Name: Xi and Putin’s Hot Mic Moment on Immortality and Why It Matters | Joshua Philipp
Uploaded: 2025-11-26T14:55:18.000Z
Description: In a moment that stunned the world, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping were recently caught on a hot mic talking about increasing longevity and even achieving immortality through repeated organ transplants.

Jan Jekielek is a senior editor with The Epoch Times, host of the show “American Thought Leaders” and co-host of “FALLOUT” with Dr. Robert Malone and “Kash’s Corner” with Kash Patel. Jan’s career has spanned academia, international human rights work, and now for almost two decades, media. He has interviewed nearly a thousand thought leaders on camera, and specializes in long-form discussions challenging the grand narratives of our time. He’s also an award-winning documentary filmmaker, producing “The Unseen Crisis: Vaccine Stories You Were Never Told,” “DeSantis: Florida vs. Lockdowns,” and “Finding Manny.”

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[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] In a moment that stunned the world, Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping were recently caught on a hot mic talking about increasing longevity and even achieving immortality through repeated organ transplants.

For the last two decades, we’ve been reporting how the CCP kills prisoners of conscience, the main body of them being Falun Gong practitioners, for their organs.

Joining me today to unpack the significance of this moment and what it teaches us about the inner workings of the CCP is Epoch Times senior investigative journalist Joshua Philipp, host of EpochTV’s “Crossroads.”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of NTD.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT
Jan Jekielek:

Joshua Philipp, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Yes, Jan, great being back. It’s been a while. A lot has happened since then too.

My goodness, Josh, talking about this forced organ harvesting industry in China, you and I have been looking at this issue for the better part of 20 years. There are very few people out there, aside from some of these key researchers, that I think both of us know. And this hot mic moment for me with Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin, talking about achieving immortality through continual organ transplantation, was a surreal moment that I honestly am still, in a sense, digesting many days after the fact. What was your reaction?

I was shocked. I mean, shocked, but also not shocked because, I mean, we knew it was happening. We’ve known this has been happening for a long time. It was kind of that moment where you’re reporting on a murderer and you know a crime has been taking place. And then you get a video clip of the murderer bragging about how they did it and how they’re happy they did it. It was that kind of moment for me.

And, you know, Jan, I was actually thinking back. I remember when I first started working for Epoch Times back in 2006; again, you know, almost 20 years. I remember you were one of the first people I met, actually at Epoch Times, that you know, you were helping train some of the journalists. I think that was the same year that we broke the first stories on live organ harvesting in China. It’s incredible to think back on it.

You know, so many things were happening at that time simultaneously. On the one hand, there was Annie, who was this whistleblower whose husband had basically taken 2,000 corneas out of living people. This is what he confessed to her.  And, you know, he was having nightmares. He finally confessed to her that this was real.

Concurrently, right around the same time in Israel, Jacob Lavee, who was the former head of the Israeli Transplant Association, had gone to China to get an organ transplant. He had been promised that he would get it in two weeks, a heart transplant. And so Jacob knew this was something grossly unethical that happened when this guy came back with a heart actually in him, with a two-week scheduled wait time. So all of this was happening kind of all at once. It was kind of this unbelievable horror that we were exposed to.

And I think this is actually one of the most difficult things about issues like this, these extreme crimes against humanity. I really didn’t want to believe it to be true, right? I mean, it took me the better part of that year, I can’t remember the exact time, to just come to terms with the fact that it was real, especially when David Kilgore and David Matas wrote this initial report that showed the evidence that was available.

You mentioned Annie, whose husband was a transplant doctor, and he was harvesting people’s corneas. I remember at first, a lot of people did not believe us. The pushback was kind of rough at that time. I remember a lot of the media, a lot of them didn’t even report it, but the ones that did report it, a lot of it was critical of us. They were like, oh, you’re just reporting rumors; you’re making crazy claims.

And then we started getting more and more evidence, additional witnesses coming out, and it began corroborating it. Then you had independent researchers, I believe the World Organization to Investigate the Persecution of Falun Gong, which has a shorter name in Chinese but a long name in English. They were making phone calls into China, and they were calling up hospitals.

You had recordings of it being like, oh, I need to get an organ transplant. How soon can I get it? And the guy’s like, well, how soon can you get here, basically? You know, you’re talking about a kidney or a heart, and it’s one or two months or one or two weeks. Then they were asking, well, I only want healthy organs. I know Falun Gong practitioners are very healthy; do you have Falun Gong organs? He says, they’re all Falun Gong. I need to consult a doctor. I’ll be right back.

Hello? Hello? Are you a doctor? How long does the transplantation take? How long does it take? It takes about a week.Are there any other types of transplantation? We all have this type. Oh, all of you have this type? Yes, we all have this type. It’s new blood. How long does it take?

I remember when that came out, I was horrified. It was something, like you mentioned, that shocks the conscience so much that you kind of don’t want it to be true. And that’s a weird thing when you’re dealing with crimes against humanity on this scale. You don’t want it to be true. On this scale, you don’t want it to be true. And so I think it’s like you almost instinctively want to reject it until you accept that evil like this, you know, can exist in the world and frankly is still existing in the world.

And then you deal with the question of how can this possibly be allowed to happen? You go through kind of a trail of feelings, I guess, when you face something like this. And I remember as a media organization, I feel like we all kind of went through it at that time. You know, it’s interesting too. I mean, you mentioned David Matas and David Kilgore. And I remember they were commenting on the way the CCP was responding because it wasn’t normal.

And he was saying what the CCP was doing was that rather than addressing the claims and addressing the evidence and trying to give rebuttals, the CCP was falsifying evidence and then criticizing the evidence they were falsifying, which was, I mean, a totally bizarre way of trying to like, you know, give responses to accusations. And to, I believe it was Matas, he was commenting that that for him was like a big red flag.

The Chinese Communist Party was not even trying to give rebuttals to the evidence being presented. They were using false information, presenting false information, and then criticizing the false information that they were presenting. What kind of a way is that to give debates?

Years later, I’ve seen what the effect of that is, because a lot of media, when they want to, like, you know, debunk it, because a lot of them have not even investigated it, when they want to debunk it, they actually use the CCP’s narrative. It’s like, oh, the CCP pointed to this claim that came out, and they debunked it. That was one of the claims the CCP introduced. It was never a claim introduced by a witness or introduced by a critic. It’s like they were manufacturing false evidence to spur on the public debate. And that’s a crazy way, when you think about it, to do propaganda to cover something up. That alone should have been a red flag for everybody.

And, you know, over the course of time, not only did we have to see the increasing amount of evidence come up, but we also saw the increasing amount of cover-up being done as it developed. And I would say even, you know, the involvement of a lot of mainstream media in what I would say is a cover-up. You know, and I think that really went on until about, you know, the tribunal in the UK. And that was a pivotal moment. And I think for the most part, a lot of media, you know, when the tribunal happened and determined, yes, this is happening, a lot of media acknowledged that it’s happening now, with the exception, I think, of maybe the New York Times. Crazy to think about.

So let me frame out a few things for the benefit of our viewers. So David Matas, you’ve been talking about him, the Winnipeg, Canada human rights lawyer, the B’nai B’rith Council in Canada. He actually played a very significant role in bringing to justice the last Nazi war criminal that was hiding out in plain sight in Canada at the time.

David Kilgore, and I just want to mention this very briefly, is a former Canadian Secretary of State, a really interesting guy. He was actually part of both parties in Canada, the Liberals and the party which was strangely called the Progressive Conservatives back in the day. He was a values-oriented guy. When the party went too far on something, he wouldn’t accept it. He switched parties.

And then ultimately, because of this, he ended up being independent and ended up being the longest-serving parliament member in Canada because everybody knew he stood for something and he was basically serious behind his values. So he stepped in, and together they wrote this initial report, which was the thing that ultimately convinced me that this was real.

And then the China Tribunal, now we’re going up to 2020, was an incredible effort by Sir Geoffrey Nice, who had prosecuted Slobodan Milosevic back in the day, and he convened what was called a People’s Tribunal. So what they did was they used the standard of evidence that would be required in an actual legal proceeding. They basically spent a year looking through all of the evidence that was available around this issue, and they brought in a whole bunch of new witnesses as well.

The China Tribunal found unequivocally that this was happening on a large scale, forced organ harvesting from prisoners of conscience, that Falun Gong practitioners were likely the principal source, with Uyghurs being another possible source, and really just established the entire body of literature. And you can go to<a href="http://chinatribunal.org"> Chinatribunal.org</a>, read it for yourself if you’d like.

You know what a lot of people don’t understand too is the Chinese cultural belief on the preservation of the body after death. And I think this is where a big misunderstanding is with a lot of journalists and critics when they say, you have a lot of people in China. Was it 1.4 billion people? And people donate their organs; you’re going to have a lot of organs.

They’re shocked to find that for a long time, the number of donations was in the hundreds, if I’m not mistaken. It was like barely any. I read a lot of books, of course. And if you read a lot of old Chinese literature, like old writings, the beliefs on the preservation of the body after death are really serious. Almost no people would ever want to donate their organs.

I’ll give you a couple of examples. If you read Outlaws of the Marsh, which is about this bandit uprising and stuff like that, overthrowing tyrannical governments. It’s kind of like the Chinese Robin Hood, right? It’s one of my favorite books. Anytime a guy’s about to be executed, the guy will beg to not have his body desecrated because they believe that the state of the body at the time of death will affect the spirit. So they take it really seriously.

You can read, for example, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio, a book of Chinese supernatural tales. The Taoists have a book called The Jade Record, which is kind of like the Taoist equivalent of the Divine Comedy. It’s about heaven and hell and a warning to the world, basically. They all talk about the effect of preserving the body and things like this, and the beliefs, of course, that if you remove an organ, it actually impacts the spirit. In their belief, you don’t desecrate a body. You don’t cut open a body. You don’t hack up a body. You don’t destroy the body.

And that belief really still stands in China. People are not going to donate their organs, and they don’t. And so when people look at the numbers, and they’re like, oh, well, where’s the CCP getting these organs? It’s not coming from donations, and they at least are willing to acknowledge that. Then they say it’s, you know, murdered prisoners.

The question then is, well, what were the crimes of those prisoners? Was it that they were murderers or drug dealers, or were they like religious believers or, you know, human rights activists or human rights lawyers or something? Like, you know, the narrative of what the CCP defines as a criminal is where that whole thing goes into.

You mentioned something super interesting here. On the one hand, there’s this traditional approach of, yes, there really isn’t a huge interest in seeing any cuts into the body, any organs being removed, any of that in traditional Chinese culture. At the same time, the modern culture, which is the communist culture, everybody knows that the Chinese Communist Party has contempt for life. So to me, it’s like the double whammy of why you don’t have people basically signing up for an organ donor card.

On that point, and that’s a really important point. Imagine you’re a Chinese citizen, and you know how people think under a communist system. And you know that if you get injured in a car accident, and you’re written as an organ donor, and you’re not dead, and you’re fine, and the doctor knows he can make $50,000 by like sending you to the chop shop. I’d be terrified, you know? I would never, never want to have signed that thing saying you can harvest my organs because you know how people think under that system that you’re more valuable dead than you are alive. Like, that is the last thing I think any sensible person would want in that country under the CCP.

So, you know, this segues really nicely because one of the things I absolutely want to talk about today is just this new book that I’m writing, right, Kill to Order, with Skyhorse Publishing. You know, they’re taking a big chance on a very, very critically important issue, at least for me and for you, and I hope the world soon. It’s almost like this issue of organ harvesting is really like the perfect lens through which you can understand how things really work in communist China and the Chinese Communist Party and what it is capable of. It kind of dawned on me at some point that it really is.

And hence, I almost view this, sometimes I’m one who believes in destiny and providence and so forth. And to have this hot mic moment come out a couple of weeks after I’ve signed the deal to write this book. And by the way, we’re doing it at breakneck speed. I’m going to be publishing it in February. But hey, you’ve just given me a ton of material to work with. Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, thank you for that. I think one of the most critical things that we misunderstand in the West collectively, is  that we’re not dealing with a normal government. Chinese communists think very differently. Communists at large think very differently.

But the value of human life is something completely different. What’s possible to do? What are the moral boundaries? Are there even any at all? Or ultimately, that the supremacy of the party is above all else? And it’s like, if you’re dealing with them without the understanding of some of these things, this is some of the stuff I’m going to be fleshing out, you’re really not going to be able to deal with them very effectively or very thoughtfully or in ways that will actually be good for your country because they’re going to take advantage of you in very extreme ways. And this is what’s happened.

This is where a lot of people fail to understand the nature of the CCP. It’s one of the big miscalculations because I think a lot of people are waking up to what communism is, but there’s still a lot of old thinking where communism is just viewed as an economic theory. Oh, you know, government-run enterprises and share the wealth. Like, you know, for a lot of young people, that’s about as far as they understand communism. Oh, you know, it’s about sharing the wealth. But it’s not.

If you break down communism, I would say it’s dialectical materialism, a theory of human struggle. You want to manufacture suffering because it’s like a Darwinist theory applied to social evolution. The Hegelian theory that conflict leads forward. And how do you force social evolution? Well, you force the dialectical process of survival of the fittest applied to politics. You get two groups of people, you put them against each other, and as Hegel would say, conflict leads forward.

The struggle of opposites drives social evolution towards, you know, the unknown future because they believe society is evolving towards something, right? And so what they always want is manufactured suffering. They want suffering. And this is where a lot of people just absolutely misunderstand communist human rights abuses. That is the system. That is what they want.

You know, case in point, one of the more horrifying historical stories we have is from Vladimir Lenin shortly after the Bolshevik revolution when he manufactured the first major famine in Russia. And he’s basically told, hey, you know, the Russian people are starving to death by the millions caused by your dumb policies.

And what does he say? He says, good, it will make them lose faith, not only in the czar but in God, too. I mean, let that sink in, right? Like, let that sink in. Like, he thinks mass starvation of millions of people, people dying in the millions, the people of a system, is a good thing because it will cause people to lose faith in the system the communists overthrew. Okay, it’ll make my political enemies look bad. They will come to support us more because they’re losing faith in that. And it will make them lose faith in God. Why would you politically want to make people lose faith in God, right?

You know, there was something Dr. Sean Lin spoke about. You know, we both know Sean Lin. He’s, of course, you know, he was a military medical doctor. He worked on virus research and stuff like that. He’s written some books about Chinese virus labs and great, great stuff, right? One thing he told me a long time ago really stood out. He was talking about why communism wants to destroy religion. And you can look at it.

Every communist regime, when they come in, they launch some type of cultural revolution where they want to destroy traditional beliefs, traditional morality, and traditional religion, right? All communist regimes, one of the defining traits is they persecute religion. They’ve all done it. Why do they do that? Sean Lin’s narrative on this, the one he says, is because they don’t want the people to understand that there’s a higher moral principle. They don’t want to have people believe in a moral principle that is outside the control of the state.

And so he said that when people, you know, commit evil normally, you know, on a moral level, on a traditional level, or on a religious level, people judge it. Do I agree with this based on the traditions of my culture? Do I agree with this based on the stories I was raised with? Do I agree with this on what my grandma taught me? Do I agree with this on what I believe to be good and evil based on my religious beliefs?

For a communist system, that’s a threat to your power because the people are judging whether you’re legitimate or not or whether you’re good or not based on a value you don’t control. So what the communists want when they destroy religion is they want state action to define good and evil. If you destroy religion, if you destroy culture, if you destroy tradition, the definition of good and evil is what I say is good and what I say is evil.

And so, you know, that’s actually where, funny enough, when people talk about, you know, political correctness, and I know it’s interpreted differently these days, but you can trace that back to 1967 and Mao Zedong during the Cultural Revolution. Mao Zedong basically said in China, you know, basically, if you do what the state says, you’re politically correct. If you go against us, you’re politically incorrect, and we’re going to kill you or put you in prison.

And so, you know, the idea was a political-based system of morality that cannot coexist with a religious belief, that cannot coexist with God. Because what it means is that good and evil is defined by the actions of the state. If the state says it is evil to be a landowner, then that’s what evil is. If the state says it is evil for a woman to wear makeup or for a priest to pray to God over the Communist Party, then that’s what evil is.

And if the state says to, you know, harvest the organs of people who oppose the state or dare speak out against it or undermine it through believing in old beliefs like religion, that is their definition of good and evil, and they have a monopoly on it because they kill anybody who says otherwise. You know, that is a really key way to understand the evil, the underlying evil nature of communism. It is an anti-tradition, anti-God, and anti-life belief. More than just, it’s not an economic theory, it is a belief. It’s not an economic theory; it is a belief, almost like a religion, but an extremely evil one that again, tries to redefine the nature of what’s good and evil itself based on whatever it wants.

Yes, 100 percent. And I think, you know, one of the more fascinating interviews that I’ve done on this broad topic is with a China scholar named Chenggang Xu, who’s over at Stanford now. He actually started his research as a communist and went out into the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, trying to study and understand how communism would apply in a rural setting because, of course, the theory had to do with the struggle of the proletariat, the working man.

Very quickly, he was branded a counter-revolutionary because of what he found; he was actually a truth seeker, it turned out. He wanted to actually find out what the real case was and they didn’t like it, to your point exactly. And so he spent a lot of time in prison, a lot of time in re-education through labor, all the while kind of developing his theories. And in many quirks of fate, he ends up at Stanford as a researcher.

And so his new book, Institutional Genes, and he’s looking at it from the perspective of what are the elements of the communist system that made Chinese communism unique and allowed it to survive beyond Soviet communism, which collapsed. And here’s what he figured out. I realize that this speaks directly to the organ transplant industry, and I’ll explain in a moment what it is.

Basically, he said, in traditional communism, communism is obscenely hierarchical. It’s in a way that most people really don’t understand. Remember, the party is supreme. The supremacy of the party is the top value always. That supersedes everything else. That’s how these decisions about what is good and right, the party’s existence is always right and good, and everyone must be sacrificed to achieve that.

So in traditional communism, the directives are being basically brought down from the top, and people are implementing them. This is what the Chinese figured out. This is the Chinese characteristics of what Chenggang Xu figured out, that you don’t need to do directives. They figured out, no, you just put the strategic directions that come from the top. And then what you do is, in effect, you’re creating a market among the regions to compete with each other on how well they can implement the strategic directions from the top. And you’ll probably see how this basically speaks to this organ harvesting issue.

I was always trying to figure out for years, how is it that this industry grew so fast, so incredibly quickly, once the Falun Gong became persecuted by Jiang Zemin and the communist regime. I didn’t expect that they could be sufficiently organized to do that, and there was all this corruption. But really, all it took was one person in one region, and we could actually even guess who that might have been, to figure out, hey, wait a second, we’re eradicating these people. Falun Gong deaths in prison are considered suicides. We’re allowed to work on these people to whatever end to break them. We’re supposed to be growing our transplant industry. There’s initiatives around that.

Wait a second, we have a win-win-win here. We can just use these people to do this and in the process eradicate them, to use Jiang Zemin’s words from the time. All it took was one very evil person to initiate the system, and it started to work in the communist logic, and everybody else had to look over there and be like, oh my goodness, they figured something that’s really working according to communist directives. I better get on board instantly because in a second, this region is going to be going to the top and I might be on the bottom.

And on the bottom means, well, heads could roll if you’re not implementing party directives correctly and effectively. So it’s almost like they figured out how to make it more evil by creating this quasi-market in trying to implement whatever the strategic directions were. I’m very curious to hear what you think about that. I don’t think we’ve talked about it before. I mean, I’ve just been figuring this out in the last few weeks, frankly.

Yes, that’s actually one of the main ways the CCP functions, in my understanding. And so that goes back to the idea of the actual definition of political correctness, which is if you want, you know, how do you rise in power in the CCP? It’s also through political correctness. You need to show that you’re willing to get blood on your hands. If the CCP says the agenda this week is to eradicate this group of people or kill all the sparrows, which caused a famine, by the way, then that’s what you got to do.

And so if you want to get in the good graces of the Communist Party, you need to carry out the objectives of the CCP. It’s like a pay-to-play system where you need to get blood on your hands. It’s the same way a mafia works or like a cartel works. And I’ve heard a lot of Chinese people compare the CCP to a mafia state. If you want to rise through the ranks, you need to be the most brutal. You need to be the most evil. If you want to be in the good graces of it, it’s like everybody sitting at the table needs to be equally guilty. And the more guilty are the ones who are more in favor of the CCP because the guilty ones are the ones they’re not afraid are going to go against it.

That’s the way communism, these hierarchical systems work. And the CCP incentivizes it too, because people know that if you want to do business with them, if you want to be in it, you have to play the game. And a few cases with that. If you do business with China, look at Hollywood, right? The CCP has vague censorship policies. And people have criticized that because they say, actually, the vagueness of it makes it worse. Because what happens is you don’t know what is deemed okay or not.

This is one of the things a lot of Hollywood studios have come out and said, a lot of filmmakers have come out and said, you don’t know what the standards are. And so what happens is you’re incentivized to over-censor. You’re incentivized to go overboard with trying to bootlick the CCP. And what happens is when they go overboard with it, the going overboard is what establishes the baseline for everybody else to follow.

And so all the other studios are like, well, I want to get into the Chinese market. What should I do? Well, this competing film has filmed this scene in China. They made China look good. They had a Chinese actor come in. They presented a Chinese narrative. They’re here. So if you want to get in, you have to beat them. So you got to go here. And the next one has to go here. And so they incentivize this race where by being vague on what the standards are, they incentivize people to go overboard with it.

Same thing with the media. A lot of media, if they dare question this, you’re allowed to criticize the CCP a little bit, which is where people get confused. But there are no-go topics. You touch the no-go topics, you’re out of China. Or you may even get arrested in some of the worst cases. A lot of people are being arrested right now for questioning the economic numbers because that’s deemed like a national security issue for the CCP because they’re lying about their economy, right?

And so there’s also a race, you know, you got to censor yourself, you got to play the game, you got to promote the CCP’s fake narratives if you want to get access, if you want to get the good sources, if you want to get the good stories, you got to play the game. And that’s why the NBA punished Enes Cantor Freedom for writing a message about criticizing slavery in China. Why is criticizing slavery controversial for the NBA?

Don’t you have players kneeling on the court condemning American slavery, but you can’t criticize CCP slavery happening literally as we speak? It’s insane. It’s absolutely insane. But he gets punished? Why do they do that? It’s because they’re trying to play the CCP’s game, in my opinion, right? And so that’s how the CCP works. It’s a mafia tactic. If you want to rise in the ranks, you have to get blood on your hands. You have to be guilty because the guy who’s not guilty is deemed a threat to the party. That’s how they work.

And just to build on this idea a little bit, Josh, this is, you know, I’ve used this example to help people kind of, again, understand how the system works. Communism functions to try to lower everybody’s moral high ground. Let’s say you’re not in the upper elite echelon. You’re not fighting for that. You actually want to try to be a moral person. You subscribe to something akin to natural law. You don’t want to be part of that system, but the system functions to try to compromise you nonetheless.

So for example, you get put in this situation where this actually happened to my mother in Poland. You get called into state security and get asked a question, hey, comrade, would you like to tell us what this and this person that you know very well was doing last night? So in my mother’s case, you can’t say no to this, of course, because then that’s definitely a red flag. But she said something like, well, I’m not really made out to do stuff like that. And so they let her go, but they pulled her passport.

And basically, suddenly she had to reveal to them she wasn’t this big activist, right? But she was just a passive regime resistor, as there always are in these societies. But she was kind of forced to reveal herself. But what they do very often is something like this.

They’ll say, well, okay, comrade, that’s very interesting that you don’t want to tell us, but my colleague is over there at school and is just actually spending some time with your daughter, making sure that she’s safe. Are you sure you don’t want to tell us? Let’s say it’s even your wife was doing the other day, and what do you do? Well, you tell them. You tell them everything because you’re forced to pick the lesser evil. You don’t want to have the chance that your daughter may be harmed or something like that.

And now, you know you’ve done wrong and you have to live with that. Whatever moral high ground you had, whatever resistance you had to the CCP or the Communist Party in that place is now worn down a little bit and you feel a little bit broken. And so they kind of cultivate the desire of these communist societies to cultivate a broken people, which are easier to control. And again, I think this is so critical for people to understand. It’s just really hard to imagine living in a free society, largely, how this could actually work, even though we’ve seen lighter variants of that, especially in recent years.

There was an anecdote that was really popular during the Soviet Union that I’ve mentioned before. And I don’t think it’s a real story. I think it’s a symbolic story that people told. But the story was this. This was during Stalin’s time in power in the Soviet Union. One of them was that he enjoyed, like his hobby would be to put green-tinted glasses on a horse and then put a bale of like dry nasty, you know, hay in front of it and then laugh as the horse, believing it’s fresh green grass, ate this nasty rotten hay and then was disappointed by what it was tasting.

I don’t think he actually enjoyed doing that, maybe he did, but I think it was symbolic of what communism did and what Karl Marx did. It tries to tell people that it’s going to offer them heaven on earth, right? It presents them with this kind of rose-tinted or green-tinted glasses. And what it gives them is this rotten, nasty mess, and then laughs as they consume it and realize what they’ve been fed.

There’s another story, more to what you were just saying, where Joseph Stalin was walking with a handful of his cadres and they asked him how do you control people, how do you control the population? He says watch this. He picks up a chicken right there walking through a farm. Again, I think this is just an anecdote. I think it’s symbolic.

But he picks up a chick and he says watch this, comrade. He picks up a chick and he rips out all of its feathers, just tears them all out, right? And then he puts the chicken back down once it’s cold and featherless and he holds out his hand and gives it a handful of grain and he says now this chicken will be dependent on me for the rest of its life.

When you destroy people’s ability to be independent, you manufacture people who are dependent. If the Communist Party tells you that it’s your, you know, big brother or you know, big uncle, Uncle Stalin or something like that, they can only achieve that if they destroy your ability to live without it. So in order to validate its existence, it needs to render you stupid. It needs to render you helpless. It needs to make it so that you’re dependent on a social welfare system because you’re incapable of surviving without it.

You know, I believe that’s actually why communism manufactures famines. It’s one of the first steps you always see when a communist regime takes power. It’s because they want to kill off a lot of the people who refuse to kill their neighbors for food or something like that. They want the most vile. They want the people who go against their inner natures. They want the evil to destroy the kind.

And then it takes the people who are broken and destroyed, who’ve gone against their conscience, whose faith has been broken, and then it takes those people and builds the new communist system, right? That featherless chicken eating out of the hand that just abused it, that’s what they do. And it’s such a disgusting, just horrifying way of understanding a system of government that validates its own systems of control by abusing people and by creating fear and creating struggle.

Everybody who’s lived under it knows this, but what a frightening prospect that there are systems like this in the world. And it creates problems too, when people who have never been through that try to understand it because it’s so far removed from how normal people think. Like it’s so far distant that a communist leader would say, hey, we can live 150 years by killing people and taking their organs. And they all smile and say, hey, great idea, comrade. What kind of person thinks like that? What kind of a person could ever even imagine doing something like that? It requires such moral bankruptcy that good people are almost incapable of understanding it. It’s terrifying.

To build on this a little bit, just a few days before this hot mic moment, Armstrong Williams in the Baltimore Sun, he’s part owner there, published one of his staff commentaries. He does it every week. He published this very powerful op-ed about the cost of engagement with communist China.

Because if you recall, Secretary Kennedy, about a month ago, basically announced that there were American hospitals that were violating the dead donor rule, meaning that basically people who weren’t sufficiently dead—let me qualify this just very briefly. It’s an ethical question how you decide if someone is really dead when you harvest their organs because you can’t harvest from a completely dead body. They need to be brain dead and body alive.

There’s a standard there. We have teams of people who are involved in transplant ethics who figure out, is this a reasonable person to transplant from or not? Is the accident sufficient? Are they really brain dead? Mistakes are made in this. This is a fraught area that has to be figured out. What we want to be doing is erring on the conservative side. If someone has a chance of living, to give them that chance.

Unfortunately, in our transplant industry, things have been shifting a bit in the other direction. There was even an op-ed some weeks ago in the New York Times, I suppose not surprisingly, arguing for the redefinition of the dead donor rule, basically making the death a little less, classifying someone as dead who’s actually a little less dead, easing the rules so that there could be more donor organs available for donation. Well, so what Armstrong argues, I think very poignantly in this piece is that this is the cost of engagement with communist China.

And I’ve been just reading reports as I’m researching for this book, Kill to Order, that I’m writing. There’s actually an unbelievable level of engagement between medical companies, hospitals, research, and so forth with communist China. The thing I’ve been reading recently is that a lot of the materials that are used for organ transplantation in China actually come from the West. That’s one of the routes of this engagement that I wasn’t even fully aware of.

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