, but really drop the hammer if you cover the things that are untouchable.
(33:45):
I mean, they have a huge department committed to this. And there's two sides, and this is the thing, this is the deep insight. I didn't even understand how powerful this was until I saw a variation of it manifesting here across the world, not just in America, but across the world. There's two parts to it. One is pushing strong, powerful narratives into the population. That's the propaganda side. The other side is preventing voices, other, these dissenting voices from being able to have a lot of play. So it's sort of a way you could describe it is you're dialing up particular narratives massively. Let's say for example, the most powerful one is the Communist Party is always right. The communist Party is responsible for all the goodness in society. And even if you're resistant to that, and even though if even intellectually you understand it's not true as it keeps getting pushed into society, you internalize some of it, right?
(34:42):
And again, until I saw it happening in our own society at some level, I didn't fully understand how powerful that is, even if you have some resistance to it. But the other side, if you don't actually know what the other arguments are, you can't actually engage them meaningfully. They're just these caricatures, which is, this is your anti-science or anti-vax or anti whatever. It's like, what do you mean? All but no, I just think that some of these products might be good, some not. I mean, what a rational. I'm just giving an example what a rational person would think. No, no, no. You're not allowed to think like that, right? You're either in this narrative and you follow the truth, the correct view, or you're labeled something terrible far, right? Whatever. All these, the monikers, I don't need to tell you. You've experienced a few yourself, Jenny.
Jenny Beth Martin (35:31):
Yeah. So election deniers, science deniers, I mean, it goes on and on. And of course, all the stuff with COVID.
Jan Jekielek (35:38):
Well, so I mean argue that, and I think it's a very compelling argument that it's not that we didn't develop some of this, these let's say, approaches ourselves. And actually, again, this Scott complex document is a very good job charting how with all the best intentions in social media, some of this type of technology was developed. The problem is that it can very quickly, especially when there's bad actors, especially when there's, let's see, a social contagion in society, for example, that I don't like to repeat propaganda, but some particular political figure is evil incarnate or whatever, and that gets pushed as a kind of social contagion in society. People, very intelligent, normal people suddenly can pick up really crazy ideas and run with them. And with these powerful messaging and censorship structures, you can kind of reinforce those things and retain them. And in a way, in other ways, you can actually self brainwash, right?
(36:49):
I think in Canada, for example, we had this truckers movement. And the truckers, it was the most grassroots movement you could possibly imagine. We covered it very distinct. We watched it from the inside. We were able to have reporters, we cared, so we knew what it looked like. And the Canadian governments somehow believed that these were some kind of right-wing extremists coming to take Parliament Hill. And I actually think some of them believed it because they basically told a very sort of compliant and well-funded by government money media and ideologically aligned media that what they wanted to hear, which was that these people were somehow these right-wing extremists coming to do damage or whatever. And then the media reported compliantly those things back. And then I think people started freaking out saying, oh my God, the right-wing extremists are coming, right? Because you see it's, it's not like you can keep control of these things once you kind of unleash them into society.
(37:51):
It's a crazy world of information warfare we've sort of set upon ourselves. But if you look at communist China, you can see where we're heading if we're not careful, if we don't put very strict safeguards on freedom of speech, on enshrining liberty as a virtue, not just liberty alone, but real liberty and responsibility. And I would even argue an understanding that our connection with God is a very important part of our lives. And that's another thing that I've come to believe is that it's something that in our secular society, we have this church and state separation and so forth, and I think there's a lot of value to that. That's a very different thing than saying the connection with God or the divine, however we construct that is not important. In fact, the people that did have that connection as a very deep and central part of our lives seem to be able to weather a lot of these storms better on average. That's been my observation as a journalist, although I haven't seen this empirically. Yeah,
Jenny Beth Martin (38:57):
Well, sometimes this is what faith is about. You trust and believe things even if you don't have all the facts to back it up. And I certainly have seen the same thing, and I found in my own life that my relationship with God has helped me through extraordinarily difficult times and helped me have the courage to face those times in ways that have made me who I am. Jan, these are important things that you're talking about that we have to make sure that we do. Protecting free speech, protecting religious liberty, protecting free expression and free press, everything in the First Amendment, essentially enshrining liberty and responsibility and making sure that we don't fall victim to the dehumanization that has happened in China. Regarding your book and the Oregon harvesting that is going on in China, what are things that Americans can do to help? Is there anything that we can do? And what is it that we can do?
Jan Jekielek (40:16):
It's a very unusual time. So I've covered this issue for 20 years. It makes me basically a defacto, a subject matter expert on it, even though there is a handful, there are some real experts who have done the heavy lifting to figure out a lot of how this worked. That was in me, I reported on it. I contributed a little bit to it over 20 years, but mostly my work has been just trying to explain it to a larger population because it's obviously of incredible importance, but very difficult to communicate right this time right now, I've never seen a time remotely close in terms of the ability of people to one, to say, okay, I understand this is real. I'm ready to believe it. And two lawmakers actually coming to the table with legislation that can actually make a significant difference. And not just that, I don't even know where I could start, but let me start for you here.
(41:17):
Okay? One is, there's three bills in the US Congress, two of which have near unanimously passed the house already, that both deal with sanctioning individuals who are involved in this horrible practice and why people say, yeah, sanctions. What's the big deal? Well, a lot of Chinese, these Chinese elites that might be involved in the forced organ harvesting have exit strategies to America. And once you get sanctioned, that exit strategy is much harder to realize, and this is, why would you want an exit strategy? Well, because it's a very volatile situation over there, their economy, it's unclear how things are going to go, and everybody there knows it. It's not that it's all collapsing at this moment, but let's just say everybody wants those things. So this will actually have teeth, a few less people involved in this means a few less people harvested, and we're going to save a few lives that way.
(42:11):
It's very powerful. Plus just the awareness level, the awareness aspect of it. This is real, right? It's actually, there's laws, if these two bills I'm talking about, the one is called the Fallon Gong Protection Act, another one's called the Stop Force Organ Harvesting Act. There's actually a third one now that's in committee, that's the Congressman Neil Dunn, the one I mentioned that I just interviewed recently. That one focuses on basically not paying for Medicare or insurance not being allowed to pay for transplants done in China. So that's another way to tackle the issue. But again, all this signals to me, wow, there's a level of interest. People are willing to grasp it, and actually, we might actually have in American law legislation that says, this is real, and we're trying to do something to stop it at the level of regulation. HHS. There was a Armstrong Williams published a powerful op-ed on this some months ago, and the HHS Twitter ex actually responded to it saying, yes, I can't remember the exact tweet.
(43:17):
You can pull it up for your interview. But basically they say, this is bad and we shouldn't participate. And it's like, wow, this is the agency taking a position on this never happened before. There's a survivor. And I never thought we'd ever see a survivor of this, a man who is missing part of his liver and part of his lung, he was harvested in the mid two thousands. He didn't even know that that had happened. He just woke up with a big gas scar on his side and chained. It's a long and complicated story, but he was actually rescued back to America by a former, at the time, it was one of the assistant secretaries of state and lived to tell the tale. And that precipitated more media attention on this issue than I've ever seen before. Right? So you see, there's a kind of a snowball in being able to, I guess, tackle this issue in a meaningful way where for the last 20 years, it really didn't move very much simply because there's on one side, governments don't want to take the responsibility in many cases. And on the other side, people are just not ready to deal with it.
Jenny Beth Martin (44:35):
These are helpful action items, the different bills that we could urge Congress to support. It seems to me like these should be bipartisan or nonpartisan issues. It should just be both parties care about human rights and civil rights, and it's something that it seems like we could agree on. Although with the way things are in Washington, who knows if that's possible. I think that one of the things that you said that we should all remember as well, just as Americans, is that dehumanization leads, especially the dehumanization combined with propaganda, which you talked about, leads to people feeling comfortable taking drastic violent action against others. We saw that with Charlie Kirk's assassination and with the attempted assassinations of President Trump as well. And I think that it's something that we all should be making sure that when we're having political debate, especially political debate online, that we remember to debate the issues and not the people so that we can get really angry at issues that people care about, but we remember that the people are still humans and not fall into that trap of dehumanizing people
Jan Jekielek (45:57):
A hundred percent. And I think that's a huge lesson. And one of the things I talked about a little bit after Charlie Kirk's murder was perhaps the reason that he was so disliked by extremists is because he didn't actually view the people that he was arguing with the people that in many cases hated him. He didn't hate them, and he viewed them as just people who were fallen like he was fallen, and people that he thought he had better ideas, and he wanted to help those people sort of grasp those ideas. And indeed, that was the project. And if we communication, this is why the First Amendment, there's such beauty and such amazing meaning in America's First Amendment, is the strongest free speech rights in the world. If we aren't able to communicate with very different ideas, we go back to clubbing each other instead of the communication actually helps us work things out without basically might means, right? And so as we, I don't know, chisel away at it and try to kind reduce its value, reduce its importance in effect, what that does is it basically strengthens this other way, which is really kind of, I would argue that civilization is actually based on, in many ways, on the ability to be able to have that communication. And in the American model, that's free speech.
Jenny Beth Martin (47:36):
And I suppose that you're right, that is free speech in the American model, and it really goes back to what you were saying. We have to enshrine liberty and we also have a responsibility, so we have free speech, and we also, we need to be responsible with our own rights, making sure that we're not falling into the kind of behavior that debas other people.
Jan Jekielek (48:01):
Hundred percent.
Jenny Beth Martin (48:03):
I think I could talk to you for another hour or two, but I don't have time to do that today. So we're going to have to wrap up and end. Maybe we could do another interview at some point in the future, what you've experienced, the things that you've seen in your life, it's fascinating, your life experience, and then what you're able to shine a light on right now with this terrible situation in China. I hope that people go buy your book when it comes out and watch your programs, and especially go back and look at the documentaries that you've mentioned today so that we can learn more about what's happening in China and be better prepared as individual Americans and as a country to help stand up against these horrific abuses of human rights.
Jan Jekielek (48:51):
Well, you can actually pre-order the book if you'd like. It's coming out on February seventeenth@killtoorder.com. That goes right to the Amazon link. And if you like these types of interviews, I have my own show, American Thought Leaders on the Epoch Times that's on YouTube and on the epoch times.com. And please come experience some real journalism with us.
Jenny Beth Martin (49:16):
You do great work over there, and the entire news outlet at Epoch Times is amazing real journalism. Jan, thank you so much for joining me today. Thanks for sharing your story and helping us expose a light on what's happening in China.
Jan Jekielek (49:33):
Jenny Beth, thank you so much.
Jenny Beth Martin (49:36):
If you enjoyed today's conversation, go ahead and hit like and subscribe. It really helps us reach more people who care about Freedom and the Constitution. You can find this and other episodes@jennybethshow.com, as well as Facebook Rumble, YouTube, Instagram X in your favorite podcast platform.
Narrator (49:54):
The Jenny Beth Show is hosted by Jenny Beth Martin. The Jenny Beth Show is a production of Tea Party Patriots action. For more information, visit tea party patriots.org.