EPISODE 292: A Crime the Modern World Prefers Not to See

Narrator (00:00:04):

Welcome to the Bill Walton Show, featuring conversations with leaders, entrepreneurs, artists, and thinkers. Fresh perspectives on money, culture, politics, and human flourishing. Interesting people, interesting things.

Bill Walton (00:00:25):

Well, we’re back and I’m delighted to be back with my good friend, Jan Jekielek, who was a senior editor at Epoch Times, and also is a marvelous interviewer program I highly recommend, probably better than mine. What are we calling your program now? It’s American Thought Leaders, and he’s had some amazing guests on it, and I highly recommend that. But that’s not what we’re here to talk about today.

(00:00:54):

Jan has written a book about a passion project that’s been really on his mind and troubling him as it should be, for a long time. And it’s a book that’s titled Kill to Order. And it’s about China’s organ harvesting industry and the true nature of America’s biggest adversary, and that would be China. And I highly recommend it because this book goes down so many different avenues that you want to explore, and it all ties China into one story. And it’s a real remarkable achievement. Good work.

Jan Jekielek (00:01:34):

Thank you. Thank you.

Bill Walton (00:01:34):

So what got you into this notion and how did the book take form?

Jan Jekielek (00:01:43):

Well, so this is an issue, this forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience at scale in China. It can only happen there. It’s a very unique, very extreme form of organ trafficking that I did some of the original reporting on back 20 years ago. And I’ve just been interested in all along. I’ve been covering it on and off for that time.

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In the early days, it was very difficult to get people to listen. The Chinese Communist Party’s approach always is attack the messenger. It’s kind of the standard approach when they’re faced with something as extreme as a crime against humanity or an atrocity like this. And also, it’s just so unfathomable. Again, maybe you’ll give me a chance to explain how it works, but [inaudible 00:02:29]-

Bill Walton (00:02:28):

I will. We will definitely get into that. That’s unfortunately important.

Jan Jekielek (00:02:33):

And when you face what’s actually happening, it’s really hard to believe. And there’s even a great film called Hard to Believe about it because it’s such an extreme violation of basic human dignity that most of us aren’t willing to accept. And the last few years, and I think maybe COVID played a role in this, like we saw, for example, all these people being welded into their homes in China during their zero [inaudible 00:03:00].

Bill Walton (00:02:59):

Literally welded.

Jan Jekielek (00:03:00):

Literally welded. Exactly. Yeah.

Bill Walton (00:03:01):

They’d take the door and they’d weld them in.

Jan Jekielek (00:03:03):

100%.

Bill Walton (00:03:04):

Incredible. Yeah.

Jan Jekielek (00:03:05):

And so, we got a sense of what that regime is capable of and there’s zero COVID insanity, this idea that they can control a respiratory virus. That also gave us insight into the mentality of the Communist Party. And so, I think that partially. There’s also against all odds, a survivor that came out a few years ago. That’s just really astonishing. I never thought we’d ever see one.

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But I think the combination of these things has shifted our public consciousness to a level where people are able to accept it. These days when I talk to people about it, they don’t just clue out in the middle of conversations, which has literally happened quite often when I first started talking about it. But now they just say, “Oh my God, that’s horrible.”

Bill Walton (00:03:47):

Well, let’s start with that because I think that once I understood what it was, it totally changed my view about a lot of things, especially the Chinese Communist Party and just how horrible this practice is. So what is forced organ harvesting?

Jan Jekielek (00:04:08):

Forced organ harvesting is just taking organs from someone against their will, which is of course horrible and is done in…

Bill Walton (00:04:15):

When they’re alive.

Jan Jekielek (00:04:17):

When they’re live. There’s black market operations that do this around the world. This is pretty horrible. But what China does under the Communist Party is really a next level thing. And you really need a state actor to accomplish it. You need an entity that can push massive coercive power through an entire population for the purposes of propaganda and for the purposes of incarceration. And I can kind of explain why these two elements are so critical. So you can imagine, and probably viewers of your show are familiar a bit with how communist parties operate, but I’ll offer a few options here about kind of how they think.

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So in communist societies, there’s always an external enemy and an internal enemy, 100% of the time, because the regime needs to have someone to blame for all the problems it creates. So externally, since the beginning, it’s been America. America’s always the number one enemy because it’s the number one threat. It’s the bastion of freedom. Even today, with all its problems, it’s still the bastion of freedom for any communist regime. But internally, that changes who the enemy… who the black class, they call them black classes. And very early on, it was the landowners that were the black class, basically.

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So what the regime did is they pushed massive propaganda into the population. They said, “These landowners, they’re actually the cause of your problems. They took what’s rightfully yours and they’re bad people. In fact, they’re lesser than you. It’s kind of okay to just take their things with no recompense. And if they die along the way, does that really matter? No, probably not because they’re bad.” And so, also pushing mass propaganda through a population, it kind of activates a quirk in our psychology, in human psychology where the moment we start believing because of this incessant propaganda that someone is either lesser than us or somehow dangerous or evil, or just somehow like a pariah.

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That allows us to kind of go along with… this is what has happened many times in history with a lot of terrible things being done to them because we don’t usually like to do bad things to our neighbor or something like that. And this landowner might have been a neighbor. So there’s been successive different black classes over the course of the history of the Communist Party. ’89, you’ll be familiar with the Tiananmen Square Massacre. It was students.

Bill Walton (00:06:52):

Wasn’t the pivotal moment though, the cultural revolution, Mao’s cultural revolution.

Jan Jekielek (00:06:56):

Yes.

Bill Walton (00:06:56):

Because we think of China, and I think of it before the communist took over. You think of Confucian, Buddhist, Taoist. And while this Chinese civilization is what? 3,000 years old in its history, it wasn’t an aggressive external culture that was trying to conquer other people, particularly. It was very, very contained and peaceful in large part.

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And I guess as I was looking this up, the Chinese initially thought the body was sacred and received from parents, and not to be desecrated. And then what happened with the cultural revolution where Mao reeducated everybody is they destroyed all that. They burned the temples, the monks were in prison, Confucian scholars denounced, and that they were left with the materials ideology with nothing underneath it.

Jan Jekielek (00:07:59):

And this is so critical. Why you have the cultural revolution and these successives. So in the culture revolution, the holders of the traditional culture became the black classes, okay? Or for example, teachers. There’s an amazing sci-fi series on Netflix called the 3 Body Problem. I don’t know if you caught that. I got so many phone calls from people telling me about this because it’s a sci-fi series, but as it would happen, it starts with a scene from the cultural revolution in China.

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And it shows it in a way that I’ve never seen portrayed in cinema or anywhere, like very, very powerfully and they really tried to make it accurate. And it’s a man who’s a scientist and very successful scientist, and he’s being struggled against by the Red Guard, right? And everyone’s like, “You’re evil, you’re horrible. Admit your faults.” And this is the thing in these struggle sessions, you might survive if you say, “Actually, everything I believed before was wrong.”

Bill Walton (00:09:01):

Paint a picture of a struggle session. What’s it like?

Jan Jekielek (00:09:05):

Well, so exactly. I’ll tell you about it, but I would recommend watch episode one of the 3 Body Problem on Netflix, if you happen to have it.

Bill Walton (00:09:12):

Kenny who produces this was saying… Okay.

Jan Jekielek (00:09:15):

It’s astonishingly well done. And you could even cut in a clip of it.

Bill Walton (00:09:19):

Even though we’re trying to sell your book, we want to…

Jan Jekielek (00:09:22):

Well, no. Listen, the purpose of my book-

Bill Walton (00:09:24):

What’s the name of this again?

Jan Jekielek (00:09:24):

I would love people to buy my book.

Bill Walton (00:09:27):

This is called the 3 Body Parts?

Jan Jekielek (00:09:27):

3 Body Problem.

Bill Walton (00:09:27):

Okay.

Jan Jekielek (00:09:29):

But I would love people to buy my book, but my big purpose here is try to explain the mind of the Communist Party. And that’s a big part of what this book is about actually. So I’ll explain this. This man is a scientist. He has a strong belief in science and he believes that he’s done his research. He knows what he’s saying is true. And the guards are telling him, “No, you have to say that that’s a lie. You have to confess your sins and pledge your fealty to the communist party,” which is what the demand is every single time, deny reality and pledge your fealty to the Communist Party.”

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And he won’t do it, so they kill him and his daughter’s watching. And in this process, she becomes a nihilist. And then she gets a signal from aliens and she knows they have malintent. And she says, “Come. This is what we deserve as humanity,” because she saw what happened to her father. This is also extremely important because of course, this is a sci-fi series, but the Communist Party engenders this kind of nihilism in the society. And part of this process-

Bill Walton (00:10:36):

Define your term nihilism. I want to…

Jan Jekielek (00:10:40):

Quite honestly, hatred of humanity. Yeah.

Bill Walton (00:10:46):

I see a lot of the cultural movements in this country as nihilist and that they want to tear everything down, but they don’t want to replace everything. They just want to destroy and the existing power structures, the people, so on and so forth. And isn’t nihilist a Russian term? And didn’t it sort of come up during pre-Lenin and the Russian revolution?

Jan Jekielek (00:11:08):

I don’t know when, but I know that nihilism became a very big thing after World War I.

Bill Walton (00:11:12):

And John Gadsby wrote about it.

Jan Jekielek (00:11:16):

Because World War I, no one imagined the kind of hell that World War I brought on the world, and it just shocked the world into a lot of nihilism, frankly. Because so much death, so much destruction, so much just wanton, right? And it’s something I’d love to trace a little bit further because it’s a central underpinning. This nihilism is kind of a central underpinning of, I think communism itself. And that’s a whole bigger discussion that we can have, right?

Bill Walton (00:11:46):

I know. Well, we’re doing what I always do, an endless digression. We’re going to get back to what forced organ harvesting is and that. But it [inaudible 00:11:57].

Jan Jekielek (00:11:57):

See, the struggle and creation of black classes is central to this because in order to get forced organ harvesting at scale like what they do in communist China, you have to have a class of people that has been dehumanized as a black class, otherwise it won’t work. And so, they did it to the students in ’89, in Tiananmen Square Massacre time.

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In 1999, there was a group called Falun Gong. And it’s an ancient meditation and spiritual discipline, very different from what people would typically think of as an organization in a sense, because there’s voluminous teachings about it by a man named Li Hongzhi, who’s the teacher or the master of the system. But there’s no things like collection of money, there’s no worship, there’s no hierarchy even. What makes you a practitioner-

Bill Walton (00:12:54):

Is there a priesthood?

Jan Jekielek (00:12:55):

There’s no priesthood.

Bill Walton (00:12:56):

Okay.

Jan Jekielek (00:12:57):

The way that you determine whether someone’s a practitioner is whether they’re practicing truthfulness, compassion, and tolerance. That’s one way to translate it. It’s zhēn, shàn, rèn, those three Chinese terms. Another way to describe it, actually, I was at Hillsdale giving a talk about this, and it just reminded me because goodness is such a central concept at Hillsdale.

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Another way to translate it is to be true, good, and endure. So people are being true, good and enduring. That is the practice. And so, also had a lot of health benefits. And it grew by word of mouth to 70 to 100 million people doing it in the late ’90s in China. That was by the government’s own rough estimate. Huge. 10,000 public practice sites in Beijing alone. It was just so…

Bill Walton (00:13:45):

So the population of China, we don’t know much anymore because the statistics are unreliable, but it’s over a billion.

Jan Jekielek (00:13:52):

Well, if you believe the statistics, it was 1 in 13 Chinese that were doing it. So a ton of people.

Bill Walton (00:13:57):

But that’s about the same number of people in China who are communist.

Jan Jekielek (00:14:02):

Slightly more even.

Bill Walton (00:14:03):

Okay. Even more?

Jan Jekielek (00:14:04):

Yeah. Slightly more. It was on the low end. And so, the dictator at the time, Jiang Zemin, decides that, “Okay, this is going to be the next black class. We’re going to eradicate it.” And eradicate didn’t mean kill everybody. It meant reeducate them, put them into this struggle system, get them to confess the error of their ways, and move on. But there’s this other feature of these black classes that’s also a lesson to the rest of the population about, the Communist Party can do this to anyone at any time and don’t be a black class. Don’t let yourself be a black class. It’s like a lesson in power, exertion of power too.

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So what happened was though that Falun Gong practitioners were unusually resilient to these reeducation methods, which is basically torture in many cases, if you’re not immediately saying, “Yes, I’m going to follow.” And so, this unwritten rule became a thing in the prisons and labor camps and forced labor camps, and reeducations were like the whole system, massive reeducation system in China. Reeducation and prison system, all Falun Gong deaths would be considered suicides. Really what that meant was, you can work on these people. If you can believe this, this is the mentality.

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They even created incentive structures where they would dock the pay of guards and so forth in these prisons, if there wasn’t enough successful reeducation of practitioners. You’d have to hit like a quota to keep your level of income in your prison or whatever. Crazy stuff. And so, this set up the fact that millions of people were arrested because they wouldn’t reeducate easily. So you have two pieces. One piece is, they’re dehumanized. There’s this mass propaganda pushed out against them. They’re bad. They’re evil. They do horrible things. Actually, very similar to 1930s Germany propaganda, frankly, against the Jewish people.

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And then they incarcerated a massive number. In 2005, the special rapporteur on torture at the UN, Human Rights Commission, his name was Manfred Nowak. I met him that year and he was an amazing human rights lawyer. He estimated that half of all the prisoners in this massive incarceration [inaudible 00:16:34] were found on practitioners that year. So they just incarcerated this mass group of people. And these are the circumstances where you can get killed to order. So let’s go back to how an ethical transplantation happens. Let’s say I need a new heart. My heart is bad. A catastrophic accident has to happen, typically a car accident or a motorcycle accident. And so, this person is crushed.

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And now, an ethics team has to look at this person and decide, this person’s definitely not coming back. And in a very ethical system, that stringency is high. You don’t want to transplant from someone that’s coming back, that would be horrible. But you can’t also transplant from someone that’s completely dead. If there’s no circulation, you can’t take those organs anymore. They degrade. So you have to get that. And frankly, our bodies reject all sorts of stuff. Whatever foreign things go into our bodies, our bodies reject those things to protect ourselves. They also reject organs.

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So the way we deal with that, is we try to get organs that match the blood type, match the tissue type. They also have to be about the right size for the person. So anyway, my point is there’s all these variables that have to happen.

Bill Walton (00:17:47):

It’s very hard to find a match.

Jan Jekielek (00:17:49):

Precisely.

Bill Walton (00:17:50):

Yeah.

Jan Jekielek (00:17:50):

Precisely.

Bill Walton (00:17:51):

Very hard.

Jan Jekielek (00:17:52):

So the evidence that hit me over the head when I first realized this was real was, one of the whistleblowers was a guy named Jacob Lavee. He was the professor of transplant surgery at Tel Aviv University. This is 2005. And he has a patient who needs a heart transplant. And the patient tells him, “I’m tired of waiting. I’ve got it set up for myself in two weeks in China.” Scheduled, right? And Jacob just says, “That’s impossible. There’s no way that could happen,” ethically, obviously.

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But the guy goes and gets it done. Comes back, got my new heart. So two huge red flags. Number one, well, that catastrophic accent is being arranged, obviously, because it’s scheduled. So someone’s being killed. And number two, the two week wait time, how is that possible given what we just said? So it’s rare to find that perfect match.

Bill Walton (00:18:52):

Yeah. You can wait six months, a year, two years, and forever.

Jan Jekielek (00:18:55):

100%, right. And so, well, what they started doing is, when they put this massive population of Falun Gong practitioners in the prison system, in their whole big incarceration system, they started blood typing, tissue typing, and organ scanning them ahead of time, and they created a large database. And now, when someone would come and pay the 100 or 200 grand for a heart that’s needed, that person’s already pre-matched. They already exist in the database and they can be shipped and killed to order. That’s the reason that’s the name of my book.

Bill Walton (00:19:26):

And also the lifestyle of the Falun Gong, if I’m pronouncing that correctly, very healthy.

Jan Jekielek (00:19:32):

Yes. No drinking, no smoking. Generally a good lifestyle. Yeah.

Bill Walton (00:19:36):

So these people are terrifically very healthy. Terrifically healthy and ideal if you’re looking for a healthy organ.

Jan Jekielek (00:19:47):

It’s a huge tragedy. Because they grow. They start persecuting the Falun Gong in 1999. In 2000, the transplant hospital system starts growing geometrically. And they have very few hospitals doing this in the year 2000. But by 2005, I don’t remember the exact number, but by the late 2000s… but most of the growth happens by 2005. We’ve got 146 hospitals that are performing transplants across…

Bill Walton (00:20:18):

And these are mostly military hospitals?

Jan Jekielek (00:20:20):

Correct. That’s right. And with no credible donation registry of any sort. And as you mentioned earlier, that Chinese don’t like to… There’s sort of an integrity to the body. There’s sort of that. See, the cultural revolution was probably the most effective of any communist revolution in destroying the traditional culture, which is a central part of what communism tries to do.

(00:20:47):

And we can talk about why. It’s a very important part. But they can never destroy all of it. They were very effective. For example, one-child policy. What was the one-child policy for? Well, people think it was this obsession with Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb, keep the population down. That wasn’t the real reason. That’s part of it, maybe. But the real reason was to destroy the family. You had these giant families. The family’s the foundational unit of humanity. They wanted to [inaudible 00:21:13]-

Bill Walton (00:21:13):

And especially China.

Jan Jekielek (00:21:15):

100%. And so, they actually successfully managed to destroy the family. Not entirely. The family reassembled itself as best it could. Of course, it’s still the fundamental unit, but that multi-generational structure of the family is gone forever because there’s only one child and not nine or seven, or whatever it was, right? Yeah.

Bill Walton (00:21:34):

So the procedure though, you’ve interviewed a lot of people, you know a lot about how this has happened and where the organ donor comes from.

Jan Jekielek (00:21:51):

So-called donor.

Bill Walton (00:21:52):

So-called donor. You tell some stories in the book about the victims of this and what they’re rounded… What happens? If you’re selected to be a liver donor or whatever, what happens? You’re taken from a prison or you’re plucked out of general population, or what is that?

Jan Jekielek (00:22:13):

Well, so that’s actually a great question. So during those years, up until 2014, 2015, when Falun Gong were by far the primary victims of this. They built it on the backs of the Falun Gong. It would always be an incarcerated person because they need to get all that data, the blood scans, the tissues, all these expensive medical tests.

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They got cheaper with time, but it’s still very unusual and very extensive medical testing for people that you’re just torturing in prison. So one of the horrible, horrible things of this is that no one really did anything about it during that time. And so around that time, they actually add another group to this, the Uyghur Muslim people in Northwestern China.

Bill Walton (00:22:58):

I was going to ask you about that. Yeah.

Jan Jekielek (00:23:03):

Right? Of course, there were other [inaudible 00:23:05] supporting…

Bill Walton (00:23:06):

Another black group.

Jan Jekielek (00:23:07):

Exactly. They dehumanized them. And they were already on their way to being dehumanized. They looked different. It’s an ethnic minority, a different religion. And of course, they want us to keep their religion, keep their faith, and they dehumanize them and incarcerated a million plus of them. But the crazy part up there is, it’s a much smaller population. We’re talking, I think aggressively, it would be like 15 million or something like that. Probably less than that total. And it’s in this very strategically important area for China, for a variety of reasons.

Bill Walton (00:23:45):

There’s Northwestern China where they rare earth metals and materials. Yeah.

Jan Jekielek (00:23:52):

The mountainous region. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. They created a police state basically there. So there, from what we know, they actually blood type and [inaudible 00:23:59] people as you suggested, in their homes because they can do that. The official US position, and this still blows my mind because I don’t think we’ve really acted on this in any way, meaningful way. But the official US position legally is that China’s committing genocide against these people.

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What that means is, it doesn’t mean we use genocide like this casual way we call mass murder, we call genocide today. Massive murder is horrible and terrible, but it’s not genocide. Genocide is another step, another level. And it’s the attempt to destroy an entire group of people. In whole or in part, that’s kind of part of the definition. We say the worst thing human beings can do to each other… There was a genocide convention after the Holocaust, after World War II. The reason was that we said, “Well, we just can’t let this happen.”

(00:24:52):

And the problem is, it spreads from group to group. Similarly, it started with the Falun Gong, then they added the Uyghurs. Right now, I’m actually seeing dehumanizing rhetoric against Christians in China. I don’t know where that’s going to go, but I can tell you that the dehumanizing rhetoric is essential.

Bill Walton (00:25:07):

The Chinese Communist Party was to get rid of every religion, period, zero down [inaudible 00:25:11]. Yeah.

Jan Jekielek (00:25:11):

Because any religion that’s serious about itself-

Bill Walton (00:25:13):

And the worst thing is the Catholic church is going along with a lot of that.

Jan Jekielek (00:25:17):

That is such a mystery to me because I can imagine in year one, in the first day saying, “Okay, we’re going to make the deal with the devil. We’re going to let the CCP appoint clergy.” Just totally insane, right?

Bill Walton (00:25:31):

Yeah. People don’t know that. Explain that. The Catholic church has seeded their rights to appoint their own clergy to the Chinese Communist Party.

Jan Jekielek (00:25:37):

It’s not entirely because there’s an underground Catholic church and there’s a communist Catholic church basically. And the Communist Catholic Church has Communist Party appointed clergy. It’s crazy, of course, because given that their interest in seeing this wiped out, their interest is in ruling over. I can say this. The effect of this Vatican deal, we don’t know the exact dimensions. We don’t know, it’s a secret what exactly they agreed to. But the effect has been more persecution of Catholics, more persecution of Christians, and more persecution of other religious groups.

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So you would think you would stop that deal after a while because it kind of worked in the wrong direction. So I don’t know what’s in there. I would strongly encourage the new Pope to think about this very seriously because the effect is, they’ve put controls on Catholic clergy now, aside from rolling up the Zion Church and these other groups that they’re starting to really push down on. Aside from replacing crucifixes with pictures of Xi Jinping. This is true, they’ve done this. not everywhere, but this is crazy stuff.

(00:26:52):

And why is there a Vatican deal? It just doesn’t make any sense to me.

Bill Walton (00:26:56):

So just jumping all over the place. Wasn’t President Xi in a conversation with President Putin caught on camera about six months ago at one of their conferences, talking about how you could live forever because you could get fresh organs to replace yours that were wearing out. And it was quite gruesome and quite candidly. Who knows whether they’ve already done that. These guys have disappeared from time to time from medical procedures.

Jan Jekielek (00:27:30):

Completely. Well, so I remember the day this happened very clearly. It was in September and my phone was buzzing nonstop because people know I’m into the issue of stopping this organ harvesting, forced organ harvesting. And so, yeah, Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, who wasn’t part of the conversation, but was there, they’re observing a military parade in Tiananmen Square. And they got caught on a hot mic. I can paraphrase what’s in there, but basically she says to Putin, “When we’re 70, we’re just babies.” Okay.

Bill Walton (00:28:09):

And they were both 72 at the time. Yeah.

Jan Jekielek (00:28:11):

Oh, yeah. Okay. Very good. Good information for me. Thank you. And Putin responds and he says, “Through continual organ transplantation, maybe we can achieve immortality. Even maybe we can achieve immortality.” And then she responds and says, “Our target’s 150 years.” And a huge light bulb went off in my head about this. Why? Because I’ve known for a while that the Chinese Communist Party has an elite longevity project, ie: they have a project to extend the life of the super elites. And that it’s working and by some measures, it’s 10 years more that they get.

(00:28:50):

I don’t know if that number is real. That’s probably part of their propaganda, but it’s longer. It’s a significant number of years longer. And I knew that. And I of course, did know about forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience, but what I didn’t know, what hadn’t dawned on me because I had compartmentalized these things, is that the forced organ harvesting is a centerpiece of the elite longevity project, obviously. And years ago, I got this obituary that was sent to me. Really weird. So you get these weird, creepy things and people send you stuff because again, related to organ harvesting, people know I’m interested in that.

(00:29:31):

And so, it was a obituary written about a state-level minister, I believe. And it was about how amazing it is that this guy had multiple organs transplanted.

Bill Walton (00:29:42):

So let’s dig into multiple organs. Let’s go down the list of, let’s say you’re a Japanese businessman, not a leader of the Chinese Communist Party, and you want to get something replaced, do they have a brochure where… It’s gruesome, but if they’ve heart, livers, kidneys, corneas. And we got a list here of something I saw, came across where there’s a list of doctors trained in the United States that are specializing in organ transplants. And they’re all back in China now and they’re doing livers and pancreas, and it goes on and on. Lungs. I mean, it’s stunning.

Jan Jekielek (00:30:32):

That’s horrific to hear because as you’re suggesting here, we train some of these people who are doing these surgeries. Hundreds. And I’ll just mention this. We’ve been watching this for 26 years. We realized we had enough information by 2006 when we first started reporting on it to know that it’s real. We didn’t know the exact dimensions of it, but we knew even just that one situation where you can get an organ into a heart in two weeks. “I had it done.”

Bill Walton (00:31:14):

Let me establish some, because I need some numbers here. How many people have been killed in order to harvest an organ of theirs? You had one number in there, 65,000 people between, was it 2002 and 2008 or something like that? But that seems to be just a smaller piece. That’s a much bigger number.

Jan Jekielek (00:31:36):

We try to be very careful about these estimates because these are very rough.

Bill Walton (00:31:40):

When you say we, who is we?

Jan Jekielek (00:31:44):

So you can think of me as a reporter on an issue where there’s probably two handfuls of unbelievable researchers who have given their lives to doing this work. And I bring them all into the book, because they’re the heroes. They’re the real heroes. And I say we, I include myself in there because I kind of contribute a little bit. But the way we estimate this is very hard because the crime scene is a hospital.

Bill Walton (00:32:13):

A military hospital hidden away from prying eyes because if you’re Chinese, you don’t wander onto the military.

Jan Jekielek (00:32:21):

100%. And it’s a state secret. So punishable by death, it’s treason to talk about it. It’s just a very difficult thing to… But you can follow it because you know how many transplant hospitals there are. For example, you know how many beds, and we know there’s going to be at least one transplant team and you can make estimates. We have detailed information for a few hospitals. One giant hospital that was doing 5,000 transplants a year while pretending to do just 1,000, less than that because it didn’t want to get on the radar as doing… like, where are these organs coming from?

(00:32:55):

Because I believe it was 2016, we did this feature piece. Matthew Robertson, one of the heroes of this. He did a feature piece called a Hospital Built for Murder in the Epoch Times. And it lays out how we calculate that there were 5,000 transplants done that year in that hospital. So we don’t typically estimate lives because we don’t know, but we can estimate close. We can be better on actual organs. And organs depends. I think it was 2012, ECMO technology came online. ECMO replaces heart and lungs. It’s used for operations, but there was this massive flurry of buying of portable ECMO machines by these hospitals after this technology came out.

(00:33:36):

Because, well, for a transplant situation, you can sort of plug people in and keep the body perfused, keep the circulation going in someone that’s already had, for example, a heart extracted and transplanted it in someone. You can keep the other organs alive for a few days using an ECMO machine. So when we say 60 to 90, Ethan Gutmann in 2016, you can cut this into this if you want as well, but he defended in front of Congress, his estimate of 60 to 100,000 transplants a year.

Bill Walton (00:34:10):

Per year?

Jan Jekielek (00:34:11):

Per year. And that’s a conservative boundary in itself, in my opinion. I don’t think 100,000 is really that aggressive of you. If you were to guess that transplant teams are working at their bare minimum that they could possibly work at. And remember, this is an efficient society. They’re not just having transplant teams sitting around doing nothing. So anyways, you can get a picture of how these numbers are calculated.

(00:34:43):

The one thing that we do know, and every time we would do these calculations, every time we would expose some data, they would make it harder for us to get information. Actually, in 2020, there was something called the China Tribunal, which was chaired by a man named Sir Jeffrey Neese. And he had actually prosecuted Slobodan Milošević back in the day. And he got an international team of experts together, independent and just looked at the entire… but took two years to look at the entire body of evidence. This is by 2020. 2020 was the [inaudible 00:35:19].

Bill Walton (00:35:18):

But these people are outside of China. They’re trying to [inaudible 00:35:22].

Jan Jekielek (00:35:21):

All outside of China.

Bill Walton (00:35:22):

You have to be outside of China.

Jan Jekielek (00:35:23):

Have to be.

Bill Walton (00:35:23):

I think one thing, let’s make everybody understand. In China, there’s no civil society. Here in the United States, we have all these organizations that are activist groups, advocacy groups, research groups, religious groups. We have thousands, tens of thousands, millions of groups organized to find things out and advocate causes or sound the alarm against something that’s horrible.

Jan Jekielek (00:35:50):

Yes.

Bill Walton (00:35:50):

That doesn’t exist in China.

Jan Jekielek (00:35:52):

No.

Bill Walton (00:35:53):

You have the state, you have a party, which is the state. And then you have individuals, and before it was families, but there’s no intervening forces there.

Jan Jekielek (00:36:07):

You’re raising something incredibly important. Let me talk a little bit about this. This is a critical thing to understand. So back in the day, Democracy in America, a lot of people have read it, de Tocqueville’s amazing book, unbelievable [inaudible 00:36:22]. So the take-home messages for me is, he believed correctly that the thing that is amazing about Americans early on, was watching all of this, is that Americans self-organize into groups that deal with problems that they have, basically.

Bill Walton (00:36:43):

Bingo. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Jan Jekielek (00:36:43):

They self-organize and they kick butt by creating a civil society group basically, in a variety of formats. And he thought this would make America be unbelievably successful. And he was absolutely right. Now the secret, and it’s shocking how little understood this is, even among our academics in America, the distinction between a totalitarian society and an authoritarian society. There’s a lot of dictatorships out there, but totality-

Bill Walton (00:37:17):

That would be authoritarian.

Jan Jekielek (00:37:19):

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. It’s run-of-mill tinpot dictatorship. I’m kind of being a little bit glib here. But there’s a lot of dictatorships. But a totalitarian system is different. It’s very different. And the way it’s different is, you can never get what happened in Taiwan, evolution from a dictatorship into one of the most vibrant democracies in the world. Or South Korea, and struggling with its democracy, nonetheless still a democracy and trying to keep that.

(00:37:50):

In communist China, you can’t get that. The reason is, it’s because it’s the civil society that actually forces the system to change. They’re like, “Hey, look, there’s better ways of doing things.” In communist China and any totalitarian system, they destroy all civil society with extreme prejudice. They make a point of destroying all civil society. Why? Because they understand that it’s civil society that affects change in society.

Bill Walton (00:38:18):

And the other thing civil society does is, it produces leaders.

Jan Jekielek (00:38:21):

100%.

Bill Walton (00:38:22):

And each one of these groups has got a president, a leader. There’s a leadership group of each of these. And so, if you look at America, we’ve got millions of leaders because they’re maybe the local scout troop or it could be a church or anything. China doesn’t produce that. You’ve got to be… I don’t know what you feel your role is in society, but it’s certainly not organizing for change.

Jan Jekielek (00:38:48):

Well, I just read an amazing book because I had Robert Suettinger on the show. He wrote this amazing book about Hu Yaobang. Hu Yaobang is kind of widely known. He was called the Conscience of China. It was not his death or maybe his burial, but basically it was the end of his life, which precipitated the Tiananmen Square movement, the student movement.

(00:39:14):

But this guy was an ardent Maoist for a big chunk of his life. The book is brilliant, by the way. It’s this amazing biography. But the thing about it also, is that it also explains the mind of the Communist Party. I’m always looking for books that will explain the mind of the Communist Party. And you find out, this guy by the way, achieved the top echelons of the Communist Party.

Bill Walton (00:39:34):

The mind of the Communist Party in China.

Jan Jekielek (00:39:36):

Yeah, yeah, yeah, 100%. But the key part is, he suffered so much. He was purged like 13 times. The guy, to get to that point, he had been beaten. And beaten, I mean psychically and physically over a very long lifetime trying to navigate everything. And finally at the end, he made it to the pinnacle of the party, and then still got purged ultimately because he disagreed with Deng’s vision.

Bill Walton (00:40:06):

I did a little digging into this and Mao built on the legalist tradition, and I understand it here underneath Confucian surface. And typically, we think of Confucianism, hierarchy, social harmony, filial piety. But the more operative tradition in Chinese state craft has been legalism, which is a state as absolute sovereign, people as instruments of the state, law as tool of control rather than protection.

(00:40:38):

And the first emperor that unified China did it on legalist principles. And Mao knew this and he studied this, and he admired him. And he would brag that he had surpassed the first emperor in getting people into this totalitarian rule. And it seems like they just took a Leninist organization and grafted on the Chinese culture.

Jan Jekielek (00:41:03):

Well, yeah. And so, China’s had many different incarnations, like every dynasty had its own particular character. So for example, the Tang dynasty, that’s widely considered kind of the zenith of Chinese civilization. It was so popular or so successful that to the Japanese, this is in the Nara period, literally picked… I think this is how the Japanese operate. When they see something that bests them and it’s obvious, this is probably what happened after World War II, when America demonstrated its supremacy.

(00:41:39):

But they picked up the religion, the architecture, all sorts of stuff from China during that period. But that was actually an incredibly open society. Open to ideas, open to trade, open to…

Bill Walton (00:41:54):

So you can’t characterize China as one thing and evolve [inaudible 00:41:58].

Jan Jekielek (00:41:57):

100%. Every dynasty had its own character. And so, this is one of the pieces of propaganda. Is it true that it adopted parts of legalism? Absolutely. Is there legalism in China? That’s true. Yeah, that existed. But what the Communist Party does is, it’s like… You hear about this term cultural appropriation. But no, no. It appropriates for its own purposes, but most importantly, propaganda purposes. Because one of the most effective pieces of propaganda, there’s a few, China lifted millions out of poverty. I always get angry when I hear that because so many people just repeat it as if it’s just casually true.

(00:42:43):

It’s like, yeah, there’s truth to it. All good propaganda, there’s a kernel of truth in it. The part they don’t mention is that they drove people into a depth of hell where people were cannibalizing each other routinely. And then in order for the party to survive, they lifted those people out of poverty. I hate to joke about this, but the reason I’m smiling is that it’s such a ridiculous piece of propaganda that so many people repeat. And so, it’s okay to say you lifted millions out of poverty if you agree to say because you drove them to cannibalism first, to that level of poverty through your own hand. Purely through your own action.

Bill Walton (00:43:27):

I need to do a commercial break here. We haven’t done this show in a while and I keep forgetting I’m supposed to interrupt to say who you are and what we’re talking about. Jan Jekielek, I’ve known Jan for a long time. Love him, he’s great. I still have a hard time pronouncing his name. It’s Polish?

Jan Jekielek (00:43:44):

Polish. That’s right. My parents got [inaudible 00:43:47] in ’70.

Bill Walton (00:43:46):

And we’re talking about a gruesome but important topic, which is China’s forced organ harvesting industry. And Kenny, we’ll run up Chyron on this or something, so we can bring this up throughout, so people know what’s at stake here and how to find out more. But let’s go back to the gruesome nature of this. Don’t we have a victim who survived to tell us what this was like?

Jan Jekielek (00:44:12):

Absolutely.

Bill Walton (00:44:13):

You write about it in the book.

Jan Jekielek (00:44:14):

I know. And it’s amazing that this person exists in the first place. I never really thought we would ever see a survivor of forced organ harvesting. It’s just too perfect to crime because the people are dehumanized, they’re in an operating room, and there’s cremation furnaces everywhere. So you never need to have any evidence, even though there is.

Bill Walton (00:44:37):

That’s the important point, they get rid of all the evidence, the bodies.

Jan Jekielek (00:44:39):

Not entirely. So there have been bodies that have been seen with multiple organs removed. There’s been different things that have been found, but it’s very rare, very rare. And the idea that there would be a survivor, I never even imagined it in a million years. The guy, we scanned him, body scanned him, and he’s missing part of his liver and part of his lung. He has a large 14-inch gash in his side where they went in to take that.

Bill Walton (00:45:05):

So they didn’t take the whole liver, the whole lung. They took pieces.

Jan Jekielek (00:45:08):

Well, the lung, it’s not even clear why they would do that. The liver, it looks like they were probably… this was in the early days of partial liver transplantation. So it looks like they might have been trying to experiment on him and see if they could take a partial liver and the guy would survive. That’s probably explanation why he survived. Not entirely because he almost didn’t survive multiple times actually in the process of getting out. His story’s a bit like a Holocaust survivor.

Bill Walton (00:45:42):

This is so compelling, but I want to change the subject a little bit because if this is going on, yes, it was in military bases, this is top secret and nobody was able to talk about it. But we’ve had Western companies operating in China for ever since Kissinger opened it up. And we’ve had this benign view of China and everything, even the Western… A lot of Westerners had an inkling of this and they wouldn’t talk about it because they wanted to be able to do business in China. If you did, you were out. So how complicit are we, the west, in allowing this to happen?

Jan Jekielek (00:46:23):

Well, unfortunately quite complicit. I think there’s multiple things happening at the same time. One is, there’s this Upton Sinclair quote where he says, “When someone’s paycheck depends on them not noticing something, they might not notice it.” I’m paraphrasing a little bit.

Bill Walton (00:46:41):

Yeah. No, no. Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

Jan Jekielek (00:46:42):

But I think it’s really bang on. I have a whole chapter dedicated to how the Communist Party makes us and even its own population complicit. But it’s a feature of the system, by the way, because you can control a population or get them to participate or go along with your thing. If they’re complicit, it’s way easier to do that than if they were like, “Wait, I’m not a part of that. I can’t do that.” You don’t want anyone saying that, not anyone thinking that. You have to knock down their moral high ground systemically over time, so that they kind of feel like, “Can I really say anything? I know they’re bad.”

(00:47:25):

And then of course, there’s the fear part, “Don’t want to lose my family. I don’t want to endanger people.” And then the other part of the money thing is that, once there are a lot of cash relationships, and the Chinese Communist Party has been expert at insinuating itself deep into the global economic system. Getting the US to give it access to the World Trade Organization, even though they didn’t deserve it at all. And then all they do is abuse law warfare, legal warfare or lawfare against America using the World Trade Organization.

(00:47:59):

But this is the crazy part. We always would tell ourselves, “Well, yeah, they’re just new. They’re just new to this. They’re just figuring it out.” So one of the really expert ways in which… And actually Jiang Zemin, the guy that started the Falun Gong persecution, was one of these bamboozlers of the barbarians, people who were expert at fooling the westerners to give China what it wanted.

Bill Walton (00:48:27):

Now, Epoch Times, is it Falun Gong as well, or related to that, or is it yes?

Jan Jekielek (00:48:34):

So we were founded by Falun Gong practitioners. Yeah, absolutely. And it’s actually kind of itself, a very interesting story.

Bill Walton (00:48:42):

So you might have more firsthand knowledge about this because of that relationship. But does that change the authority about what you talk about this because you’re obviously enemies of the Chinese Communist Party. And I’m totally on board with what you… I agree with everything you’ve done. Does that change the way we think about it at all?

Jan Jekielek (00:49:07):

Excellent question So imagine it’s the year 2000, right? The Falun Gong persecution has just started. And Western media, many media are just picking up the Chinese government’s propaganda, dehumanization talking points and publishing it as if it’s fact. Not everybody. There’s some great exceptions, but a lot. And our media started at Georgia Tech as a student website. So these were people who had come over… they had participated in the student movement in 1989. They came over to America, ended up getting scholarships to Georgia Tech in Atlanta. And then they saw this all happening, this whole system being spun up.

(00:50:00):

And the propaganda against the Falun Gong. Some of them themselves had become Falun Gong practitioners in America along the way. And they thought, “Hey, we have the First Amendment here. We can talk about this because no one seems to get it.” Certainly in Chinese language, it’s just Chinese propaganda. And in English, a lot of Western media are even just copying as if it were legitimate information. Propaganda was actually a reasonable opinion, as opposed to propaganda designed to demonize a group of people. So that was the context.

(00:50:38):

If they hadn’t done that, who’s going to do it? This is the situation that you have. And also, there was this crazy narrative at the time. The crazy narrative was that if we pump enough cash into communist China, we’re going to liberalize them. Actually, they’re liberalizing as we speak.

Bill Walton (00:50:57):

[inaudible 00:50:57] the liberal democracies with Iraq and [inaudible 00:51:01].

Jan Jekielek (00:51:01):

This was the ’95 issue. Listen, everybody believed this. I remember it. A Democrat, Republican, up right, up down.

Bill Walton (00:51:08):

I was in the private equity business. I was guilty of exporting a lot of jobs to China, and that was the idea where we would get them…

Jan Jekielek (00:51:14):

Well, no. But our own propaganda was that they’re going to liberalize. It wasn’t just our own. They injected that and Kissinger pushed it hard. To be fair, I think he’s a big architect of that line. Bt it was false. And I knew that. As someone who was in the human rights field in 2000, I wasn’t a journalist at the time, but I knew they’re literally killing people for refusing to give up their faith.

(00:51:46):

There’s a reason the First Amendment’s the First Amendment’s the First Amendment. It’s our fundamental protection from government. This ability to believe, to think what we want to think, to believe what we want to believe. They’re killing people for exercising that. That is by definition, not a liberalizing society. So someone needed to take on the project of explaining to Americans in the world that, “No, they’re not liberalizing. You’ve got this really wrong. They’re taking you for a ride.”

Bill Walton (00:52:15):

How does knowing all this and writing about this and researching this and talking, how’s it changed you?

Jan Jekielek (00:52:23):

Oh, man. Well, at the beginning, I was… I didn’t understand before I looked at the depth of darkness that the Communist Party was affecting on its own people what communism was. My parents had escaped from communist China, communist Poland. Pardon me, not China, Poland. And they told me that it was bad and explained to me some of the ways that it’s bad, and I should think it’s bad. And I knew it was. But I grew up in a very free society in the 80s in Canada. I was like those kids in ET that are riding their bikes around. There’s no parents to be seen. That’s what we lived like as kids. It was wonderful actually when I think about it. Maybe too much freedom when I think about it.

(00:53:18):

But it’s hard to imagine what it’s like to live in a totalitarian society unless you’re in it. It’s hard to imagine. And I’ve discovered over the years that I have the freedom bug or something. Some of us feel very uncomfortable the moment we feel that oppression coming. And you sense it. It’s like it’s in the air when you see it. Again, for many of us living in the country, this country, Canada, and many liberal democracies wouldn’t have encountered that. Maybe only in specific instances. So when I had to face this, for example, I remember very early on, I was at the University of Alberta. And this one woman, she was the mother of a postdoc at the university who had escaped from China.

(00:54:14):

And she had been tortured literally, exactly for refusing to sign a piece of paper that said, “I renounced Falun Gong and I’ll help reeducate other Falun Gong,” or something. The third thing. Because you imagine when people are being… Again, our quirk of our psychology. Imagine when people are being persecuted or incarcerated or something, they did something wrong. They must have done something wrong. That’s right, right? Well, what they did wrong-

Bill Walton (00:54:38):

That’s true. There is that, “Well, if they were charged, there must be something.”

Jan Jekielek (00:54:40):

Well, it’s natural for us to think that. And I was like, “So what did you do? Why did they torture you?” And it just dawned on me when she was explaining this to me, I’ll never forget the moment because this shock went through me or something. I got a shiver up my spine remembering it even right now. Oh, my God, this is communism. This person literally has done absolutely nothing wrong. What they did wrong was refused to be broken by the system, which is what communism is and does.

(00:55:15):

And this is what my parents were trying to explain to me all these years that I didn’t get. And that was transformational because I also realized, I’m going to help these people. And so, I was lucky in a way, because early on, I understood that this is just a very, very dark system, which wishes anybody who refuses to subject themselves to it. Look at Jack Ma. I remember a guy like Jack Ma, top of the world, one of the most affluent people, one of the most successful tech companies in China gets taken away for reeducation or control. Why? Well, he got a little too uppity.

Bill Walton (00:56:05):

Yeah. They just gave him 20 years and he’s 75 years old or something like that.

Jan Jekielek (00:56:09):

Yeah. Well, so now you’re talking, but you’re thinking about Jimmy Lai.

Bill Walton (00:56:13):

Oh, Jimmy Lai. Right.

Jan Jekielek (00:56:14):

Okay. So no, but that’s also a great example.

Bill Walton (00:56:16):

It’s the same.

Jan Jekielek (00:56:16):

But that’s also a great example. But Jack Ma, remember, Jack Ma was the darling of China.

Bill Walton (00:56:21):

Yeah. He was. He was Elon Musk.

Jan Jekielek (00:56:25):

Exactly. He was Elon Musk, but got a little too independent. Had some of his own ideas. And this is what happened to Hu Yoabang.

Bill Walton (00:56:36):

So just coming back to our complicity. Let’s say there were a million recipients of these organs. Probably half, three quarters were from outside of China. Is there organ tourism?

Jan Jekielek (00:56:53):

I can’t say that.

Bill Walton (00:56:55):

Because certainly if you’re in Chicago and you’re waiting for something and you get impatient and you find out about China, you’ve got to wonder how this thing was served up to deliver. [inaudible 00:57:08]-

Jan Jekielek (00:57:08):

It was relatively common in Taiwan and relatively common in South Korea.

Bill Walton (00:57:13):

For them to go to China. Yeah.

Jan Jekielek (00:57:15):

Yeah. One of the evidence bases is a film crew that took hidden cameras and went to China from South Korea because they wanted to see if they could procure organs. And they were like, “Yeah, two weeks, got it for you.” It’s amazing what they found. That was really gutsy of them, by the way, just unbelievable. But no, so it seems like more of the transplant tourism, I would guess most of it is within China. I would guess, but we don’t have those numbers. We can’t say it for sure.

Bill Walton (00:57:46):

Unfortunately, I’ve got 53,000 other questions, but I’ve got to get you out of here. You’ve got to go do a conference call as I recollect. A, buy the book, and you’re already saying a lot. There’s a lot in there, but what are we supposed to do with this information? What’s the call to action?

Jan Jekielek (00:58:08):

Well, so I have an appendix in this book, appendix two, which is committed to answering this exact question at the… If you’re a federal legislator or an activist or lobbyist, if you’re a state level, same thing. If you’re a grassroots and you just want to make a difference. There’s even like a Rotary club. I’ve become a Rotarian recently because there’s a Rotary club that’s committed to ending forced organ harvesting in China. If you can imagine, they created a special satellite club explicitly to do this.

Bill Walton (00:58:40):

Well, that’s an example of civil society.

Jan Jekielek (00:58:42):

It’s the perfect example of civil society. Absolutely. So anyway, I always used to work with Rotary back in the day. I used to run international youth programs at one point in my life. They were always very supportive of how getting placements for the kids and all this stuff. But anyway, now I’m a Rotarian now. But no, but there’s two pieces of legislation at the federal level that have actually passed the House near unanimously. And now, the Senate can decide on that.

Bill Walton (00:59:12):

Falun Gong Protection Act and the Stop Forced Organ Harvesting Act.

Jan Jekielek (00:59:14):

And amazingly, the first one that you mentioned just a few days ago, maybe it’s two weeks now, got reintroduced in the Senate. I think it’s S.4009. It’s now called the Falun Gong and Victims of Forced Organ Harvesting Protection Act, Cruz and Merkley, Bipartisan. And let’s bring that to the fore and get it passed. It’s a good bill. They’ve made some changes from that previous bill that’s actually mentioned in the book. But I think what that does is it sanctions people involved. That will put a dent in this because some of these people have exit strategies to America and they don’t want to have no access to America. They’ll think about it.

(01:00:00):

See, the way we would deal with… When I was working in the human rights early on, it’s very hard to deal with China. They just deny everything and say. “You’re evil,” when you say there’s a problem. So what would we do? Well, I mentioned Manfred Nowak, the special [inaudible 01:00:18] in Georgia. I would translate credible, detailed reports of torture for Manfred Nowak. Write them into UN speak. And if he deemed it credible, he would send it to the Chinese mission and they would have 24 hours to respond. And they would say, “Oh, this is all a lie. This is horrible. How dare you suggest it?” Whatever.

(01:00:34):

However, they knew that he knew that there was an international eye on this one person, and we could save a life that way and we did. We saved some lives that way. This is how you had to operate. So my point is this, it’s similar. This type of legislation, it also will establish in law that this is an atrocity under the Elie Wiesel Act. That would be very valuable.

Bill Walton (01:00:56):

Do you feel like you’re in any personal danger for blowing the whistle?

Jan Jekielek (01:01:00):

I’m sorry, I’m laughing. I shouldn’t. It’s not funny at all.

Bill Walton (01:01:04):

But you know there’s these networks all over the world that disappear people.

Jan Jekielek (01:01:07):

Because whenever anyone asks me this question, I get a little more worried. And I’ve been thinking about this because…

Bill Walton (01:01:16):

“What have I done?”

Jan Jekielek (01:01:17):

No, no.

Bill Walton (01:01:20):

I shouldn’t be laughing, but just for…

Jan Jekielek (01:01:21):

But the truth is that the CCP, they’re a supremacist organization. They’ve been actually fanning the whole flames of Han supremacist thinking. That’s a whole different discussion for a different day. But they also sort of imagine, all the Chinese, all the people that are under their jurisdiction, it doesn’t matter if they’re Chinese or not, but the Han and these 55 other groups that are part of China, they view like they own them.

(01:01:50):

So if I was a Chinese guy talking to you, in my view, I would be in much greater risk. So I work with a lot of Chinese. I see people who truly risk everything. I look at Rushan Abbas, my good friend, who the moment that she came out against the Communist Party, they took her sister years ago, and they still haven’t released her. So yes, there’s some risk, but I feel like I need to do this.

Bill Walton (01:02:19):

You have to do it. You have to do it. Well, I’ve admired you for a lot. I didn’t quite realize how deeply involved… This is an important mission. Thank you.

Jan Jekielek (01:02:32):

Thank you. I love this conversation.

Bill Walton (01:02:36):

We need to wrap up for now. I’d like to get you back on maybe with some other people to talk about how this all operates. But Jan Jekielek, close pronunciation.

Jan Jekielek (01:02:49):

Jekielek. Hey, listen, I’ve heard it all. Very close. Yeah.

Bill Walton (01:02:52):

And he’s the host of American Thought Leaders, which I think many of you watched and I’d say this, you may be a better guest than host and your terrific host. This is great. Thank you. And here’s the book, buy It.

Jan Jekielek (01:03:06):

Killtoorder.com, by the way. That’s the direct Amazon link, if someone wants to get it. One click, killtoorder.com. Yeah.

Bill Walton (01:03:13):

Got it. Okay.

Jan Jekielek (01:03:15):

But bookstores, libraries, all that. Yeah.

Bill Walton (01:03:18):

It’s great having you on. I’ll see you soon. To be continued and hope you enjoyed this, and we’ll be back with hopefully something equally interesting. Take care.