Radically Genuine Podcast with Dr. Roger McFillin

Dr. McFillin (00:02.464)
Welcome to the Radically Genuine Podcast. am Dr. Roger McFillin. There are stories that when you first hear them, your mind simply refuses to hold them. Not because the evidence isn't there, but because accepting them requires you to confront something about the world and about yourself. Something that may be inconceivable, threatening, and even alters your perception of reality.

My guest today has spent two decades in that uncomfortable space, carrying a truth that most people have not been ready to receive. Being dismissed, doubted, watching institutions look away and choosing to keep going away. His name is Jan Jekielek . He's a senior editor at Epoch Times and he's a host of the tremendous show American Thought Leaders.

He's interviewed nearly a thousand thought leaders on camera, heads of state, cabinet secretaries, congressional members, scientists, dissidents, survivors. He's an award-winning documentary filmmaker. And he was doing the earliest serious journalism on China's forced organ harvesting program when almost no one in the Western press would touch it. His new book is called Killed to Order.

It documents what may be the largest ongoing crime against humanity on the planet right now. The state sanctioned industrialized harvesting of organs from living prisoners of conscience in China. And I want to be honest with you before we begin, because I think honesty is the only way through a conversation like this. There is something that happens to people when they are confronted with information this dark.

Jan has seen it for 20 years. You may feel it yourself right now, even just hearing the description. The mind pulls back, the eyes go somewhere else, kind of internal static rises up and the information stops landing. Psychologists have a name for it. It's a defense mechanism and it's completely human. But it's also, I would argue, one of the most dangerous things about us because I think we are in a moment.

Dr. McFillin (02:29.002)
right now in our lifetime where the forces working against human dignity, human empathy, and human freedom are counting on exactly this. Counting on that this would be too overwhelming. Counting that we would choose comfort and denial. Counting on the fact that we will look at something this large and this dark and decide quietly that it isn't really our problem. And I ask you to approach this conversation differently.

Jan Jekielek, welcome to the Radically Genuine Podcast.

Jan Jekielek (03:02.168)
Roger, thank you. I'm excited to be here and to speak with you because I think we can really dig deep into this from all sorts of angles. really, a centerpiece of it is this total destruction of the basic concept of human dignity, which is so central to, frankly, our whole morality, our ethics, not just Judeo-Christian but traditional Chinese.

traditional faith systems have had this as a really important part of their viewpoint. We're in danger of losing that to this horrible utilitarian model. This utilitarian model is not just in Communist China, where it's the extreme of it, but in a way, this is the teachable moment. This is what can happen when we choose this greatest good for the greatest number model of trying to shape and control and build humanity.

So thank you, I'm very excited to be here.

Dr. McFillin (04:03.052)
Yeah, it's an honor to be with you. And I was down in DC for your event with Rob Schneider. was amazing evening with amazing people. And I'm going to assume most of my audience has never heard of Falun Gong and you came to this community at a very personal moment in your life. Would you be willing to tell us how you found them and who these people are?

Jan Jekielek (04:26.446)
Oh, 100%. And it's actually centrally important, in a sense, to how this horrible macabre industry developed. allow me to explain. just personally, had a previous career before journalism, before was human rights advocacy. But even before that, I was actually an evolutionary biologist. That was quite a jump.

The reason that I had to jump was because I had something that some of your viewers may be familiar with. I contracted a syndrome called Guillain-Barre or GB syndrome. This is an autoimmune disease. Your immune system goes haywire, attacks your nervous system. It's sometimes a type of vaccine injury. In fact, was one of the COVID vaccines had it in its official list as one of the injuries that can happen. Rare, of course.

and but also it could be for other reasons. My own experience was I had this parasitic worm, Askerid infection, had mono, and I also was in a very, very tough relationship. My own thoughts about it is I think this is what made my immune system toast and start attacking me, so to speak. And that really was losing control of my body. was a geneticist, also molecular biologist, geneticist.

I was doing a lot of fine work. had to hit little tubes with little pipettes and things like this. I suddenly couldn't do this. My gait changed. Just everything's double vision. All sorts of stuff happened. And basically, killed my career. I never had it at the level where some people do where they can't breathe anymore and they die. That's possible. It happens actually to too many people, but I didn't have it that bad.

Let's just say it was a very defining moment for me. I know that you like to talk about spirituality on your show, so I'll mention this as well. In this process as an agnostic, was one of these people who apparently this is a common thing for people to do whether or not they're faithful or not, is in these moments where they face their own mortality, they look up and they go, just in case.

Jan Jekielek (06:43.118)
So what I said was, I promised God that I would give my life to service if indeed I made it out of this predicament. And what happened was, amazingly, it was a good decision to do that. But not too long after that, a man that I knew from, I talked film with at a local coffee shop,

I met him and I told him what had happened to me. said, listen, I've had chronic fatigue syndrome. It's actually kind of a related autoimmune disease. said, you know, when I tried this Chinese slow motion exercise meditation thing, maybe you should try it. It helped me a lot. And so I got this grainy DVD. I think we called them BCDs back in the day. And I was learning these slow motion exercises and these were the Falun Gong exercises.

What is it? It's an ancient system of cultivation. In traditional China, you could think of it like a Chinese yoga. These systems would cultivate not just the body, but it was mind, body, and spirit all at once. We compartmentalize these things even into different institutions in the West. This was all being done in one system. I understand there are thousands of such practices.

ancient practices, and they're typically passed down one-to-one, or one to a few people. Most people would never know they exist. The most recent teacher or master of the system, name was Li Hongzhe. He basically started teaching the system more broadly in 1992. Within China, had this. It was in Changchun, China that he started.

and he basically taught in an auditorium. People would come. They were very interested. They had heard it has some health benefits. This is actually one of the common things. It kind of looks a bit like Tai Chi. Some people have seen it. And the central principles that it espouses are truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance or forbearance. But another way, and I was recently reminded when I was doing a kind of a lecture at Hillsdale College,

Jan Jekielek (09:04.829)
It just reminded me, because of the nature of this place, that another translation for this that I hadn't used in a long time is, to be true, good, and endure. That's what people are living. There's voluminous teachings around this, but there aren't a lot of rules. This is what makes it very difficult, I think, in the West for people to even understand it, because there's no hierarchy. That would be a rule. There's no leaders. Even Li Hongzhi, there's no worship.

that's not allowed. You're supposed to live by the teachings. There's no treasury. You're not allowed to enrich yourself from it in any way. There's no even roster. You don't join something. It's like you living the teachings makes you a Falun Gong practitioner, not joining the group of Falun Gong practitioners or something like that. Another thing, Roger, if you were an amazing Falun Gong practitioner and I just wanted to emulate you, copy you,

As far as can tell in the teachings, I'm not allowed to do that. I have to understand these teachings and live them myself, my own way. Why is this important in this context? We have this movement, extremely grassroots, extremely bottom-up, promoting a lot of agency in people. It grows, spread one-to-one. Lee Hong-Jae only taught for about two years, 1992 to 1994. Then he said, if you like this, you're welcome to share it with others.

People shared it one-to-one, so to speak, and set up practice sites and parks and other places because there's also no houses of worship or something like that. It doesn't work like that. By the end of the 90s, there were 70 to 100 million people doing it. One in 13 Chinese, if you believe the real number, I think it was probably more than one in 13, were doing this.

and that was bigger than the Communist Party of China, which was 60 million at the time. Communism is very hierarchical. the edicts come from the very top of the party, it's incredibly important to follow that. If you don't, heads roll, so to speak. In a way, it was quite incompatible. By the way, this is also important.

Jan Jekielek (11:27.478)
It's not political. There's no desire for political power. But there is a desire to be able to practice and be able to exercise what we call in America our First Amendment rights. These are our core rights, our core protections from government in the Bill of Rights. Freedom of belief, freedom of religion, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly.

These are the core things that we need to be allowed to do as human beings. These are the things that allow us to be human and to exercise our humanity. James Amann, the dictator at the time, decided no. Sorry, is not acceptable. We're going to eradicate you guys. Falun Gong became the newest black class. In communist societies, there's a hiss.

Every communist society does this. There's always someone that's targeted as the cause of the woes of the society, and those people need to be struggled against. They need to be re-educated or broken, and if they're not broken, can be killed too. That's routine. For example, in China, it started with the landowners. Actually, most places, it started with the landowners because they wanted to seize the land. No one has private property except the regime, of course, has all the property.

Anyway, it's kind of an excuse to take people's stuff, so to speak. But there's always a black class. There's always an external enemy, America, that's always been for the Chinese Communist Party. And there's always an internal enemy. in 1989, it was the student movement, which led to the Tiananmen Square massacre. And then that became the black class, or it was already the black class before the massacre. That's how the massacre was allowed to happen. And then Falun Gong in 99.

Now this sets up a very unique situation. This is how we get to forced organ harvesting at scale from prisoners of conscience. Falun Gong practitioners are, first of all, mass propagandists pushed into the system, as it always is, against the black class, the new black class, to explain why you're supposed to hate and vilify these people and also be able to do

Jan Jekielek (13:47.692)
bad things to them. We have this quirk in our psychology as human beings. We don't like to harm people generally. There's a small subset of the population that is perfectly fine with harming people— psychopathic tendencies, some cluster B personalities, disorders, things like that. But most people don't. But people can be tricked into going along with it by imagining that people are bad, or somehow dangerous, or lesser than us.

There's different variations of this theme, but go back to the 1930s Germany and you'll see how that works. And even more recent times, which we don't necessarily need to talk about. But it's a very common formula. it's always before any atrocity, before any kind of mass movement against a group, you need that part because you have to get kind of the broader population on board with doing bad things to a group.

There's this dehumanization part. They do that massive propaganda in the system, and then they try to re-educate these people. There's a whole well-developed system of breaking people, getting them to submit to the will of the party, all of that. Re-education, transformation is another horrible word that I've heard. Basically, you don't sign the piece of paper that says, renounce, I'm a good party guy, I'm going to help re-educate others,

all that, you'll get tortured until you sign that piece of paper. Or, now it turns out that Falun Gong practitioners, perhaps because of this unique nature of the system where I think it promotes particular agency among the people who actually do it, they're not breaking easily. So now they're incarcerating huge amounts of them. Okay, maybe a million, maybe two million in 2005.

The special rapporteur on torture at the UN, he said that half of the people in this entire massive incarceration system they have were Falun Gong practitioners. So they incarcerated a massive amount, and here's where you have the setup for the beginnings of this atrocity.

Dr. McFillin (15:52.867)
I'm really curious about your health journey because I think this speaks a lot to the Falun Gong movement, the practitioners, the work that they're doing. It also sets the stage, I believe, for greater discussion on the spiritual battle that exists. What do you believe was the mechanism for your healing?

Jan Jekielek (16:11.618)
Haha, wow. So you're getting to the really hard questions now, right off the bat, hey?

Dr. McFillin (16:20.076)
That's the nature of this program.

Jan Jekielek (16:23.0)
So this is a question that I would have answered in different ways at different parts of my life. That's why it actually is a hard question. Because when I first started, I had no explanation. When I first started it, I tried it on. I was open-minded. My mother was into alternative medicine things. I was not. But I knew it worked. She had healed herself, actually from cancer through some kind of South American fungus. I don't even remember exactly what it was.

I that the possibility of alternative health methods existed and so forth, so I was open. And by the way, there's no treatment for GB. You're just kind of stuck with it. So I tried this and it made me feel better for the first time in a long time. just, this is excellent. Let's do it, right? And two months into it, basically I was starting to feel a lot better and I had a stat neurologist appointment.

And when I saw her, she did my measurements and I think they check your cerebral spinal fluid with DB and things like that. And she's like, you are in complete remission. I don't know what happened. I don't know what you're doing. Keep doing what you're doing, but you don't need to see me anymore. You're great. You're not just fine. You're great. And for me, I hadn't fully even grasped at that moment what had happened.

I had started reading the teachings of Falun Gong a little bit, but I didn't fully grasp what I was doing entirely at this point yet, if that makes sense. I just knew I had this incredible experience. I knew there was energy coming into my body. Perhaps this is really good for my journalism career, but—

I'm a particularly skeptical person. It's good for journalists, but it's not good for general life. Everything that anyone's ever says to you, a little bit like, hmm. You don't take anything, almost you almost take nothing at face value. You're just always a little bit, hmm, right? And so with this, I wasn't terribly against it, but I wasn't terribly for it either. It's not like I was like, of course, this is gonna change my life.

Jan Jekielek (18:45.622)
So it was remarkable when I felt this energy coming into my body doing this, because that's what happened. And that's the reason I kept doing it. And of course, and I like the principles, the principles of truthfulness, compassion, forbearance. I thought that these are noble principles. I can get behind that. But I didn't really fully understand what I was doing. And I would read the teachings. And a lot of it is rooted in kind of traditional Chinese cosmology. It was difficult for me.

to kind of understand it at first, okay?

Well, okay, I'm gonna share something which I don't often share, but I think maybe it's good. It'll be good for your audience. had this really interesting moment. Actually many, but I'll share the one that was pivotal, okay? I was doing, we have this standing exercise in Falun Gong where you kind of hold this, it's like a standing meditation. You hold these postures for a long time. And in this, I suddenly have a vision, okay?

Kind of like what you think of in the movies as a vision. Like people have, you're seeing different. So I'm seeing my life pass before my eyes. But it looks odd. I just, was fascinating. I mean, it's fascinating. I'm just like, wow, this is incredible. My life is passing before my eyes. Wow. And I'm watching it. It's like a movie reel, right? Kind of moving quickly, but I'm experiencing it almost like in real time. But it's odd. It's different. It's off. Something's not right.

It's not how I remember it, but it's clearly what it is. It dawns on me in the midst of this vision that I'm experiencing my life through my mother's eyes. This was unbelievable for a whole lot of reasons. I'm a very, very independent person. In the bell curve, I'm on the front end. Don't tell me what to do. Don't tread on me. I'm the guy with the

Jan Jekielek (20:46.594)
rattlesnake flag, even though I didn't know what this was at the time. I like to be able to set my own agendas. I don't like people invigilating me. I'm very, very self-motivated. My mother was born in the middle of World War II, lost her mother at nine to cancer, was operated on without anesthetic at age five for her appendix. She had a really tough childhood, like really tough.

saw a lot of death, saw lot of the Nazis, take the family fortune, kill family members, and then the Russians or the Soviets and then the Polish communists. So anyway, a lot of suffering. So my mother, if you take a bell curve of overprotectiveness, she's also in the top percentile, even among very overprotective moms, which many of us are familiar with. And this was a tough

Relationship easy could imagine right because you have on the one hand you have this person is super independent And has their own ideas about the world and then on the other hand you have someone and by the way My mother's also incredibly observant, right? So she would you know, is that a strange blemish you have on your face? Or is this like or your cock? Did you was that a cough? I thought I heard like a quarter of a cough there and you get the idea Okay, and pull on top of that poles are generally hyperchondriacs. Okay, so the whole thing was just really tough. It was tough we loved each other but

You know, there's a lot of lot of tension always okay, and this vision shows me Like I just I thought she was a little bit crazy to be honest, right and Maybe a little bit. don't know. I probably shouldn't say that to maybe she'll watch this episode. But mom, please forgive me for thinking that But No, I saw what what she saw like somehow

and understood that this is what I was seeing and I got it and it completely blew my mind, right? Because I saw like how I saw...

Jan Jekielek (22:55.054)
I saw how I would hurt her inadvertently, sometimes intentionally. I saw the things that triggered her. I saw her pains. I saw all these things through her lens of this, you know, the first born child who, and by the way, just as another crazy thing, right? She was told, because the pregnancy was so tough, she was told she would have to abort me or she might die. And she chose not to do that. On top of everything else, you know, like, you know, that's a...

very grateful for that decision, of course, right? I'm of joking, but so anyway, this was the setup. so we just had this fraught relationship. And I was always running away and she was always, you know, and I just, I came out of this and it just completely blew me away. And I had an idea in my mind how to fix our relationship. And the next time I went back to Toronto, you know, I fixed it. In 24 hours, I was able to shift.

this decades of this relationship because I had this idea how to do it. And it just changed it to the point where we were both just stunned. And this was a time when a lot of people, this is early 2000s, a lot of people, there's this massive propaganda coming out of communist China. A lot of people are believing it. This is part of the reasons the Epoch Times was started back in 2000 was to try to counter

crazy narratives from Communist China that a lot of people in the West were believing, even that China was liberalizing and stuff like this. It was a crazy narrative out of its face. can explain why in a moment, why it was obvious to me it was crazy back then, but it was a 95-5 issue and everyone believed it, that this was going to happen. Anyway, no, and so my mother, after this, it was such a stunning shift in our ability to relate to one another that she became this massive

positive force for Falun Gong. My mother's also very strong personality. When she gets something in her head, that's the way it's going to be, and she's going to tell you. When people would regurgitate some of this propaganda, she would just tear a strip off of them. I was like, this is the best use of this personality trait I've ever seen. Yeah. It was quite wonderful and touching.

Jan Jekielek (25:17.518)
Also, think people learn some things too along the way. That's really what sold me. It's a long story, but if you want to know how I got into it, I got into it because of this amazing physical healing that I experienced, which was astonishing. But I didn't really fully understand what I was doing, and I didn't really believe that it worked because of how Li Hongzhi said,

it worked. But as I had these experiences, like this one I just described, I'm not going to describe the teachings to you. That's a thing. Better people get it from the horse's mouth, so to speak. But I saw the teachings appearing in my life in ways, and that's another thing about it, which is really interesting. You're not supposed to pursue things too much. At least that's how I understand it.

You have an idea about where you want to go, but you let those things come to you in a way more than the rat race where you're pursuing. This is also fascinating because since that time when I decided I would give my life to service, I've been very serious about it, in some cases making some really tough decisions around that.

And sometimes I would just know, even I remember with my wife, now with, I've had my wife, amazing wife of 21 years, who's just like the best person in the world. And I mean, everyone agrees with me, but it's much better than me. And people say, yeah, you're right. You're told that you're not just, you're not exaggerating it. This is true, right? I had to make decisions where I really thought this decision is going to be, this is going to be the end of this relationship, because, but I have no choice because I've made my vow, right?

But afterwards, turns out, no, this is the only way it could have actually worked in the first place. And so I've had this, in my view, because of my commitment to truthfulness, compassion, and forbearance, or being true, good, and enduring, and being serious about that, I feel like this magical and committing my life to service, which is really these things kind of go hand in hand, actually.

Jan Jekielek (27:41.238)
I like I've led this amazing magical life. It's led me to be able to be on this podcast with one of the top podcasts in the world, with Roger. And who would have ever guessed that that would be possible? I didn't know where my life would go. But I've gotten to help a lot of people. I've gotten to write a book that I think can help people understand really what this regime that we're dealing with is about, which I still think, even though we've made a lot of progress in the last 10 years or so.

I still don't think we fully grasp how they think and how they work. And we need to do that to be able to deal with them effectively.

Dr. McFillin (28:17.541)
Jan, your story is beautiful and it's very familiar to me from other guests who've come on here when we start talking about the nature of disease. If I'm hearing you correctly, if we take out a kind of a wide angle lens and look back on your life, that this disease, the health problems that you were experiencing ended up being a catalyst to put you on your life path. And I'm curious to know if that shift in seeing

what this health journey was for you is actually part of an expansion or an understanding or a life purpose, a life path that reflects on challenges in our lives as happening for us and not to us.

Jan Jekielek (29:03.16)
Well, answer first of all is that what you just described is a core principle of Falun Gong. In fact, if it fits into that third ren or the forbearance, it's actually a more complex concept. There's stoicism in there. There's tolerance to people. There's tolerance to pain. There's not seeing suffering as a bad thing, but in fact, as a very good thing. All of this is tied up in this third principle.

Okay. And so I try to live that. And in fact, when I look back, and I mean this sincerely, isn't just like, when I look back at that moment where I got GB, I truly think it was the best thing that ever happened to me. Because I had a decent path. I was doing well. I probably would have become some kind of academic or something like that. That's where I was heading. It certainly looked like that. this was so outside of my frame of reference. But when I look

Jan Jekielek (30:06.766)
When I say I live this wonderful life, I truly do. I'm not saying it's not hard and there isn't suffering. There is. All of this is true. For a living, for example, you thank you for your kind words about American thought leaders, but for a living, I get to talk to people I find fascinating and learn from them, and people pay me money to do that. That is astonishing.

It's just an amazing thing, right? Who would have guessed? For me personally, that's what I'm interested in. I'm not a financially motivated person. Again, there's these bell curves. I'm unusually non-financially motivated. I've discovered this about myself when I realized what people do for money. I'm like, you just sold your soul for money. How could you do that? That's crazy. Who would do that? But apparently, it's more important to people than to me for a lot of things.

I mean, I've never been tested with a billion dollars. So, you if anyone wants to try, could we could explore. Just kidding. But but no, but I get that we have different things which are important, which which which basically edify us, which make us our best selves, right, which which which where we flourish. And for me, talking to people where I'm genuinely curious about their life and thoughts and expertise like that is where I love that. And I think it's where I shine. I think that's why the show

is a relatively good one, let's say.

Dr. McFillin (31:35.674)
It's a great show actually and there's awe and there's wonderment into how this all played out. And ultimately when we're on our soul's path, there is an expression of this higher force. You can call it God or you can call it love or you know, there's words that describe this across cultures, but you're entering into this flow and you're letting that higher force source kind of express through you.

And life becomes this experience where you're in flow and there's joy and there's expression and there's love and you're in alignment with that higher force, which brings us to the Falun Gong practitioners and the way of life is there's a higher authority that exists. Our place in this incarnation, in this life is understood to be temporary

And our soul is going through these lessons, right? When you discuss your relationship to your mother, it's very clear to me that you were to learn love and you were learning compassion and empathy. And when you describe your mom's journey, her life experiences, now you have this greater understanding of why she may have responded to you or raised you in the way she did. And so that's a depth of empathy that you get to see life through her eyes.

Jan Jekielek (33:03.52)
And here's the kicker, right? Because of the particular, let's say, challenges and like, you know, she made my life difficult. She gave me a lot of wonderful things. She also made my life very difficult. But to me, it's very obvious that these difficulties, these some of these things, which I really disliked, right? At the time, right? And actually probably most people would dislike, to be honest, right? Actually were really important.

in me be the person that I am today and be able to do the things that I do. It's very clear to me that those formative experiences, some of which were unfortunate, and not necessarily at my mom's hand, but in different scenarios, some quite unfortunate, were actually incredibly important in forming this particular way of thinking, particular disposition that fits well

into what I do today.

Dr. McFillin (34:03.378)
Well said, well said. So now let's talk about some specifics, know, kind of the mechanics of this and what's going on in China right now. And I think we're getting an idea why the Falun Gong people would be targeted by this regime. So how does a person become a prisoner of conscience, number one, in this regime? And then how does that transition to becoming an organ source?

Jan Jekielek (34:32.302)
Let me just paint the picture of how this machine of death works. In a normal situation where you're going to be an organ recipient, you need a new heart, let's say, a vital organ. You're going to die if you don't get a heart in some amount of time. Sometimes you have to wait a long time, sometimes you pass away before you get it.

The reason for that is that to source an organ ethically, there has to be a catastrophic accident to a person that also happens to match you in a variety of ways, blood type, tissue type, size, as a starting point, the histology, is the tissue aspect. Someone has to have that accident at a time when you are still able to receive a transplant.

the organ recipients, they've got a grab bag at home, they're ready to rock at any moment because the phone call could come in, that right person just had that motorcycle accident, and we're going to get you together, we're going to take the organs, give it to you, done. It's rare. There were 40,000 transplants done in America last year. That's the record. Because of this reality,

How is it that you get to a two week wait time and you can schedule a transplant? So there were actually ads before 2006, before we started to report on this that literally said this online, publicly available. And one of the original whistleblowers, this was the scenario, is a transplant surgeon who had a patient actually do this. And it was like,

The prisoners of conscience are basically, as I mentioned before, caught by the system in the process of eradicating them, initially attempting to break them. But as soon as some very evil person—and I theorize and kill to order in the book who that was, I think I make a compelling case, I don't know for sure—figured out that you can actually monetize the idea that you're eradicating these already dehumanized people,

Jan Jekielek (36:51.854)
You also want to grow a transplant industry because there was this low-level transplant experimentation and stuff already happening before 1999, before 2000. We even have a surgeon that has confessed to killing someone by removing their organs during that period. But here, now what you can do is you can keep someone incarcerated, can blood type them, tissue type them, and organ scan them, and mass, and create a database.

Now you have a database of all these vitals. So when someone comes in, pays that money, the moment that transaction is made, there's a database query that happens, and you have your prisoner of conscience pre-matched, ready to rock, so to speak. For a person with extremely loose morals, that person can be shipped and killed to order. And that's why my book is called Killed to Order. This is why this is a next level type of extreme organ trafficking. You can only have it

where there's a state actor involved that has the ability to have this coercive power in a system and a large population of people waiting to be killed on demand. That's how you overcome the probability issue that someone's going to match, in a large population, you'll have a few people that will match already. That's this monstrous system. And then it just grows from there. The moment that they figure this out,

2000 to 2005, geometric growth of hospitals. We get to, I think by 2010, if I recall correctly, I really have to check that number because I mentioned a lot, we get to 142 hospitals. Ethan Gutman, of the heroes of the research on this movement, in 2016, he testified, I believe it's 2016, to Congress about he defends the numbers of transplants that are happening every year. He says 60 to 100,000 is his estimate.

and he explains how he got that under oath at a congressional hearing. I think that boundary, I used 60 to 90,000, it's slightly lower. He kind of criticizes me for that because I felt like too ostentatious or something to say 60 to 100,000. But the whole boundary is kind of low, actually. We're being unusually conservative. And we always have been because it's so hard for people to believe that this even happens. As you pointed out early on, there's this phenomenon of not wanting to know.

Jan Jekielek (39:17.902)
wanting—my mind was doing this too when I first heard about it, right? We all are going to experience this, right? We don't want to believe that something this macabre, this horrible could even be happening. I wish it wasn't, right? for a whole suite of reasons, for 14 or 15 years, this was literally almost left alone, very little. In Israel, there was a law passed against receiving transplants. In Spain, was another law passed, mostly the world panned it.

some international organizations kind of run cover for it in a way. I could talk about that, although I still don't fully understand it. I think it was part of how the CCP makes us complicit. have a whole chapter in the book that talks about that. around 2015, they dehumanize another group of people and they mass incarcerate another group of people, the Uyghurs, and then they start using them as a second group. And Ethan, know I'm supposed to be plugging my own book, Kill to Order,

But Ethan Gottman himself has a new book out relatively recently called The Xinjiang Procedure, where he gets down into the detailed specifics around what is happening to the Uyghur people right now. So there's actually two books on forced organ harvesting that have come out concurrently. I hope they can really work in synergy. But Ethan is a true hero. Previously, he wrote a book called The Slaughter, which was focused, course, on Falun Gong, who were the main victims all along. And I think probably still are, but the Uyghurs have kind of been

added as this massive, unusually vulnerable group, is, according to the US government, literally being genocided. And I don't mean that in the way we use that word genocide, casually, like we talked about war death, like a lot of war death as genocide. It's not. Genocide is very specific. It's an attempt to eradicate in whole or in part an entire group of people as a matter of policy. So that we believe, and many other countries do as well, that

Chinese Communist Party is genociding the Uyghurs. I think they're also genociding the Falun Gong and the Tibetans. We could debate that, right? But they're doing horrible things to a number of groups of people. And it's still hard for us to understand that something like this exists. And this is what I'm, this is purpose of this book, Killed to Order, is to try to just at least get us to the point where we can say, yes, this is absolutely real and we don't want to be a part of it.

Dr. McFillin (41:45.736)
Yeah. And this is always a challenging question because you've discussed a totalitarian systems as pathocratic that they're structurally elevating psychopaths to positions of power. And if you believe that there is a battle being waged, not just in the political realm, but in the spiritual one, then what is being targeted in Falun Gong practitioners is not accidental, truthfulness, compassion, forbearance. These are not.

They're not just values. very, they're the very things that a system of control must destroy in order to function. Is the persecution of people committed to these principles, the most explicit example in the modern world of what spiritual war actually looks like in practice?

Jan Jekielek (42:33.834)
It's fascinating that you say that, but of course, yes. It's interesting because I hadn't quite thought about it like that, like you just said, absolutely. I think it's the most poignant and obvious example. If you understand, if you are able to accept, and I hope most people are at this point, that Falun Gong practitioners on their face,

This the centerpiece of their existence, is trying to live these principles. They know they're accountable to, as you said, the higher power, and they know that this is their life's work. Destroying these people, these are the people that will never allow for tyranny, ever, ultimately.

tyranny despises. This is the reason it's the First Amendment for us in America. The fundamental protection from government that we have is speech, faith, conscience, religion, assembly. These are the basic things that allow us to exercise our most basic human rights. And this is how I knew, just by the way, this is how I knew that China was never going to liberalize. I knew that in 2000, even as most people looked at me like I had three heads on

I was like, no, they're killing people for exercising their fundamental right. That's crazy. Of course they're not liberalizing. How could they be? They destroy all semblance of civil society. This is actually another thing I talk about in my book is this amazing scholar, Cheng Dong-shu, out of Stanford. used to be a fervent communist, got sent into the countryside, wrote some analyses the regime didn't like, spent—

decade in prison himself, had a lot of time to think about it, wrote a book explaining the institutional genes of communism. He figured out fascinating things about how totalitarian systems are able to prevent themselves from changing, prevent that grassroots civil society change that changes a place like Taiwan or South Korea into a democracy out of education, preventing that from ever happening in their system.

Jan Jekielek (44:58.83)
I struggle with a lot of these ideas in the book, but to go back to your original question, absolutely, I think this is fundamentally a spiritual battle. I don't get to talk about that aspect very often, to be perfectly honest, so I appreciate being able to. I think the way you characterized it is frankly more astute than what I grasped.

or put more astutely than what I grasp myself. So thank you.

Dr. McFillin (45:34.015)
This transitions into another thing that we're facing. I don't think it's discussed enough. I've introduced it on my podcast. I've written about it. There is a global elite class that is obsessed with extending life, enhancing the body, transcending biological limitations. like there's billions are being poured into longevity research, organ replacement, which obviously creates a market for this and technologies that treat the

human body as an like upgradeable hardware, you know, like we're a series of parts. And I have to ask, is there some connective tissue here when, when elites begin seeing the human body as a resource to be harvested, optimized and extended, then who decides whose body has value and who's doesn't.

Jan Jekielek (46:25.742)
I had to laugh when you said, what's the connective tissue? You we got a bit of a body illusion there. Anyway, it's like a little bit of forced organ harvesting humor here on the side, you know? Anyway, no, but we have to laugh about these things, because this is so dark, right? Like, if you dwelled in it for too long, and without being able to lighten your heart a little bit, it can drive you crazy, I think.

Dr. McFillin (46:38.59)
No pun intended.

Jan Jekielek (46:55.212)
So thank you for that, the connective tissue. So how many of your viewers, did you ever talk on your show about the hot mic moment between Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, Kim Jong-un was there, but he wasn't part of the conversation, in Tiananmen Square observing a military parade? Did you cover this? Okay.

Dr. McFillin (47:19.028)
I have not, and I know that you spoke about it when we were at the Kennedy Center earlier this week. Please share that story, it's important.

Jan Jekielek (47:23.158)
Right. Yeah. No, it's apt, okay? Because basically, this is a hot mic that's caught on Chinese central television. Reuters is broadcasting this. My phone is buzzing off. If there was a hook, it would be buzzing off the hook, but I think it's just buzzing.

paraphrase what they said. Xi Jinping says to Vladimir Putin, we're 70, we're just babies. Putin says, astonishingly, through continual organ transplantation, perhaps we can achieve immortality.

Wow, okay. And then she responds, our target is 150 years. That's a truncated version of the conversation. Okay. And for me, this was a cathartic moment because I knew about what they call Project 981 in China, which is the Chinese version of this elite longevity project that you're kind of describing. That's not as systematized, perhaps among the global elites, so to speak, like people have their own versions, right? Transfusions.

diet, next level hospital care, all this kind of stuff. That's what I imagine the Chinese were doing. I also knew about the Forced Organ Harvesting Initiative, but it never occurred to me. the concept hadn't entered my mind that the organ transplantation is a centerpiece of their elite longevity project. Indeed, was this obituary that was sent to me some years back.

about a state level minister, and sometimes you get this weird creepy stuff from China like this, where the author was gushing about how awesome it was that this guy had had multiple organs transplanted before he died, that had extended his life. was just kind of, okay, this is weird, and probably related to organ harvesting. But it never connected me with this elite longevity project. So it's obvious that not

Jan Jekielek (49:33.982)
only is this $9 billion estimated annual industry, which is course a lot of incentive for people with loose morals, so to speak, say that unusually lightly. But it's also obviously a centerpiece of this elite longevity program, which they call Project 981. And now, if you're a Chinese super elite, you have unlimited organs available to you, basically in perpetuity.

I was on a podcast with someone, we're talking about this, and I was like, what would it be worth to you if you're someone who had no moral boundary to have unlimited organs available to you essentially forever until you actually die? What is that worth? And the person said to me, well, that would be worth everything. And I was like, yeah, I think you're right. $9 billion is nothing compared to what that's worth if you're willing to kill on demand for the privilege.

So now this is what's really interesting when it comes to your question, Is that some Chinese believe that this was that Chinese state television is way too controlled for this to be able to have been a hot mic moment. And one of the theories, Let's call it an actual conspiracy theory, right? Because I think it's talking about a conspiracy and it's a theory. Or as Brett Weinstein would say, it would be a conspiracy hypothesis. Okay, he's always.

educating me on this. mean, reminding me, because I actually know the concept well, but is that this was not actually a hot mic moment. This was an advertisement. Two people around the world who might have loose enough morals to take advantage of this system, but also the moment you take advantage of it, you're buying into our system. You're buying into our worldview. Now you're with us. Now you're part of our

I mean, I don't know what to say, evil scheme, right? And we have you on our side because they don't have a lot of people on their side right now and they're frankly, their whole system is incredibly rough shape because it's again, topic maybe for another podcast, but it's a parasitic system. It doesn't actually build anything itself. It doesn't innovate. It needs to steal. needs to harm basically. It needs to control.

Jan Jekielek (51:57.006)
I'm not saying that there hasn't been economic development, there has been all sorts, some of that economic development, that's the reason their whole real estate businesses collapsed, because they did a lot of GDP growth through real estate building of stuff that wasn't useful. That's one way you generally have to grow your GDP in a way where people can use the thing that you've made.

these centrally planned economies, that doesn't necessarily need to happen. You just say what's going to happen and it happens. They're in rough shape and it's possible that they're I tend to think it's a hot mic moment, by the way, just for the record, but it's just interesting that some people, Chinese mostly, believe what I just said.

Dr. McFillin (52:41.418)
said something very interesting that just piqued my interest. around like a parasitic economy and a parasitic system. And when you start thinking about things from the spiritual realm, and I've had these conversations with people with various spiritual gifts, and they talk about the low dimensional field, the field in which the three dimensional field of energy in which we inhabit the density of this plane that we inhabit in this earth.

is to survive on this and to create on this the lower energies are parasitic and they harvest fear and they create control mechanisms which is kind of this inner web of global elites that have created these worldwide systems that fuel a war complex, fear provocation and a shifting of resources into the very few at the expense of

of the many in a system like this exists in China. And it's very anti-life because if we're talking about God, the creative life force, it's ultimately aligned with what everything is of nature. Nature is life. It's an expression. It's a life force. And we're living in a period of time where I think culturally that

there's some dangerous concepts that are being...

put out into our kind of zeitgeist, right? Where like life that's worthy of protection is being actively renegotiated. So abortion, euthanasia, assisted suicide, gene editing, even AI personhood. So when a culture begins sliding on that question, even here in the West, in the United States,

Dr. McFillin (54:35.872)
Are we losing our moral authority? Like, is there a connecting thread between how we value life here and then our own capacity to be outraged by, you know, what is being destroyed there?

Jan Jekielek (54:50.254)
I think one way to look at what communist China is today is that you could view it as a of a cautionary tale. something that, of course, as you know, since you've watched American Thought Leaders before, you know I've done a lot of coverage of big questions we had during the pandemic, let's just say a whole range of big questions, right, including where does this totalitarian impulse that we experienced come from?

Was it just all here? People were ready to pounce and force people to do stuff that they didn't need to do. These are profound questions that we really need to answer if free societies are to survive. I don't think we've finished litigating these questions yet, not by a long shot. What struck me is that the way I think about it, I think a lot of will be familiar with the idea that

of Hippocratic medicine. Hippocratic medicine is roughly that you have a caregiver and you have the patient, and the caregiver's job is to understand the totality of the patient and provide, if an intervention is needed at all, to provide an intervention that would harm that person the least. That's a wonderful system. The innate dignity of the human being is central to it.

and it's a one-on-one relationship. really, you're only thinking about that one person. And then medicine, more broadly, and even something like public health becomes something where it's the emergent property of all these people being treated this way, in a very personalized way, that reflects their inner dignity. The other side of that spectrum, if you will—but you can't always do things like that, and there's exceptions and so forth. We can discuss that.

For example, wartime, when you're deciding who do you take off the battlefield. You have to use a different way of looking at things. Temporarily, it's an exception. The other side of it is utilitarian bioethics. Utilitarian bioethics is the greatest good for the greatest number. If you're on a battlefield, I love thinking about this because we've all seen the videos where the medic's going through the battlefield, they're putting Xs on certain people's foreheads.

Jan Jekielek (57:11.768)
They're taking other people. They're making the really tough choices. They're playing God. They're saying, this person's going to live, this person's going die, because I just don't have the resources to take them all. I'm making horrible decisions, but I have to. What else am I going to do? I'm going to take the people I'm going to try to have survive. One thing I realized as I was writing this book was that this utilitarian bioethics is this, in a weird way, it's very much like that. It's like imagining the world kind of working like that all the time.

you're always picking the winners and picking the losers. You're always playing God. saying, it's okay to sacrifice a few for the whole. The problem is that someone's deciding what that greater good is. Now, in the communist system, under the Chinese Communist Party, that greatest good is always the supremacy and survival of the Communist Party. So you see what happens. This blew my mind because I've heard this a million times.

To make an omelet, have to break a few eggs. This is Uncle Joe Stalin's. I'm sorry for saying Uncle Joe. Joseph Stalin said this or Walter Durante. There's debate about that. anyway, it explains why to build this glorious Soviet utopia, we may have to sacrifice a few. But the effect of that is atrocity. And in every communist society, it's the same because human dignity doesn't mean anything anymore. If that's what it takes,

to get survival and supremacy of the Communist Party as being the greatest good, then that's what it takes. so the Chinese Communist Party has become the greatest mass killer in the history of world, the greatest killer in the history of the world over its decades of rule through this type of mentality. what is our, to me, the obvious lesson is that this

utilitarian bioethics, which has been on the rise in the West. There's an amazing book called Culture of Death by a man named Wesley Smith, who's been chronicling this from 2000. He wrote it in 2000 originally. He saw it. He was looking at assisted suicide. He was looking at just different manifestations of this weird, utilitarian, instrumentalized view of the human being and model of medicine.

Jan Jekielek (59:28.622)
and updated it in 2016. Unbelievable book that I think should be required reading for anyone interested in this space at all. If I had read this book before COVID, I would have seen it a completely different way. I had to learn all this the hard way before I got to Wesley's book, like year four or five, five or something like this. But anyway, that's where we will head to if we allow the apotheosis, if you will.

of utilitarian bioethics is the reality of the communist system. We have to understand what's happening over there, how they think, what they allow for, the insane things which are acceptable, the total degradation of the dignity of the human being, the simplicity with which a top leader can be destroyed, the struggles they've had to get put through, the hells in life they've had to get put through.

to even get to that position, the humiliations. You said something before, and you said it was, you didn't say anti-human, it was close to that, but I think it's an anti-human system. don't see looking at communism as a problem, as a political issue, which by the way, under communism, everything is viewed as a political issue. Reality is not really important. It's a political reality, a political utility of any

issue a fact or non-fact or statistic or whatever. But I truly think it's just an anti-humanity system. It has the greatest contempt for the most basic aspects of humanity. It instrumentalizes, it thinks of us as tools, as simple material things to be molded and wielded as it sees fit. And it inculculates people.

It's hard for people that aren't. For psychopaths, it's very easy to do that. That's why partially also, as you mentioned before, pathocratic system. Thank you for reading the book. That's great. I can tell. You're a deep reader. But it kind of forces people to be more like that in order to be able to survive in the system. That's how it makes us complicit. It takes away our moral high ground. It demands obedience, so to speak. And for us to not have that moral high ground, not the truthfulness.

Jan Jekielek (01:01:53.858)
compassion and forbearance as a centerpiece of our life or ability, or the Judeo-Christian tradition. There are a few specific faith systems that are under assault in China.

Dr. McFillin (01:02:13.816)
Yeah, and you've been a great interview. I just want to walk us into the final section of this because it really begs the question about the role of the United States government and us. Like, what can we do about something like this? I'm a product of the American public school system. I know you're Canadian, so I was exposed to what amounts to be a narrative that America is a force for good in the world. And this often justifies our role, our foreign policy agenda.

And it has justified foreign wars and the forever wars that we've been in here. And, by its fruits, you shall know it. Right. So we kind of take a look at what that agenda, what's, what's it for. And it's born death, you know, and it's born destruction. And here we are. in another, we're another war. And this is happening in, in China. American companies have outsourced its manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, rare earth minerals, technology supply chain.

and doing so has made itself dependent on a regime that is committing crimes against humanity. How do you think this is impacting our political elite and our decision-making from a foreign policy perspective?

Jan Jekielek (01:03:30.392)
Well, so as I think I mentioned that I have a whole chapter dedicated to explaining how the Chinese Communist Party explicitly makes people complicit, both internally and also its partners or its targets, let's say, internationally and so on. And so I think there's been a very dedicated effort over decades

to compromise the American elite class by the Chinese Communist Party. I'm not saying that people weren't willing participants, by the way, just to be clear. I'm not clearing people of their own accountability, but I can just tell you that this was a project of the CCP to do this, to create financial relationships. The moment that you have actually Jiang Zemin, the guy that started the persecution of Falun Gong himself, before he rose to power, he was one of these

so-called bamboozlers of the barbarians. His job was to court the Americans and others and basically bring them in and bring the investment in and convince them that they're working with the reformers and that if we work together, we'll stop the hardliners from having their way. Don't worry. But don't say anything bad, especially if there's the Tiananmen Square massacre. This is just a

temporary setback, if you say if you you know Do too many things against us the hardliners will win so work with us because we have a good really and and they took advantage one of our gullibility and two of our greed and that we have to be very honest about that because again It's a very when you have this financial relationship. It's hard to see sometimes You know what? Because you have a lot to lose if you notice that that that your partner

is doing really horrible things to their population. But it should also be a lesson. Can you trust someone that does that? No. And this is the part that I find so confusing. Because we've known all these years, or many of us have known, what the Chinese Communist Party is doing to its own people. But we still just got completely in bed. So when we have this engagement, in our mentality, we basically said,

Jan Jekielek (01:05:47.02)
we're going to change them, right? They're going to liberalize because of our massive financial input, because of our benevolent contribution, and so forth. And partially, we believe that, right? Of course, as I mentioned before, they never had any intention of doing that. They just wanted to make it look that way. But when that engagement happens, someone's being changed. And I think we were changed in the other direction, right? We started believing their propaganda. This is what the Chinese regimes are the—or not Chinese regimes, but all communist regimes—are the best at.

is propaganda, selling their kind horror show, cherry-picking the things that worked among the horror show and saying, look at the incredible great success, and by the way, all the bad things, that's propaganda against us, and we're just fantastic, and it's great. And it's this weird, specious ideology. I keep thinking about this because we just keep being attracted to it somehow. There's people with Che Guevara shirts.

forget that he is a mass murderer, he's a cool guy. We've had this love affair with communism in the West. I think that's also part of the reason. We want to believe for some reason that the system is good, that's what's sold to us. The effect of this all has been a lot of complicity and a lot of

the Chinese economy insinuating itself into the global system and into the American system. And now, if we were to do what I think would be the smartest, would be just to cut them off, because like I said, it's very much a parasitic system. Even today, as these flows have lessened quite a bit from past years, from past highs, it would hurt us a lot. And this is what makes it politically very difficult to just say,

You guys have really screwed things up for yourselves and for lot of people, right? And we should just let you have to deal with that, right? And let the Chinese people have their say. There's a huge one thing we haven't talked about, Is, you know, this amazing movement that of what's called the Quit the CCP movement that the Falun Gong practitioners have been enacting in China, know, of quietly helping people free themselves of communism, at least the mental chains of communism and so forth.

Jan Jekielek (01:08:10.254)
and that we might actually have a population that's quite ready to just have a normal society again and not this obscenely hierarchical totalitarian system that demands allegiance to it. Let that work itself out. We don't have to go to war. All we have to do is stop funding the parasitic economy that is using our money to keep itself alive.

The problem is that if we did that, we would also suffer and it wouldn't be politically expedient. That is more than just an academic thing because we live in a very fraught political reality. I think these are actually tough decisions to make. But I think that for the Chinese people and for the world, ultimately, that would be by far the best thing.

There's amazing literature that has been written, studies that have been done and then written as books, as literature, to show that essentially we built that, the world's biggest dictatorship. They were extremely good at extracting wealth, treasure, all sorts of things from us willingly.

and unwillingly without us doing anything. It's still this brittle economy. It's not like they figured out how to actually have a sustainable system. They don't. That's being shown repeatedly now. All they have is an export economy, and it's a very brittle system.

Dr. McFillin (01:10:00.493)
Yeah, I'm incredibly grateful for the conversation and for shining light on the darkness. you know, often people hear something like this and then it's so overwhelming. They just shift their mind back into their lives and they forget about subjects like this because it's just so upsetting and they don't think there's anything they can do about it. The first thing I want to let the audience know is that this book has not really been written. Like this has to be an issue.

that exposes this as a crime against humanity and reflects a shared values of everything that is good in all of us around the world is to take up issues like this out of love for each other. This is a human issue. And a lot of what we're talking about today is the spiritual nature of this. And darkness allows to

continue to thrive when there's no light that's shined on it. the courage here on your end is to take that risk and to put yourself out there knowing exactly who are running operations like this and the elites around the world who in this sick transhumanist movement are exploring these type of surgeries and these type of lifestyle interventions to try to

create almost a godlike status for themselves. I mean, they are to rule this world. This is a realm that dark principles and principalities do have great power and control. Just to wrap it up here, just a final word on what the average everyday person can do after being exposed to material like this, and then how can people be exposed to your work?

Jan Jekielek (01:11:57.208)
Well, as you thank you for pointing this out, a big part of the book is just trying to help people understand the mind of that regime. Because I really think that our policymakers don't fully grasp it. I think we've made a lot of progress, but I still think that we're not quite there. And I think maybe through the lens of forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience, you could grasp it, because that's how they view you as a tool to be used.

and disposable. Maybe even Iran is seeing this with its lack of help. The centerpiece of their Middle East strategy is suddenly not getting a lot of help from its key principality. So they really instrumentalize everything.

I mean, my hope is that I put an appendix at the end of the book, which kind of summarizes what literally anybody, whether you're just a grassroots, someone in a community, don't even particularly like going out there and being an activist or something like that. There's actually like a rotary club.

satellite club now. I loved Rotary clubs when I was younger. I used to run international youth programs. I could always count on these service organizations. They've created a club explicitly dedicated to ending forced organ harvesting, and it's a virtual club. You can join Rotary and be a part of it, and they're always organizing, screening, shining this light, as you just mentioned, Roger. So it's like for someone that just doesn't even want to, isn't particularly active, but wants to get involved in a community.

at a grassroots level. This exists for us, and it makes a difference. Awareness actually changes policy here. A hundred calls to a senator's office really gets them listening. There's actually federal legislation that's in the Senate, just got introduced a few days ago, to literally directly target this issue. At the state level, there's multiple states, six now, that have passed legislation to counter this issue, to make sure we don't fund

Jan Jekielek (01:14:09.102)
Medicare, Medicaid insurance fund anything related to transplants in China. If you're in the administration at that level or something like that, at the state or federal level, you can also just make a point of not cooperating with these institutions, not funding them. This could be put into law as well, but it could also be a decision made at the institutional level.

participate in the transplant program of Shina in any manner, shape, or form until some truly independent body assesses that they're no longer doing this machine of death, forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience thing, kill to order thing. So I have a lot of options in there. I write about it through the book, but I also summarize it to make it very easy to kind of grasp. so I would love it if you got the book. It's at killedtoodorder.com. That's a short link to Amazon.

but you can also get it at your local bookstore. If you're going to do that, call them, ask for it. They may even order a few copies. That would be great. You don't have to go through Amazon. It's just for a of people, that's the easiest way. Boom, and it arrives in the mail, killedtoorder.com. It's almost like a little movement, and it doesn't take a lot to participate, and I would love you to be a part of it.

Dr. McFillin (01:15:30.606)
Jan Jekielek, I want to thank you for a radically genuine conversation.

Jan Jekielek (01:15:36.12)
Thank you so much, Roger. This has been absolute pleasure.