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Jan Jekielek didn't start as a journalist. He started as a human rights worker, helping Chinese prisoners of conscience navigate an underground railroad through Southeast Asia toward safety. He heard the earliest rumors of forced organ harvesting during that work — and like most people, he found them almost impossible to absorb.
Two decades later, after more than 1,300 long-form interviews as host of American Thought Leaders and years of investigative work at The Epoch Times, he's written Killed to Order — a meticulously documented account of how the Chinese Communist Party built an organ harvesting industry on the backs of its own people. The book became a New York Times bestseller.
This episode isn't primarily about China policy. It's about something closer to the core of what Derate the Hate covers every week: what happens to human beings — and to whole societies — when dehumanization is allowed to proceed without limit. Jan and Wilk trace that question from the CCP's earliest "black class" campaigns through the present day, where Christians are now the newest group in the regime's crosshairs.
Jan Jekielek is an award-winning journalist, filmmaker, bestselling author, Senior Editor at The Epoch Times, and host of the long-form interview series American Thought Leaders, where he has conducted hundreds of in-depth conversations on culture, politics, human rights, and public affairs. He is also the author of Killed to Order: China's Organ Harvesting Industry and the True Nature of America's Biggest Adversary.
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Killed to Order — Available at KilledToOrder.com
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If you're interested in long-form conversations that challenge assumptions, explore complex issues, and feature some of today's most influential thinkers, Jan's work is well worth following.
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[00:00:00:00] Wilk Wilkinson: We talk a lot on this show about what happens when dehumanization goes unchecked. When one group gets labeled as the other, the enemy, the threat. But my guest today isn't talking about political rhetoric on cable news. He's documenting what happens at the absolute extreme end of that road when a regime decides a group of people aren't just political enemies. They're raw material. Stick with me. Welcome back, my friends, to the Derate the Hate podcast. I'm your host, Wilk Wilkinson, your blue collar sage calming outrage and helping to navigate a world divided by fog and those who would spread that fear, outrage and grievance. The Derate the Hate podcast is proudly produced in collaboration with Braver Angels, America's largest grassroots cross partisan organization working toward civic renewal, this podcast amplifies the mission that we share to foster a more respectful and united America where civic friendship thrives even when we disagree. Each week, through the power of story, conversation, and connection with incredible guests, we work to build bridges instead of barriers, not to change minds on the issues, but to change how we see one another when we differ. Because friends, it really is about bettering the world one attitude at a time. We did not create the hate, but together we can Derate the hate. So be sure to subscribe wherever you get your podcast, share it with a friend and visit Braver Angels to learn how you can get involved in the movement to bridge the partisan divide. Friends, I am so incredibly grateful that you have joined me for another powerful Derate the Hate episode. So let's get to it. Jan Jekielek came to this story the hard way. Before he was a journalist, he was a human rights worker working with an underground railroad in Southeast Asia, helping Chinese prisoners of conscience make it out through the Golden Triangle to UN refugee status in Thailand. He heard the early rumors about forced organ harvesting back then. He did what most good people do. He struggled to believe it. Over the next two decades, he couldn't stop pulling that thread. As a senior editor at the Epoch Times and host of American Thought Leaders with over 1300 long form interviews, he became one of the most informed journalists in the world on the inner workings of the Chinese Communist Party. And what he found wasn't a rumor. It was a system. His new book, Killed to Order, documents the CCP forced organ harvesting industry, a state sanctioned practice that has turned prisoners of conscience Falun Gong practitioners, Uyghurs, and others into what he calls an on demand donor pool. It's a New York Times bestseller, and it's certainly something that we all need to know about. Let's get into it with my friend Jan Jekielek, Here we go. Jan Jekielek, Welcome to the Derate The Hate podcast. It is so good to see you, my friend.
[00:03:45:06] Jan Jekielek: It's so good to be here.
[00:03:47:03] Wilk Wilkinson: Yeah, I'm I'm truly grateful to have you here We've known each other for a while, and like we were just saying we've we've we've done a lot of texting back and forth over the past several months. But but it's good to have you on the show and, get you in front of the listeners. So, so Jan, the, the the primary reason that you're here today is talk about this book that that you've got out killed to order, which I think for, for anybody that has an opportunity to read it, it's going to be an eye opener. It definitely gave me a different outlook on on some things that I think people just aren't aware of. And I want to I want to talk about that. But but as we get started, tell me how you ended up at the at the Epoch Times and, and started doing this. Where did this awareness come from that, this. Organ harvesting thing was happening in, in China that that led to this book. Because I know it's a, it's a it's been a several year, a couple decade journey for you. Jan. So let's start at the, at the beginning there and just, just bring us up to speed and.
[00:05:05:11] Jan Jekielek: Absolutely. And so I was a China human rights worker. You could I could describe it that way. And at one point I was actually in Thailand working with kind of an underground railroad that was bringing Chinese prisoners of conscience, religious dissidents who had escaped basically out from China through this treacherous region, kind of between China and Thailand, called the golden triangles. Multiple countries kind of come together there. It's lawless. And then into Thailand, where there was a UN refugee office, and we could get them this really coveted status for people that are persecuted in extreme ways. Through an interesting quirk of the international legal realities. So anyway, this is I was involved in that, not doing the actual sort of, you know, underground running and things like that. Those are those are different kinds of people doing that part. Now, there were rumors of large scale forced organ harvesting. I'd heard something about that. But I sort of assumed. And when you hear about this, right, it sounds really extreme. It sounds very, almost science fiction like. Right. We did know that prisoners had been killed for organs in a scheduled way. I mean, before 1999, when the Chinese Communist Party started persecuting the Falun Gong practitioners on whose backs this whole industry was built, there were hearings that demonstrated that prisoners had been killed for organs before in China. This had happened, okay, but the idea that it could happen at scale wasn't something that I really contemplated. And in fact, one of the problems, challenges dealing with this is that no, you don't. Most people don't want to know that something like this is happening. It's like we just sort of pull away. When I first started talking to people about this, and I can lay it out for you, kind of how it works in a moment, but, but and how it's different than, you know, typical black market organ trafficking, which is horrible in itself. Right, right, right. When I would talk to people about it, people would zone out in the middle of conversation. It was a very common thing, right? I would talk about it. And suddenly when they grasp, start grasping what is actually going on, they sort of I can see the light go out. Right? And I mean, I'm sort of smiling about this a little bit because it's in retrospect, it's when you see it a lot. At first I was very irritated and I thought, you know, but then I kind of became more understanding because it is so horrible that you can have a, you know, basically a stable of a huge number of people that have been blood type, tissue typed and organ scan kind of ready to go to be killed for, you know, the, the transplant wealthy or Chinese Super elite transplant recipient.
[00:07:54:17] Wilk Wilkinson: Right. So let's go back to the beginning of that arc because you said, in the book. You were talking about how it how it really started with, with prisoners. And that's, that's how the model, I guess, was built for this thing. And, you know, I want to start with the prisoners, but then I want to get to the following gong practitioners because I I'll be honest, you know, I didn't know the Falun Gong was a thing. I mean, I don't know a lot about China. I don't know how much about China and the people of China that the listeners of the Derate the Hate podcast know, I mean, I think people have heard about the Uyghurs and things like that, but the following Gong practitioners was something new for me. But start with the start with the prisoners and and how that model, I think that's horrific enough. I mean, I think most people in the United States can't even, you know, fathom the idea of forced organ harvesting, whether it be somebody who's in prison or somebody who's been wrongly imprisoned or whatever. But start with that. And how that kind of was the genesis of the model.
[00:09:04:09] Jan Jekielek: Well, so we actually have two surgeons pre this massive scaling of the system that happened in around the year 2000. Right. We have examples of surgeons that have admitted to participating in this. Like to actually doing it to actually knowing that someone is alive and you know with under duress, you know, with guards around them with the implication that if you don't do what you're told, you might be dead or something like that, right? That okay, here's the operation, one example. And right. He was basically brought under cover of darkness in the military scenario, you know, to a room where he was told cut and he could see the person was alive and he did what he was told ultimately. And he actually in a, in a, in a testimony actually in the UK Parliament, there was a, there was a whole testimony around this forced organ harvesting happening now. Now post scaling and post growing of this massive kill to order industry. He has this moment where he realizes because no one ever wants to come clean with something like this, right? You've just you killed someone for organs, right? But he has this moment where he's listening, and I think he's sort of moved by, you know, how this is scaled and so forth. And he decides to tell the truth. It's this incredibly powerful testimony which he does kind of on, you know, on camera or on audio at least. And so so this is a system and this is a big part of the subtitle of the book is and the True Nature of America's Biggest Adversary. Okay. And so, you know, I'll tell you the punchline right now and that's that the Chinese Communist Party doesn't view its people with innate human dignity like we are used to in the West. Okay, we hope to. That's our ideal, right? It doesn't view. That's not the ideal. Okay. They view them as kind of raw material for use. And there's specifically these black classes which it's had a habit over decades of creating. Right, that that are the easiest to use in this way. And I'll explain what I mean right now. Right. So the first black class or one of the first was the landowners. So there was this decision by the regime, of course. Right. This is a property free society. Right. Public property is bad as evil. And so what we're going to do is we're going to, you know, take that property from the landowners in 1949. But to do that, you can't just go and take stuff from people are going to resist. Right? And society is going to be like, hey, what are you doing? Right? Like, that's my friend. And they worked for that or, you know, or whatever. Right. So what they did was they pushed mass dehumanizing propaganda through the system. This is something that every communist regime is actually expert at. They didn't have the like powerful technologies for this, but they did control all the information systems that existed. That's again, a key part of what every communist regime does demands, right? Make sure it controls that messaging apparatus. Is the the media okay. But really these are propaganda organs as today are every single Chinese media that's connected with the regime and is an effective propaganda organ, not a media. So when you control all of that, right, you can basically and you'll be you're kind of familiar a bit with this in the context that we've met. Right when you when you have the ability to, on the one hand, squelch counter narratives right through mass censorship and on the other hand, push mass messaging of a particular sort that has a very powerful impact on the population. Okay. And and the effect, right, is that in this case, when you tell people these are dangerous people and you do it on mass and you keep pushing it hard, hard, hard, right? These are bad people. They're kind of beneath you. In the case of the landowners, they kind of took it from you, actually. You deserve it. Right? And you should you should take it back. And that's what we're doing here. We're doing a righteous thing against dangerous, very suspicious kind of bad people. Okay. And that activates a quirk in our psychology which basically allows us to, I mean, as human beings, to go along with some horrible things being done to people that were moments ago are friends.
[00:13:24:02] Wilk Wilkinson: Neighbors.
[00:13:25:02] Jan Jekielek: Neighbors and relatives. Relatives. Exactly right. There's this amazing piece. I don't know if you saw the three body problem on Netflix. There's this kind of Sci-Fi series, right? And the moment that came out, I got interested in it because someone said, Jan, you won't believe it. But there's a case study of a struggle session produced like Hollywood production level, right at the right at the beginning of this thing. So I watched it and it was astonishing because basically what happens is this young woman, this is a new black class. These were the intellectuals, right? And basically this man who's a scientist is being struggled against your liar, your evil. Everything you say is false. But the guy is so committed to science that he won't. Basically, this is what you all you need to do, right? To basically not be killed or suffering tremendously. Just say you're right, you're right. I don't, I accept, I accept the new propaganda line. What however crazy it is, whatever it is, okay? And if you do that, then you can kind of be left alone or just still be a pariah, but at least a nice pariah that has admitted there wrongs. It's reeducation, right? Transformation of people. But this guy doesn't do it. So in front of his daughter, they kill him in a very public spectacle. Also, to show what happens when you don't comply with the regime's edicts. And she goes on, becomes this kind of nihilist and welcomes the aliens to kill everybody. Of course, it's a sci fi series, so we don't need to go into that part here. But but that's what happens. Okay. That's what happens. And and so this is actually now let's fast forward right to the year 1999 or 2000. Right. We have a. So in China there's this tradition of these ancient you can think of them like yoga like methods. They're broadly called qigong okay. That's the general term for them. And the traditional methods, as was the case actually also in India, but also in China. They're not just physical exercises. There's there's a mind component, okay. There's a body component, which is those exercises. And there's also a spirit component. These these methods would cultivate these things all at once. Okay. In the case of Falun Gong, which is a very popular one that was happening in the 90s, these these systems are also known to have health benefits, which is perhaps one of the reasons why they became so popular in the 90s as the health care system in China had collapsed. They're kind of, you know, again, socially, the extreme version of socialized health care graft and basically a system that works only for the super elites. The majority of the system had collapsed. So people went to these. Falun Gong was particularly good. It looks a bit like Tai Chi, okay. And a lot of people were experiencing health benefits, like millions of people were experiencing these health benefits. At the same time, what they were doing was they were practicing truthfulness, compassion and forbearance. Another way to translate it is to be true, good and endure. Okay. And these principles centerpieces of the practice. The other part that the thing that's really interesting about Falun Gong, which makes it unusual from, I think certainly the Chinese Communist Party perspective, but also our perspective in the West is that it's unstructured in a way that's difficult for people to imagine. Okay. Right. So it's it basically there's there's there's voluminous teachings written by a man named Joe. He's the teacher or the master. People don't like that terminology, but he's basically the person who has mastered the system and is kind of the authority on it. Right? But what there isn't is there's no hierarchy, okay? There's no worship, there's no collection of funds, there's no tithing or something like that. Like these things you're not these things would be considered kind of an anathema. I think if you're a practitioner, you wouldn't do these things right. And there isn't even a roster. You don't join anything. What makes you a Falun Gong practitioner is living it, right? Just living, not living. It doesn't matter how much you say you are, you're not right.
[00:17:28:02] Wilk Wilkinson: And that's that's one of the things that I found so fascinating about this. And again, I had never heard of the Falun Gong and, and, and I, I, I mean, 50 years on this planet, I never heard of it. So I imagine there's a lot of other people out there that hadn't. And and yeah, when you started putting it together in the book, Jan about how this became what the CCP would have considered a threat, you know, it started to make a lot of sense and like, okay, there's no hierarchical structure. There's no there's no leaders, there's no there's no power dynamic within the organization, which is completely separate from what a, what a communist regime would expect, you know, not to mention the fact that that you know, the truth and the compassion and everything stands completely in contrast. So, so, yeah, so, so get into that a little bit more and then I want to take it to, to the, to the next level, the dehumanization thing. Because here on the podcast that's obviously a big thing that that we talk about, you know, in terms of depolarization and bridge building is, is what can happen when when that propaganda machine turns somebody into the outgroup, the others, the, the dehumanization, you know, like the Nazis would call the Jews vermin and and equate them to to the scourge and rats and the sewer and things like that spreading. This is what happens when we dehumanize. So. So yeah, I'm sorry. Keep on going with the Falun Gong. But then I want to take you to that and dehumanization.
[00:19:07:11] Jan Jekielek: 100%. And so this actually is the, the both the nature of Falun Gong as I of course, there's a lot more to Falun Gong than what I just described. Right. But that would be a whole episode or something like this. Right? But that and this dehumanized standard, you know, incredibly well honed dehumanization, black class system, which the Chinese Communist Party had created these things together, created this circumstance to get killed, to order forced organ harvesting. So let me just briefly, as briefly as I can lay out how this happened. Okay. So they make they make the Falun Gong illegal. They're going to eradicate them to use that language. They actually use language very similar to 1930s Germany against the Falun Gong, as they have with other groups too. And again, this is a well-honed machine of black classing, okay. Basically making people subhuman, so to speak, right? From the perspective of the regime and what you're supposed to believe if you're part of the population, you don't necessarily, but you feel like you're being compelled to. Okay. So this is this is the setup. Now, the Falun Gong become for the first time, I think, in Chinese history on mass, they actually resist this black classing. And because, you know, the typical thing, right. What happens is if you're black class, you if you don't want to die, you say, yes, I got it. I agree with you. The crazy thing that you're suggesting. Yes, landowning is evil. Yes. You know, whatever. Right. Whatever it is that the regime is demanding. Yes, science is a is an evil thing. Whatever. Okay, but with Falun Gong, people were I think it creates an unusual level of agency in people. The people that are doing it are particularly serious about it. They're not, you know, kind of there aren't these sort of social controls that are keeping people doing it. They really want to do it because it's very valuable to them. Right. And and so they resist that. They simply say, no, I'm not going to agree that I'm evil. And all of the things that that the regime said unmask. Right. And this is what creates the mass incarceration. There's this rule that's actually created unwritten rule in the system that all Falun Gong deaths in the system will be considered suicides because they encounter incarcerated massive number of people enable torture, which, again, the Chinese regime has honed over decades. It's very effective and extreme measures. You can work on these people as hard as you want. Even if they die, they die in the process. Okay. That's that's. That's exactly that's the experience. And then you have some very evil person. And I make the case in the book about who I think that was. Right. And his psychopathic police chief, they get together and they realize, hey, wait a second, I can do a kind of in the twisted logic of the CCP, a win win situation. We have this, you know, priority to grow our organ industry. And on the other hand, we need to eradicate the Falun Gong. Hey, we have a win win. And the moment that in that region, this system is created and they start being able to use these so-called donors, actually innocent prisoners of conscience, other regions get in on the game because it's quote unquote effective. This is a there's a scholar at Stanford named Cheng Gang Shoe who actually, through his decades of research, have come to him. And Communist China has actually figured out this, this kind of unique modification, if you will, of the of Chinese communism, what he calls regionally administered totalitarianism. Once you get an effective model of implementing the edicts of the regime, the sort of the priorities of the regime, others kind of have to comply because otherwise they won't get the graft that they get from it, and to the regime will be going, hey, these guys are doing well. What's wrong with you? You better get up to speed or you're going to lose power. Right? So so you get this situation and and that's how you get you go from what we have in an ethical transplant situation, which I'm not sure China has ever had. Right. In fact, I'm pretty sure had never had any form semblance of an ethical transplantation situation because it even started with individual prisoners. Right. But so in an ethical situation, you have you have someone needs to have a catastrophic accident. Okay. Let's say I need a new heart, okay. There has to be a car accident or a motorcycle accident. And then on top of that, someone, you know, an ethics team has to look at that person and say, hey, is this person coming back or not? Right. If they're coming back, obviously you don't want to transplant, right? There's actually been two systems in America that were tied last year because they were got too soft on that question. Those ethics teams were deciding people were dead too quickly, too easily. Right. So it's a very serious question. And then our bodies reject foreign objects, including organs. So you actually have to match for blood and tissue type. And there's these anti-rejection drugs. The size also needs to match. My point here is you have this huge pool of people who need the organs recipients, prospective recipients, and you have one unique combination of of of person. That's the catastrophic accident. And then you have scramble. There's an algorithm these days that helps figure this out. And you scramble to get the right person close to that so you can do the transplant. Okay. Yeah. In China it works the exact opposite way. The exact opposite way. Okay. What they did with the Falun Gong is they started blood typing and tissue typing and organ scanning them in, in this mass incarceration system. And then they created a database. Okay. So now if I'm this wealthy transplant tourist, I've got my 100 or 200 grand, I pay the money, the transaction goes through, and there's a database with hundreds of thousands of people, and you can find that perfect match. So you only you have a single recipient and a mass of donors, one of which is going to be the perfect match. And that's how you get a two week transplantation time. Wait time. Right. Because basically the moment that transaction is made, that person can be shipped and killed to order. And that's why my book is called Kill to Order, by the way, that's at killedtoorder-dot-com. A little bit of shameless promotion here. If someone does want to read about this whole picture further.
[00:25:22:15] Wilk Wilkinson: Yeah. And and I want to make something really clear here, Jan, that this is not this, this episode for for my listeners. I want them to know this is not one of those things where I'm trying to I'm not having you here to scare people, because to me, this is one of the most horrific things that can happen to to a person, to a people, The the idea that that that this this would be happening on this kind of a scale is, is horrific. I want people to take this information and hopefully they buy your book and go to Killedtoorder.com and and buy the book and learn about this as a thing. But I want this more as an awareness piece than anything. I think it'd be fantastic if they if they buy the book, but this is not something that most people that I know, and most people in the circles that I run in could even comprehend as as being something that's that's real. Like I said, I think, you know, as we were growing up, there was there was a lot of us that couldn't even imagine the horror that that, you know, during World War Two, when, the Nazis were, were found out as having, exterminated, 6 million Jews and things like that. That was a, that was a revelation that, that a lot of people could not get their mind around, you know, but but the, the root cause of this comes down to, in my mind, what kind of scale of evil does it take and how much dehumanization does it take to do something like this? And I think most people want to believe that most people, most human beings, are good and that they would not ever partake in something like this. And, you know, I think we need to be incredibly grateful that there you know, I know you talk about one whistleblower in there, which horrific story that that he was able to sneak away when there was some, some prison guards had him, you know, had had not had him detained well enough and come to find out, a, you know, a number of years later because of a scar and, and he's missing some organs or missing some parts of some organs and then the, the doctors that have come forward and, and I know that there's a, there was a gentleman in, in Israel, I believe. Right. And then a woman in, in the United States who's whose story that you tell as well. And, and so when people think about this and they look at this, there's going to be a certain amount of people. And I'm sure you've run into him on that. Say, no, this, this can't be real. This, this. There's just no way that this is an actual thing. What do you say when people start pushing back on that? Because it's it's horrific. This is an awareness piece. I want them to understand that you've got the you've got the the stories that back this up.
[00:28:23:03] Jan Jekielek: Well, let me mention one specific piece of evidence which I find particularly compelling. The evidence around this, just to be clear, is voluminous. I like using that word because it really, as David Badass, one of the here researchers of this whole thing, describes it. The problem isn't too little evidence, it's too much evidence. And there's a whole China tribunal that was held in 2020. It ended in 2020 over the course of about a year and a half, run by Sir Jeffrey niece, who had actually prosecuted Slobodan Milosevic back in the day. He convened this international tribunal in London of experts, and they basically looked through the entire body of evidence that exists. It runs from like phone calls to Chinese hospitals where people would call in and say, hey, can I get organs in two weeks? Yes, absolutely. Falun Gong organs? Yes, absolutely. Stuff like that. I mean, just as a starting point, right? That's just one little bit. Right. And then but the problem, of course, is the moment that you start documenting that kind of evidence, that door closes. Right? So they make it harder for you to get that type of evidence. This has been kind of the story of this time, but the piece of evidence I specifically want to give you, right, is there's a paper in the American Journal of Transplantation. It's about through about three years ago. Okay. It's titled Execution by Organ Procurement. So what the researchers did is they decided to ask the question. They said, we know that most, if not all, transplantation in China is basically this killed to order variety. It's possible that with kidneys it's different. Like with an organ where someone can survive the transplantation, it could be a bit different. But we don't we don't have documentation of that. And the incentive structures are obviously all messed up. But they ask the question, could it be, since that's the normal thing these guys have been doing for 20 years, that they actually. Right. Violations of the dead donor rule, meaning people being killed by having their organs removed into their research methods, into their scientific research methods that are published right, with very smart questions. So they look through just over 2000 papers and what they found, and they had very stringent criteria. I actually think the number is much higher than this. But with their extremely stringent criteria, they found 71 papers out of those 2000 plus that there was a very clear violation of the dead donor rule, meaning that the person was killed by having their organs removed. Okay. And so that and they documented in the American journal transplantation, it's so normalized there that they don't even fully realize in some cases that it's inappropriate. Use that word, you know, casually here to write killing someone into your scientific research methods, okay. By removing their organs. That's and I mean, we could spend a whole episode talking about the range of different kinds of evidence that that exists around this issue.
[00:31:16:05] Wilk Wilkinson: That's right. No. And and like I said, this is this is one of those things when I first started listening to it. And, you know, when, when, when I first saw that you had this book coming out, I'm just like, oh my gosh, this, this, I. I'm one of those people, Jan, who, knows human nature. You know, we as humans are fallible human beings. We do all kinds of ugly things. I know evil exists, but to realize that evil at this scale is happening, that's one of those harder things to get your mind around as a good person. I think.
[00:31:47:18] Jan Jekielek: 100, 100%. And, you know, so when the Gulag Archipelago came out, one soldier wrote that book, right? And just sort of unequivocally demonstrated the evil of the Soviet communist regime. I mean, that it took a lot of it shocked a lot of people, even, you know, even though dissidents had been talking about this for decades, the gulag, the horrors of the Gulag. Right. So I actually argue and kill to order this again, there's this true nature of America's biggest adversary is that this whole system is really a feature, not a bug. It's sort of a natural. This is something that the Nazi regime in Germany would very much do if they had the technology back then to do it right. They had this approach of monetizing, the work, the you know, when I made a documentary about my father in law who had survived Buchenwald and a number of other camps, he was a Holocaust survivor. And one of the things that I hadn't grasped until we made that film and we were in Germany, is in this one region where where he had spent a lot of time he was making he was doing forced labor, making Panzerfaust, which are these single use anti-tank weapons during World War two that the Germans used? You know how much? There were 500 concentration camps right around this one town alone, right. So they were using they were basically working the Jews to death. Okay. As but but getting as much, extracting as much value out of as they could. And there's actually a PhD thesis that was written about this whole forced organ harvesting industry by a man named Matthew Robertson, another one of the hero researchers of this whole thing, where he dubs this whole methodology extractive repression. You get to destroy a group, right? Well, at the same time, you monetize it as much as possible. And here we're talking, you know, by kind of a very rough estimate, about a $9 billion annual industry. Never mind unlimited access to organs in perpetuity for the Chinese super elites.
[00:33:47:22] Wilk Wilkinson: Yes. Yeah. there's some serious parallels there. And it's all it's all evil. And I just want people to be aware of it. The book again is killed to order. I know we're at the end of our time here, Jan. And and I look forward to our next conversation. KilledtoOrder.com Com is the book American Thought Leaders. I want to mention that as well. Your show over there at Epoch Times where all the places they can find you.
[00:34:15:15] Jan Jekielek: Thanks for asking and I do hope that I can come back and maybe we can do a whole episode about this whole dehumanization thing, because, you know, this is this didn't just stop with the Falun Gong in 2015, 2016. They added the Uyghurs, you mentioned them before, dehumanized them horribly, incarcerated a million plus on of them, and started to work on them. And now I'm seeing dehumanizing rhetoric coming out against Christians in China as they're ramping up at persecution of Christians. This is horrible stuff. So I would love to talk more about that whole phenomenon and so forth with you as to where people can find me. my favorite place right now is Killed to order. That's the direct Amazon link to the book. Easy way to pick it up. But you can also go to your library or to your local bookstore. It's around it got, astonishingly, became a New York Times bestseller, which is, you know, I'd been hoping for something like this because there's a level of interest these days that I just hadn't seen before. Okay. And that's what that's that's part of why I wrote it now. I felt like at the time might finally be here. You can also find thank you for mentioning American Thought Leaders. I have covered this issue on American thought leaders. I've done over 1300 shows right now for that long form. That's if you look up Jan Jekielek or American Thought Leaders straight, I can be found at JNJ e l e that's and you'll find links to all of this the book, the show and of course the Epoch Times. Com where the fourth largest media in America by paid subscribers I right now by a margin and we're we would be thrilled if you wanted to come and check us out, especially if you're someone who really believes in kind of de-escalating hate rhetoric and stuff like that. This is part of our part of our founding was about kind of breaking down narratives, but also narratives that actually drive people to to have these kind of hateful things and, and approaches. And this is it's an incredibly, incredibly destructive thing. And I also finally, I want to commend you for your work in trying to do this, because it's just way too easy, especially with our own particular media reality today. With social media, it's sort of accelerated this silo ization, if you wish, of people. And in effect, it's very easy to use dehumanizing rhetoric to kind of create audiences and create these groups of people. So it's like this is something that's been accelerating. It's a huge concern of mine, and it's something that we're really looking to stand up against at the Epoch Times, and also how we do our content.
[00:36:53:20] Wilk Wilkinson: That is excellent. Well, thank you so much. Jan, this has been a great pleasure. And we will absolutely do another episode and focus more on the dehumanization. I think it's important. Keep up all the great work that you're doing at the Epoch Times, and I will make sure that all of those ways to find you are in the show notes for this episode. It's been a pleasure, my friend.
[00:37:15:13] Jan Jekielek: Thanks so much, Wilk...
[00:37:17:06] Wilk Wilkinson: Friends, I want to thank you so much for tuning in. And if there's anything in this episode that provided exceptional value to you, please make sure to hit that share button. If you haven't done so already, please be sure to subscribe to get the Derate The Hate podcast sent to your email inbox every week. We really are better together. So please take a moment to visit Braver Angels and consider joining the movement towards civic renewal and bridging our political divide. This is Wilk wrapping up for the week saying get out there. Be kind to one another. Be grateful for everything you've got. And remember, it's up to you to make every day the day that you want it to be. With that, my friend. I'm going to back on out of here and we will catch you next week. Take care.
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