Why The Epoch Times Exists: Truth, Tyranny, and the Price of Telling It With Joe Polish, Rob Schneider, and Jan Jekielek

Joe Polish sits down with actor and comedian Rob Schneider and Epoch Times senior editor Jan Jekielek for a wide-ranging conversation about how ordinary people get talked into accepting things they know are wrong.

Rob and Jan trace the warning signs of propaganda, the price of telling the truth, and what it takes for a free society to hold itself together.

Here's what you're about to discover in this conversation:

• Why Jan Jekielek says the best slaves are the ones who don't know they're enslaved, and how Communist China's decades-old playbook for creating “class enemies” explains what happened to unvaccinated Americans during COVID.
• The eerie Epoch Times experiment Jan describes: five simulated towns run entirely by Google, OpenAI, xAI, and Anthropic's AI, where one town collapsed into total anarchy in four days and one resident voted for her own deletion.
• Why Rob Schneider says attention spans have collapsed from nine seconds to 1.7 seconds in twelve years, and the half-joking advice he has for anyone worried about AI reading their eyes.
• What Dr. David Martin's 40/30/30 breakdown of COVID compliance reveals about mass psychology, and why Jan says the 30% who refused the shot were enough on their own to end the mandates.
• How Rob turns one of the most abhorrent subjects imaginable, organ harvesting in China, into a joke that actually lands (and why it only works at an Epoch Times fundraiser).
• What Jan learned interviewing the leaders of Poland's Solidarity movement about the exact two week window when a totalitarian regime realized it was already over.

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Show Notes:

Mass Formation and the COVID Wake-Up

• Jan points to Mattias Desmet's concept of “mass formation,” popularly known as mass formation psychosis, to explain how a mob mentality let large parts of the population get swept into a government and media propaganda campaign without realizing it.
• Referencing Dr. David Martin's breakdown, Jan lays out a rough 40/30/30 split during COVID: 15% wildly in support of lockdowns and mandates, 15% supportive but less zealous, 40% who just wanted the path of least resistance, and 30%, roughly 80 million Americans, who refused the shot outright.
• Jan argues that 30% refusal was enough on its own to end COVID mandates, and asks the room what let some people avoid the psychosis when so many others did not.

The Scapegoating Playbook

• Jan traces a pattern from decades of watching Communist China: totalitarian regimes pick a group, such as landowners, and use control of the media to paint them as dangerous and worthy of contempt before seizing their property.
• He connects this directly to COVID, where dehumanizing language against “anti-vaxxers” followed the same script used against class enemies in China's Cultural Revolution.
• Jan's rule of thumb: whenever a group of people gets labeled as lesser than everyone else and worthy of contempt, that is a massive red flag that a psychological operation is underway.
• Rob adds that communist systems cannot admit the system itself has failed, so when the promised utopia never arrives, someone else has to be blamed, first an external enemy, then an internal one.

Rising Antisemitism and October 7th

• Rob connects the current wave of antisemitism to Holocaust survivors passing away, arguing it is no coincidence that hatred is resurfacing as the generation that remembers it firsthand disappears.
• He walks through the math: if the percentage of Israelis killed on October 7th were applied to the US population, it would be the equivalent of roughly 30,000 Americans killed in 48 hours, a scale he says would provoke total retaliation if it happened here.
• Rob argues that no army works harder than Israel's to minimize civilian casualties, yet Israel is treated as the aggressor, a pattern he traces back centuries through recurring European pogroms.

Attention Spans, AI, and the Addiction Economy

• Rob and Jan open by noting that the average attention span has reportedly dropped from nine seconds twelve years ago to about 1.7 seconds today, roughly that of a goldfish.
• Jan points out that despite this, people are still willing to sit through hour-plus, deep conversation podcasts, which he reads as a sign of real hunger for truth-seeking in a culture full of performative fakery.
• Rob raises a newer concern: AI systems are now reportedly trained to read eye movement to learn what holds someone's attention, and only half-jokingly suggests putting tape over the camera.

Inside the Epoch Times AI Town Experiment

• Jan recounts an Epoch Times piece describing a May 2026 experiment where researchers built five identical simulated towns and let a different AI system, Google's Gemini, OpenAI's GPT, xAI's Grok, and Anthropic's Claude, run each one on its own for 15 days.
• The Grok-run town collapsed within four days as small incidents escalated into theft, violence, and death; the Gemini-run town racked up nearly 700 crimes and ended with two AI residents burning down the town hall together.
• The OpenAI-run town recorded almost no crime, but residents simply stopped doing what they needed to survive, and all were dead within a week; only the Anthropic-run town held together for all 15 days, though researchers flagged that residents agreed with 98% of all proposals as a possible warning sign of its own.

Why The Epoch Times Exists

• Jan explains that The Epoch Times was founded by people who had fled China after Tiananmen Square and the 1999 crackdown on Falun Gong practitioners, at a moment when most people still believed capitalism would liberalize the Chinese Communist Party.
• The paper carries no pharmaceutical advertising and draws 90 to 95% of its revenue from more than a million individual subscribers, a model Jan argues is one of the most independent funding structures in media because no single donor or industry can buy influence.
• Jan contrasts this with outlets whose coverage can be shaped by major advertisers, noting bluntly that when a broadcast is sponsored by a pharmaceutical company, its coverage reflects that relationship.

Russiagate and the Cost of Reporting the Truth

• Jan describes how The Epoch Times investigated the Russiagate narrative around the 2016 election in good faith and found the underlying allegations did not hold up, even as competing outlets won Pulitzer Prizes for reporting the opposite.
• That reporting got The Epoch Times permanently labeled a right-wing publication, prompting Jan to attend conservative events himself just to understand who conservatives actually were, since the label never matched how the newsroom operated.
• Jan's takeaway: in the search for truth, there is no political affiliation, and being punished for accurate reporting is one of the clearest signs of a captured media environment.

What Real Courage Looks Like

• Asked how to tell genuine courage apart from ego or attention-seeking, Rob and Jan push back on the idea that people who get canceled are doing it for money or fame, noting there is little financial upside to unpopular positions.
• Jan cites Charlie Kirk's definition of courage: not focusing on the outcome, but proceeding anyway.
• Rob argues it costs more to stay silent than to tell the truth, even when telling it publicly, such as his call to reinstate the draft, brought him significant backlash.

The Case for National Service

• Rob argues for a mandatory two years of service for young Americans, not necessarily military, but potentially social services or overseas work, so the burden of national commitments is shared rather than carried only by volunteers.
• He connects this to a broader loss of civic education, arguing young people are rarely taught that the freedoms they enjoy were earned through bloodshed and come with responsibilities, not just entitlements.

Getting Truth Past People's Defenses

• Jan explains The Epoch Times opinion-page rule: attack ideas, never the people holding them, because attacking a person triggers their friends and shuts down anyone who might otherwise listen.
• Rob describes comedy as a tool for approaching the most difficult, taboo subjects, including his own joke about organ harvesting in China, which only lands when he makes himself the butt of the joke rather than the target group.
• Both agree the goal is not to force agreement but to invite people to identify what would actually change their mind, rather than defending a fixed position out of fear or identity.

The Collapse of Civics and Literacy

• Jan and Rob point to civics education being removed from California classrooms in the early 1980s and spreading nationwide, alongside the loss of home economics, as part of a broader erosion of practical and civic knowledge.
• They cite a statistic that 40% of university students can no longer read at the university level, and that the Los Angeles Unified School District graduates less than half its students.
• Rob argues the country will not survive another 250 years on its current educational trajectory without serious course correction.

How Totalitarian Regimes Actually Collapse

• Jan shares stories from interviewing leaders of Poland's Solidarity movement, which began as a workers' rights movement rather than an explicitly anti-communist one, and describes a mysterious two week period in the 1980s when the movement suddenly tripled or quadrupled in size.
• Rob recounts how East Germany's secret police apparatus collapsed the same day reserve units realized their own family members would be among the protesters they were ordered to arrest or kill.
• Both agree regimes that look permanent can fall very quickly once a critical mass of people stop being afraid at the same time.

Virtue, Trust, and a Return to God

• Rob argues the American system was built on the assumption, voiced by John Adams, that it only works if the people in it are virtuous, and that declining religious belief tracks with the fraying of the culture.
• He raises Peter Boghossian's concept of low-trust societies, arguing that importing large numbers of people from low-trust cultures without shared values changes the character of a high-trust society.
• Rob calls all forms of evil a degradation of something good, and argues that rebuilding trust starts with holding up truth even when it is costly.

Resources:

• Killed to Order: China's Organ Harvesting Industry and the True Nature of America's Biggest Adversary | Jan Jekielek's book investigating the forced organ harvesting of prisoners of conscience in China (Skyhorse Publishing).
• The Psychology of Totalitarianism | Mattias Desmet's book on the “mass formation” concept referenced in the episode (Chelsea Green Publishing, 2022).
• People of the Lie: The Hope for Healing Human Evil | M. Scott Peck's book on lying and the nature of human evil.
• Never Fear Cancer Again | Raymond Francis's book on cellular-level cancer treatment, referenced by Rob.
• Return of the Strong Gods: Nationalism, Populism, and the Future of the West | R.R. Reno's book referenced discussing the twentieth century's overcorrection against nationalism.
• Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust | Daniel Jonah Goldhagen's book referenced on the historical roots of European antisemitism.
• The Most Important AI Experiment You've Never Heard Of | Kay Rubacek's Epoch Times opinion piece on the AI-run simulated towns Jan describes in the episode.
• The Epoch Times | Jan's subscriber-funded, ad-free news organization.
• American Thought Leaders | Jan Jekielek's interview show on EpochTV.
• Brownstone Institute | Nonprofit referenced as one of the independent institutions building outside failing systems.
• University of Austin (UATX) | New institution referenced as an example of rebuilding classical liberal education.
• Great Barrington Declaration | The 2020 declaration co-authored by Dr. Jay Bhattacharya arguing against broad COVID lockdowns.