Episode Details

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 Ho