American Thought Leaders

The Small Business Administration (SBA) recently suspended nearly 7,000 Minnesota borrowers for suspected fraud in pandemic-era small business loans totaling nearly $400 million.

“We worked through the holidays, from Thanksgiving up to New Year’s on about 20,000 different files, found about 8,000 instances of fraudulent loans, and moved quickly to make sure that those borrowers … could never access the services of the SBA again,” said SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler.

They’ll now be taking the same model to investigate other states for COVID-era abuse of the Paycheck Protection Program and Economic Injury Disaster Loans.

In this episode, I...

In this episode, we sit down with J. Michael Waller, a senior analyst for strategy at the Center for Security Policy and author of “Big Intel,” to understand the geopolitical implications of America’s capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.

“For the first time in a very long time, the President of the United States has reasserted the Monroe Doctrine to keep foreign empires out of our hemisphere,” he says.

By capturing Maduro, President Donald Trump sent a signal to all of America’s adversaries, but first and foremost to communist China. “Trump has just pulled out...

“I’m seeing crime, chaos, and death on the streets of America. ... The homeless are being used. And Antifa, the far left activists, they want to keep the tent encampments on America’s streets to show that capitalism isn’t working,” said Jonathan Choe, a reporter for Turning Point USA’s Frontlines and a senior journalism fellow at the Discovery Institute.

At Turning Point USA’s AmFest conference, I sat down with Choe to discuss his investigations into Antifa and the homelessness epidemic in America.

While some nonprofits are really helping people, Choe said, he believes a siz...

Former New York Times reporter and now independent journalist Alex Berenson is the author of “Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence.”

In this episode, we dive into the debate around cannabis and THC and President Donald Trump’s recent executive order directing the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to reclassify marijuana from a Schedule I to a Schedule III drug.

Berenson argues that it’s a bad move. Schedule I substances are defined as having high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use. Schedule III substances, in contrast, have medical uses and...

At age 12, Chloe Cole began identifying as male and started socially transitioning. Soon after, she was put on puberty blockers. Testosterone injections followed at age 13, and she underwent a double mastectomy at 15.

Shortly after the surgery, she realized that it had all been a terrible mistake: “I didn’t believe that I was a boy ... until that idea was put in my head.”

When she decided to detransition, the community that once eagerly encouraged her to transition into a boy treated her like she was “subhuman,” she says.

“The moment that I detransitioned, I was human...

Have we reached the end of “woke”? Comedian and writer Andrew Doyle thinks yes. But he believes new forms of what he calls the “authoritarianism impulse” will follow.

He’s the author of “The End of Woke: How the Culture War Went Too Far and What to Expect from the Counter-Revolution.”

Doyle is the creator of Titania McGrath, a fictional ultra-woke activist whose X account became hugely popular and currently has over 700K followers.

Doyle has also published satirical books under Titania’s name, including “My First Little Book of Intersectional Activism.”

In our conversatio...

“We get a lot of inappropriate over-prescribing for almost everything,” says drug policy researcher and journalist Alan Cassels.

Cassels is the co-author of “Selling Sickness: How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients.”

For Cassels, it was one disease in particular—osteoporosis—that changed his entire view of medicine.

Based on changing definitions of the disease, large swaths of Americans could suddenly be declared sick and in urgent need of drug treatment.

They “medicalized normal aging of basically the entire female population. Overnight,” he says.

In our interview...

“COVID was a really dark time for me and for a lot of people,” said Rob Schneider.

For the famous comedian and actor, the years of the pandemic were a time to take stock of what had become of America, speak up about it—and even write a book. “You Can Do it! Speak Your Mind, America” was published in September 2024.

“If we’re going to continue to have a free society, it’s going to require people to step up and be courageous,” Schneider said.

Schneider, who is also a screenwriter and director, rose to...

As early as 1989, intelligence officers in the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) recognized China as the next threat, says former DIA officer and physicist Michael Sekora.

“We identified what [China] was doing to become a superpower faster than any country in history, and we were on track to containment,” Sekora says.

Back in the 1980s, he led a classified Defense Intelligence Agency program called “Project Socrates” that was created under the Reagan administration to determine the cause of U.S. economic and military decline, find a way to reverse it, and outcompete Moscow. Later they turned their si...

For the past half century, Americans have been told that psychiatric drugs fix chemical imbalances in the brain. But this is nothing but a myth, says journalist Robert Whitaker.

Whitaker is the publisher of MadInAmerica.com and is known for his influential critiques of modern psychiatry and psychiatric drug treatment.

It was hypothesized that depression was due to too little serotonin and that schizophrenia was caused by too much dopamine—and that drugs could fix that, just like insulin for diabetes. But that was never backed up by evidence, Whitaker said.

“That was the...

How might a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan unfold? China’s anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) strategy—a combination of missiles, submarines, sensors, and air defenses—is designed specifically to block and disrupt US air, sea, and even space and cyber power.

But the true outcome of the operation will hinge on the rapid mobilization of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) ground forces, argues recently retired four-star general Charles Flynn, former commander of U.S. Army Pacific.

He warns that the real “center of gravity” of a Chinese invasion will lie in its ability to rapidly assemble, de...

Amidst ongoing U.S. efforts to mediate a Russia–Ukraine peace and the release of a new U.S. national security strategy that has sent shockwaves through Europe, I’m sitting down with the foreign minister of Latvia, Baiba Braze, to get her unique perspective.

Latvia is a small Baltic country bordering Estonia, Lithuania, Belarus, and Russia. In the 1940s, the Soviets occupied Latvia and its neighboring countries—a reality that has made Latvia hyper-vigilant against potential Russian expansionism.

Latvia joined both the EU and NATO in 2004, alongside Lithuania and Estonia.

Latvia is one of...

Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says he’d like to see the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines phased out and eventually removed from the market.

Redfield led the CDC from 2018 to 2021. While an avid proponent of vaccines in general, he hopes that the fallout from the emergency-authorized mRNA vaccines will lead to a broader recognition that vaccine manufacturers must no longer be exempt from liability.

Redfield is a clinical virologist who, prior to his appointment as CDC director in 2018, spent decades in HIV/AIDS research and clinical care, including se...

“I’ve been fighting communism by teaching capitalism,” says Robert Kiyosaki, holding up a copy of Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” and a copy of his book “The Capitalist Manifesto.”

Robert Kiyosaki became famous as the author of “Rich Dad Poor Dad,” a book that has sold 48 million copies worldwide since its 1997 publication.

Kiyosaki maintains that in today’s America, plagued by high inflation and a crumbling dollar, rich dads are getting ever richer while poor dads are getting poorer:

“Food gets up in price, but the poor and middle class have to pay for it. So my apartm...

“Neuroscientists who stand up and say ‘we have souls’ are few and far between,” says pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor.

“But when you look carefully at the neuroscience—the best neuroscience over the past century—it clearly points to the existence of the soul and to the existence of aspects of our mind that don’t come from the brain.”

Egnor himself started off as a materialist and atheist. But 40 years and more than 7,000 brain surgeries later, he concluded that reason and free will do not reside in the brain. In this episode, he reveals what he’s found.<...

Maryanne Demasi is an independent investigative journalist based in Australia and a former medical scientist with a PhD in rheumatology from the University of Adelaide.

For many years, she worked for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and gained wide attention for reporting on controversial medical topics, particularly the efficacy and safety of statins and psychiatric drugs.

Demasi was eventually suspended from her position at ABC in 2016 following controversies over her comprehensive and critical examination of statin drugs and other health risks. After leaving ABC, she continued her career as an independent investigative medical journalist.

In this exclusive interview with FBI Director Kash Patel, we dive into the agency’s crackdown on crime and foreign espionage, his trip to China, the “burn bags,” and recent criticisms.

What exactly is the “764 network,” and how is the FBI working to target these actors? Why did President Donald Trump label Antifa a domestic terror organization, and how does this alter the playing field?

Does the FBI director’s recent visit to China signify a pivot in the agency’s priorities? Given Beijing’s record of broken promises, can we really expect the regime to honor its sid...

For many Americans, the COVID-19 era revealed profound ruptures in American society. While some are eager to move on from that period and simply return to “normal,” there are others who wonder: Is it really that simple?

How can we move forward without truly reconciling with the profound brokenness that was revealed in the last five years? How can we simply ignore or forget those who were censored, deplatformed, surveilled, fired, socially exiled, or irrevocably injured? And if a new virus were to spread in America, can we really say that the same things wouldn’t happen all ov...

In a few years, America may not need to buy critical minerals from China anymore, says synthetic chemist and nanotechnologist James Tour.

Why? Because of a method called flash Joule heating that he and his team have been studying at Rice University.

China currently has a near-monopoly on global processing capacity for critical minerals, including rare earths. These are essential to much of our modern economy, from electronics to defense to medical devices.

The United States has access to plenty of rare-earth reserves, but minimal capacity to process and refine them. Rebuilding these...

Most Americans have little understanding of the vast amount of private data harvested from their smartphones by third parties, said Joe Weil, a former Apple product manager and the founder of Unplugged.

Where you go, who you associate with, what you like, is all easily discoverable, Weil said.

“It’s publicly available. It’s purchasable.”

What’s even worse is that the Fourth Amendment does not protect this advertising data, he said. The U.S. government, for example, does not require a warrant to access it.

Data brokers sell this data freely, an...

Modern medicine is veering away from the traditional Hippocratic Oath that required physicians to do no harm and use their knowledge and skills solely for the purpose of healing the patient, says psychiatrist and bioethics expert Dr. Aaron Kheriaty.

Now, physicians are euthanizing patients, removing healthy organs in certain transgender-related surgeries, and injecting drugs for late-term abortions even when the mother’s life is not threatened.

Hippocratic principles are being superseded by utilitarian ethics that prioritize the “greater good” over the well-being and rights of individual patients, Kheriaty says. That’s fueling, for instance, the push to...

Declan Ganley’s company, Rivada Networks, is developing a technology that may revolutionize global connectivity and security—and it appears that the Chinese communist regime is desperately seeking to gain control of it.

As much as 99 percent of global internet traffic today relies on a series of subsea fiber-optic cables around the world that are vulnerable to natural disasters and attacks. Chinese cable-cutting incidents have shown how easily they can be sabotaged.

Ganley is working on something called the Outernet, a constellation of 600 Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites that would make up the world’s first...

Filmmaker Natalya Murakhver has recently released her new documentary “15 Days: The Real Story of America’s Pandemic School Closures.”

It shows the devastating effects that remote learning had on children and families. What was the true impact of the school closures on a generation of children? How can we begin to measure it?

“Viewers will bear witness to the stories of the people who experienced the closures directly. The film was shot almost immediately following the closures. We started in 2022, so the pain was still extremely raw,” Murakhver says.

“I felt [that] we better get t...

Why did Patrick Girondi, a successful singer and songwriter, become the founder and CEO of a pharmaceutical company?

Originally from the South Side of Chicago, Girondi dropped out of high school and became a musician and also, quite by accident, a highly successful commodities trader.

In the early 1990s, his young son Rocco was diagnosed with thalassemia, a rare blood disorder caused by a defect in the globin genes.

Girondi was told by doctors that his son would not live to be a teenager.

So Girondi set out to find a...

Recently, Bill Gates very publicly pivoted on climate change, rejecting “doomsday” predictions and calling for a more pragmatic, human-centered approach.

Is that a sign that the era of climate alarmism is coming to a close?

That’s what I wanted to find out when I sat down with Michael Shellenberger, author of “Apocalypse Never” and founder of Public.news and the nonprofit Environmental Progress.

From rising sea levels to surging forest fires to dying polar bears to disappearing coral reefs, much of what we’ve been told about climate change is not true, he says.

“We don’t want Americans to participate in any way, shape, or form in this kind of organ harvesting and transplantation scheme. … You can actually sit in America, [and] make an appointment for a heart, lung transplant in China right now,” says Congressman Neal Dunn (R-Fla.), a former Army surgeon who is also founding president of the Advanced Urology Institute in Florida.

“I want to make that illegal.”

As a starting point, Dunn has introduced the Block Organ Transplant Purchases from China Act, also known as the BLOCK Act, which would prohibit federal reimbursement for organ transp...

In this special episode of American Thought Leaders, I visited the Food Independence Summit, an annual event dedicated to homesteading, sustainable living, and reclaiming food autonomy, in Walnut Creek, Ohio. The 2025 summit, with a theme of “Seed to Spoon,” took place in mid-June earlier this year in the heart of Ohio’s Amish country.

Homesteaders, farmers, gardeners, educators, and healthy food advocates spent two days together participating in hands-on workshops, listening to keynote presentations, and networking with like-minded people.

For many Americans, the COVID-19 pandemic exposed the fragility of supply chains, including the food supply chain...

Dr. Irwin Goldstein is one of America’s leading sexual health physicians, a pioneer in the field, and the director of San Diego Sexual Medicine.

In this episode, he breaks down his latest research into what’s known as post-SSRI sexual dysfunction (PSSD)—a condition that’s not uncommon but rarely discussed publicly.

He’s found that a class of antidepressants known as SSRIs can cause lasting physiological damage even after patients discontinue the medication—contrary to what many patients are told.

“When they stop the medicine, the usual teaching is that everyone returns to the...

What happens when a business decides faith matters more than profit? Apparently, it flourishes.

Hobby Lobby, founded by David and Barbara Green in Oklahoma City in 1972, is a private, family-owned corporation now with over a thousand arts-and-crafts stores nationwide. The stores are closed on Sundays, do not sell any Halloween-themed products, operate debt-free, and are run according to Biblical principles, emphasizing the value of faith and family life.

David Green told me in our recent interview: “God blesses us when we do what we should do, rather than what’s maybe most profitable.”

“When we...

What if the most potent weapon that America has against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) isn’t nukes or tariffs?

“This isn’t a competition between the largest economy and the second largest economy. This is a competition of ideals—and we’ve got the better ones,” says former Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback.

“If you want to hit them where it hurts, hit them on human rights issues, genocides in their own country, religious freedom that they don’t grant any of their people—whether they be Buddhist, Muslim, Falun Gong, Christians. That’s where they’...

More than 11 percent of Americans take antidepressants, including rising numbers of kids and adolescents and even pregnant women.

The majority of Americans believe that depression is linked to a chemical imbalance in the brain, and that drugs can fix this imbalance—just as someone with Type 1 diabetes might take insulin. But that’s not true, according to board-certified psychiatrist Josef Witt-Doerring.

“There’s never been any evidence that there’s been a chemical imbalance,” Witt-Doerring says. “There is no way to differentiate patients who are depressed from those who are not depressed using any objective markers.”

Political scientist Charles Murray has written many well-known books over the course of his lifetime.

Many of his works—including “Losing Ground,” “The Bell Curve,” and “Coming Apart”—have deeply influenced the intellectual discourse and zeitgeist of our times and provoked heated debate about the roots of major social problems in America.

His latest book covers a topic that he has never covered deeply before: religion.

Murray writes in the foreword of his book “Taking Religion Seriously,” “Millions are like me when it comes to religion: well-educated and successful people for whom religion has been irrelevant. W...

Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.) has been spearheading efforts in Congress to combat the threat posed by the Chinese regime to American interests—from economic warfare to espionage and infiltration—as chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.

“With rare earths, China is basically firing a loaded gun ... on our economy,” he says.

He’s pushing a bill that would phase in a 100 percent tariff on all strategic goods from China. The tariff would not just penalize China but also incentivize “other countries, as well as the United States, to invest in this almost...

NBA player Jonathan Isaac is known not just for his talent on the court, but for his convictions and outspoken faith. He’s the author of the 2022 best-selling memoir “Why I Stand.”

As a youth, he struggled with anxiety—but a chance encounter in an elevator with the man who would later become his pastor changed the course of his life.

Faith helped him triumph over his battle with anxiety, but it also later put him at the center of a national debate. After George Floyd’s death, at the height of the Black Lives Matter mov...

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) recently imposed unprecedented export controls on rare earths, escalating the U.S.–China trade war.

How is it that the Chinese regime managed to gain control of many of the most essential supply chains, from critical minerals to pharmaceuticals? How should the Trump administration approach this threat to national security?

In this episode, we sit down with Lee Smith, author of “The Plot Against the President,” and the soon-to-be-released book, “The China Matrix: The Epic Story of How Donald Trump Shattered a Deadly Pact.”

“It was simply American corruption t...

Few people understand the far-left extremist group Antifa as well as investigative journalist Andy Ngo, author of “Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy.”

He has been beaten, attacked, and nearly killed by Antifa for his undercover reporting of the group’s operations.

In an executive order signed on Sept. 22, President Donald Trump designated the group a domestic terrorist organization. On Oct. 8, the president hosted a roundtable focused on Antifa and invited Ngo and other journalists to participate.

In this episode, Ngo recounts his harrowing personal experiences.

What will it take...

Larry Sanger is the co-founder of Wikipedia and coined the name “Wikipedia' in 2001. He established many of Wikipedia’s founding policies, including the original neutrality guidelines, before he left in 2002.

Since then, he has become a vocal critic of Wikipedia’s growing ideological bias, particularly on politically charged issues.

Sanger says certain outlets are favored as sources while others are blacklisted, creating systemic distortion and exclusion of dissenting views.

Most of Wikipedia’s top editors are anonymous, which means that people have no legal recourse for lies or inaccuracies about them that may be publi...

While we often hear that free trade means cheaper goods, is it really that simple? What is the true cost of that? How can we measure the long-term decline of America’s manufacturing and industrial base and its impact on America?

John Gardner is the author of “Manufacture Local: How to Make America the Manufacturing Superpower of the World.”

“America has a lot of questions to ask itself about the morality of what we’ve done to our own citizens, but also the morality of chasing sweatshop labor in other nations,” he says.

Why is havin...

“What we’ve got today is too much money riding on seed oils. They can’t produce addictive, empty, junk food, processed food without the seed oils,” says Sally Fallon Morell.

For decades, Morell has led a grassroots movement to see healthy foods in every household in America.

“You need to get in the kitchen. [It] doesn’t mean you have to spend hours in the kitchen, but you need to get in the kitchen and learn how to produce healthy food for your family,” she says.

In this episode, she explains what’s wrong with our...

Mollie Engelhart was once a celebrated vegan farm-to-table restaurateur in California. When she decided to put meat back on the menu, a targeted campaign forced her to close her business.

She ultimately decided to make the painful decision to uproot her entire life, sell her farm, and rebuild from scratch in Texas.

She’s the author of the new book “Debunked by Nature: How a Vegan-Chef-Turned-Regenerative-Farmer Discovered that Mother Nature Is a Conservative.”

“We’re treating the soil and our bodies like we can outsmart them, but we’re getting sicker,” she says.

Once an a...

“President Trump talks about ‘drill, baby, drill.’ We’ve also got to mine, baby, mine. We’ve got to get back into this business,” says U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum.

China has a stranglehold on rare earths and critical minerals, controlling at least 85 percent of the refining of the 20 most important rare earth minerals, Burgum says.

As secretary of the interior, Burgum oversees nearly half a billion acres of federal land and plays a key role in the Trump administration’s energy dominance agenda.

In this episode, we dive into what the Trump...

In early September, during a joint press conference with Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida’s Surgeon General Dr. Joseph Ladapo publicly announced the decision to eliminate all state vaccine mandates—including those required for schools.

In this episode, Dr. Ladapo explains the decision, how it will take shape, and his response to critics of the announcement who say there will be increased outbreaks of infectious disease.

“It’s just not appropriate for someone else to be able to dictate or force you to put something into your body.… If you own anything, you do own your body, just...

The Chinese communist regime has “created a market in the organs of their political enemies,” says Matthew Robertson, a researcher who has been investigating China’s organ transplant system for more than a decade.

Fluent in Mandarin, Robertson is a China studies research fellow at the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and co-author of a number of research papers on China’s organ transplant system including, “Execution by organ procurement: Breaching the dead donor rule in China.”

After conducting a forensic review of thousands of Chinese research papers, they found 71 cases where violations of the dead donor r...

Family farms in America are slowly disappearing, with a 2022 USDA census reporting that America lost 142,000 farms over just five years. The average farmer in America is now nearly 60 years old.

But it’s not government subsidies that farmers need to stay afloat, says Joel Salatin. What small farmers really need is the freedom to innovate and sell directly to local consumers—without facing a morass of red tape, regulations, and mandates.

Salatin, co-owner of Polyface Farms in Virginia, is widely recognized as a leading pioneer of sustainable or regenerative farming practices that enrich the land, rath...

For decades, there has been an assault on the Western classical tradition and the core values, arts, and philosophy at the bedrock of Western civilization, says classicist Spencer Klavan.

Are we now witnessing a shift in this tide?

Klavan is the author of multiple books, including “How to Save the West: Ancient Wisdom for Five Modern Crises.”

He is also an associate editor at The Claremont Review of Books and host of the “Young Heretics” podcast.

“People are starting to realize that you can only scream and yell and tear down statues an...

How did the last nine years change Eric Trump? How did the second son of President Donald Trump react to the assassination attempt on his father’s life in Butler, Pennsylvania? And does he plan to run for political office in the future?

His new memoir is titled “Under Siege: My Family’s Fight to Save Our Nation.”

“It’s the thousands of stories behind the scenes of how they try to dismantle our family and the greatest political movement in American history,” Trump says.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and t...

Since mRNA technology was deployed widely in the COVID-19 vaccines, developers have rapidly accelerated research into more mRNA products. Moderna alone has more than two dozen mRNA products in development.

But is the mRNA platform really the revolutionary breakthrough that its champions claim?

Since early 2021, Cole has been at the forefront of alerting the public to an unusual spike in cancer diagnoses following the widespread adoption of the COVID-19 genetic vaccines.

In this episode, Cole explains the risks he sees with mRNA technology and how he sees things shaking out at the National...

“South Africa moved from one race-based system to another race-based system. ... We need to move away from race-based systems,” argues Ernst Roets. He’s the Founder and Executive Director of Lex Libertas, an organization that advocates for constitutional reform and more decentralized governance in South Africa.

While many have highlighted the killings of farmers in recent years, this violence is emblematic of broader problems in South Africa, he says.

South Africa’s murder rate is among the highest in the world—more than seven times higher than the global average. And race-based policies and distribution of wealth...

What happens when a nation loses one of its most influential voices—and what can we learn from the legacy he leaves behind?

What is the role of faith in shaping America’s future, and how should we move forward?

In this episode, I sit down with pastor Jackson Lahmeyer to reflect on the assassination of Charlie Kirk and the work of the Trump administration to strengthen religious liberty in America.

“We have a lot to learn from Charlie’s methodology,” Lahmeyer said. “Charlie would reach you in your mind, but also he'd reach you in...

Florida’s “Alligator Alcatraz” immigration detention facility in the Everglades has generated considerable buzz and controversy since it was first proposed by Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier.

In this episode, we sat down with Uthmeier to discuss Florida’s aggressive efforts to curb illegal immigration and fentanyl trafficking, what he sees as the politicization of the U.S. census, and his investigations into surveillance technology.

“In Florida, the most recent investigation we launched was into a company, Lorex. They make in-home or in-business cameras, everything from baby cams to nanny cams, doorbell cameras. … They capture the imagery...

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 Ph...

As America has reeled from the assassination of Charlie Kirk, many have wondered what the future holds.

How will this tragedy transform America? Will political violence continue to escalate? What is the path forward?

To understand our current political and cultural moment, I sat down with legal scholar and political philosopher Robert George. He’s a professor and director of the James Madison Program in American Ideals and Institutions at Princeton University.

“We’re at an inflection point, and it’s very worrying, very dangerous,” George said. “We could easily fall into a cycle of rev...

How have screens and social media altered the brains of children? What is the long-term impact on their happiness and ability to be prosperous, fulfilled adults later on?

“Looking at the brain science, we really have to treat screens more in the category of a highly addictive drug like digital fentanyl than sugar,” argues Clare Morell, a fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and author of “The Tech Exit: A Practical Guide to Freeing Kids and Teens from Smartphones.”

“These companies are in a race to the bottom. They’re all in a race to get...

Is it possible that autism, Alzheimer’s, bipolar disorder, and other major health challenges might all be related to the gut?

That’s the question Dr. Sabine Hazan, a gastroenterologist and CEO of Progenabiome, has been probing for years.

The Food and Drug Administration recently approved the use of fecal transplants for research into the treatment of autism, and Dr. Hazan says this may open the door to real breakthroughs.

She hopes to compare the microbiomes of autistic children with their neurotypical siblings and see if fecal transplants can help treat autism. She’s alre...

In this episode, Jeffrey Tucker unpacks President Donald Trump’s growing dispute with the Federal Reserve and his efforts to remove Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook for alleged mortgage fraud.

“There’s a lot more at stake than just this one regulation about residences and mortgages. It has to do with whether and to what extent the Fed is actually accountable to the President of the United States,” says Tucker.

He’s the founder and president of the Brownstone Institute and senior economics columnist for The Epoch Times.

How did the creation of the Federa...

With President Donald Trump recently challenging pharmaceutical companies to “justify success” of their COVID-19 products, I’m sitting down with scientist, physician, and author Dr. Robert Malone to get his insights into what’s going on behind the scenes.

Dr. Malone is currently serving as a member of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) and also as a medical advisor for MAHA Action.

The recent firing of CDC director Susan Monarez was followed by the resignations of several top CDC officials. At the same time, Robert F. Kennedy Jr...

In less than a decade, euthanasia has become tied for the fifth leading cause of death in Canada, accounting for one in every 20 deaths since it was first legalized in 2016. Over 60,000 Canadians have died via euthanasia.

“This marks a massive cultural shift in how we live and die in Canada,” says Amanda Achtman, a leading critic of the practice and the founder of the Dying to Meet You Project.

Patients no longer need to be terminally ill to request euthanasia, and there are ongoing debates about whether minors or people with mental illnesses should be able...

When an 88‑year‑old Tennessee woman confronted representatives of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) when they came to survey her land for a methane gas plant project, her words—“you think you own something, you don’t own nothing”—left a lasting impression on country artist John Rich.

That moment became the spark for his new song “The Devil and the TVA” and the starting point for this conversation on “American Thought Leaders.”

In this episode, Rich reflects on his journey from Texas family sing‑alongs to writing No. 1 hits with bands Lonestar and Big & Rich. He explains why he...

For years, U.S. strategic missteps have empowered Tehran and Beijing, according to political theorist Yoram Hazony. Now, as a new strain of isolationism grows in America, Hazony says, both isolationism and hyper-interventionism have key flaws.

In this episode, we dive into President Donald Trump’s distinct foreign policy approach as well as what Hazony sees as an assault on nation-states and their right to independent decision-making.

Nationalism has been falsely vilified, and global governance has become the new mantra, he says.

Hazony recently released a revised edition of his 2018 seminal work, “The Virt...

Political economist Chenggang Xu grew up amid the upheaval of China’s Cultural Revolution and in the 1970s was beaten, imprisoned, and subjected to years of forced labor by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

Today, he is a senior research scholar at the Stanford Center on China’s Economy and Institutions, a visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University, and author of the new book, “Institutional Genes: Origins of China’s Institutions and Totalitarianism.”

For decades, Beijing has repeatedly deceived the world about its true intentions, Xu says. So why do we keep falling fo...

In this episode, I’m sitting down with award-winning investigative journalist John Solomon, founder and editor-in-chief of Just the News, for a deep dive into what we now know—nine years later—about the origins of the Russia collusion probe.

How did these events change America?

“We'll never know what history was stolen from us, what opportunities diplomatically were stolen from us, what security opportunities were thwarted because this dirty trick was allowed to extend so far,” Solomon says.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and...

How has Hollywood changed in the last several decades, and why are film productions leaving Los Angeles and increasingly going abroad? Where is the industry headed, and what role should Trump’s “special ambassadors” to Hollywood play?

“Hollywood spent probably the last 15 or 20 years basically telling half of its audience that they don’t want them to watch, that they hate them, that they’re deplorables,” says actor and filmmaker Nick Searcy. “They’ve driven half the audience away.”

Searcy played James Baker in the Reagan biopic last year and is perhaps best known for his role as Art Mull...

A few weeks ago, Rabbi Abraham Cooper, a prominent advocate for religious freedom and human rights, was invited to the Presidential Palace in Damascus, Syria, alongside fellow religious freedom advocate Johnnie Moore.

They had an intimate meeting with the new president of Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa.

In this episode, the rabbi shares what he learned about al-Sharaa and whether he believes a peace between Syria and Israel is possible in the near future.

“There’s a term in Hebrew: It’s called Kabdehu ve Hashdehu, [which] means show respect and verify,“ he says. ”So, this is no...

As the Trump administration gives China another 90-day extension on elevated tariffs, I’m sitting down with China analyst Gordon Chang to get his read on U.S.–China trade talks, signs of infighting in Beijing and trouble for Xi Jinping, and the recent destruction of a Chinese coast guard vessel by a Chinese navy warship.

Chang is the author of “Plan Red: China’s Project to Destroy America.”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Canadian-Chinese filmmaker Yan Ma knew from the outset that he was putting himself at risk for making a political thriller about a lab leak in China. “The Unrestricted War” is a movie that was inspired by the cover-up and outbreak of COVID-19 and spotlights how the Chinese Communist Party coerces its citizens, and even foreigners living within China, to achieve its ends.

Officials pressured Ma’s family members back in China in attempts to coerce him to stop the project. His Chinese team members faced similar pressure. Ethnically Chinese actors refused to participate in the film for fear o...

“As an economist, it’s extremely important to look at the data, rather than just on a theoretical basis,” says Mark Skousen. “We should be in a recession. Well, we’re not in a recession; looks like we’re coming out of slow growth, which is really important.”

In this episode, I sit down with economist Mark Skousen to discuss taxes, tariffs, trade, and energy.

“I think somewhere in between what the Fed wants and what Trump wants is a more reasonable approach to keep this economy on an even keel,” says Skousen. “The other thing that’s really...

How does the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) cognitive warfare manifest in the West? How prevalent is it? And how can Americans recognize it?

Few understand this elusive subject better than Robert Spalding. The CEO of Sempre, Spalding is a retired Air Force brigadier general and B-2 stealth bomber pilot, former senior director of strategy at the National Security Council, and author of “War Without Rules: China’s Playbook for Global Domination.”

“We have these enormous political warfare and psychological warfare campaigns happening in the United States. We have nobody that’s responsible for responding to them,” he...

“Veterans are not being told the risk of their medications,“ says Derek Blumke. “Doctors themselves are not aware of the risks of those medications.”

Derek Blumke served 12 years in the US Air Force and Michigan Air National Guard and is a longtime advocate for veterans. A bad experience with psychiatric drugs changed his life trajectory. He has been sounding the alarm about suicide and the overprescription of psychiatric drugs among veterans.

“If we’re going to treat a firearm with respect that we should and we do, which is making sure there’s a safety on, making sur...

Bob Healey was in his 60s battling terminal cancer with only a product prototype when he sought advice from business coach Clay Clark. Now, his company is booming.

It’s never too late to succeed, Clark says.

After building several multi-million dollar businesses, Clark developed a 14-step system to help budding entrepreneurs turbocharge their ideas.

During the pandemic, he helped his clients not just stay afloat but even thrive.

In this episode, we dive into how to grow a small business, what business schools fail to teach, and why America must re...

For years, award-winning investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson has been tracking the rise of censorship, biased “fact-checkers,” and what she describes as narrative-enforcing journalism.

How has today’s information landscape transformed? What does she make of the recent releases of new documents surrounding the Russia investigation? And will Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and the Trump administration be able to fulfill their campaign promises to reform the various health-related agencies?

Attkisson is the host of Full Measure and author of a number of bestselling books, including “The Smear,” “Slanted,” “Stonewalled,” and most recently “Follow the Science.”

In this episode, I sit down with the 28th governor of Oklahoma, Kevin Stitt, to learn about how he’s reducing his state’s vulnerabilities and dependency on communist China.

We also dive into Oklahoma’s push toward critical-mineral production and the governor’s mission to promote economic development and reignite the American Dream.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

“China is surpassing American strength, whether it be naval forces or nuclear forces,” says retired U.S. Army Col. John Mills.

His four-decade career has spanned key roles from the Cold War era to the War on Terror. At the Department of Defense, he directed cybersecurity policy.

“I was brought into cyber in 2007 when the threat really was Russian cyber adventurism, but by 2012, from that point onward, it was all China—wasn’t even close,” he says. “For every dollar Russia spent on misadventure, China spent 20.”

In this episode, we dive into the Chinese Communis...

Former Trump national security adviser retired Lt. Gen. Michael Flynn found himself at the center of a national firestorm when he was charged with lying to the FBI over a phone call he had with the Russian ambassador to the United States.

The DOJ would later drop the case, saying there was no “legitimate investigative basis” to have targeted him.

In his new book “Pardon of Innocence,” he details his story.

As new documents are released by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, we sat down with the 33-year military veteran to understand how he s...

“A quarter to a half of the exploitation that’s happening to our own nation’s youth ... it’s a caregiver doing it—it’s a familial figure,” Jaco Booyens says.

He is the founder of Jaco Booyens Ministries (JBM), an anti-human trafficking organization working to protect American children from predatory exploitation.

“We’re talking about a $52 billion industry of buying and selling predominantly women and children inside this country—American citizens. The discussion about an immigrant child or an immigrant in the country is a completely separate conversation,” he says.

Booyens says laws against human tra...

Kelly Walker, a local coffee shop owner in Tucson, Arizona, never imagined how his world would be turned upside down when he started speaking out publicly against COVID-19 mandates and the harm to children.

He and Sam Sorbo are cofounders of the Parents Demanding Justice Alliance. They have put together a report detailing alleged actions taken by local authorities to censor, surveil, and pressure parents who protested policies during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Editor’s Note: Kelly Walker previously has done work for The Epoch Times as a freelance marketing writer. Sam Sorbo previously hosted a sh...

In this episode, Rushan Abbas reveals how the Chinese communist regime has escalated its campaign against the Uyghurs.

Uyghurs are being mass surveilled, forcibly sterilized, and exploited as slave labor both in Xinjiang and in other provinces across China. There are growing signs of large-scale forced organ harvesting in the region—including an apparent special lane in the city of Kashgar’s airport dedicated to the transport of human organs.

In 2018, the Chinese regime imprisoned Rushan Abbas’s sister Gulshan in an apparent attempt to silence Rushan. Her sister was sentenced to 20 years in prison, and sh...

In this exclusive interview, I spoke with Dr. Marty Makary, commissioner of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), about his first 100 days in office and how he is transforming the agency.

In this wide-ranging interview, we dive into his work to change food guidelines and drug approval processes, reduce supply chain vulnerabilities, and tackle conflicts of interest. We also address criticism of some of the FDA’s recent decisions surrounding vaccines.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Ep...

The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF), a newly established U.S.-backed aid group distributing food in Gaza, is under fire from critics who say hundreds of Gazans have been killed near its distribution sites.

But is there a bigger story here?

In this episode, I sit down with Johnnie Moore, executive chairman of the GHF and former commissioner for the U.S. Commission on International Religious Freedom.

“We have one mission, to feed the people of Gaza in a way that Hamas—a designated terrorist organization in the United States and Europe—can’t steal...

“We’re living in this strange day and age when we’ve essentially bio-hacked all of the things that we do and really come to organize our lives around our little rewards, right? So, we wake up in the morning, we reach for our phones, we have our cup of coffee, we have our favorite muffin.”

Dr. Anna Lembke is a psychiatrist, professor, and medical director of addiction medicine at Stanford University. She’s the author of “Dopamine Nation: Finding Balance in the Age of Indulgence.”

“This is, of course, the great paradox, that although we want to avoid...

For decades, we’ve been reporting on the ways the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) crushes the religious freedom of its citizens. But in recent years, the CCP has been escalating its tactics against a religious group here—on American soil.

In this episode, I sit down with religious freedom lawyers Justin Butterfield and Lea Patterson to understand what’s going on and discuss their response to a recent lawsuit against Shen Yun, the performing arts company founded by Falun Gong practitioners in New York. The case touches on vital questions about what it means to be able to pra...

When Adam Coleman was 8 years old, he was institutionalized after contemplating suicide. He shares his struggles—and the struggles of so many others in America—of growing up without a father in his new book, “The Children We Left Behind: How Western Culture Rationalizes Family Separation and Ignores the Pain of Child Neglect.”

“I went through a lot when I was a kid, and I want my story to be an example that, yes, certain things happen to you when you’re a child, but when you’re an adult, you make life happen for you. So, it is possible...

Recently, the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) met for the first time after Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. replaced its entire membership with new picks.

In this episode, I’m sitting down with two new ACIP members, Dr. Robert Malone and MIT professor Retsef Levi, for a deep dive into all things ACIP.

“They basically impact billions of dollars of revenue for the pharmaceutical industry. So there’s big money at stake here. There’s big policy at stake,” says Malone.

“One of the problems that we had in the context of...

John Eastman is founding director of the Claremont Institute’s Center for Constitutional Jurisprudence. He is also a former law professor at Chapman University’s Dale E. Fowler School of Law and served as a law clerk for Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas in the 1990s. He has represented over a dozen parties before the U.S. Supreme Court.

His life took a sharp turn when he helped President Donald Trump challenge the integrity of the 2020 election results.

He is facing disbarment and criminal charges in Georgia and Arizona. He has pleaded not guilty.

Vi...

To understand Middle East dynamics, I always count on Michael Doran, Director of the Middle East Center at the Hudson Institute.

“For the first time, Jan, in history, Israel and the United States have taken military action together. This is totally new,” he tells me.

We sat down to discuss what has now been dubbed ‘The 12-Day War’ and how Middle East political realities have been transformed.

“One of the most amazing things about the Israeli attack against the Iranians is that they totally took the Iranians by surprise. Scientists were in their beds. Comm...

In this episode, I sit down with Eric Trump, executive vice president of the Trump Organization. We dive into his vision for revitalizing American manufacturing, making American-made products competitive globally, and building alternative financial and tech systems where people can’t be canceled.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

In this episode, I’m sitting down again with Kyle Bass, founder and chief investment officer of Hayman Capital Management and founding member of the Committee on the Present Danger: China, to get an update on how China’s economy is faring since our last interview five months ago.

“There’s nothing that’s going to bail China out of their economic spiral. They’re having a real estate crisis, a banking crisis, a youth unemployment crisis, and now they need to be worried about their current account,” Bass says.

How have the Trump administration’s policies and r...

President Donald Trump has recently criticized the ANC-led government of South Africa for what he says are state-sanctioned, racist policies that have been endangering white farmers.

In this episode, I sit down with South African businessman and entrepreneur Robert Hersov to get a read on what’s happening in the country. What is the real story surrounding white farmers in South Africa today? What role have Iran and Russia played in the region? And what can we expect from U.S.-South Africa relations moving forward, after the confrontational meeting between Trump and President Cyril Ramaphosa last mo...

On June 20, Florida Governor Ron DeSantis signed Senate Bill 56 into law, criminalizing geoengineering and certain weather modification activities in the state, with violations classified as a third-degree felony.

“They were intending to alter the trajectory of hurricanes using things like silver as a way to change the precipitation and intensity of these storms. Later, in Vietnam, for example, they used it for increasing weather, such as precipitation, on the so-called ‘enemy.’ Project Popeye [using cloud-seeding] is well-established to have been a successful weaponization of the weather. So, there is a pretty long history of weather modification and milita...

Five months into the Trump administration, I sit down with Heritage Foundation chief economist EJ Antoni to get his insights into how the American economy is doing, where the US-China trade war is headed, and how he assesses the “big, beautiful bill,” which has engendered significant debate among conservatives.

How are Americans faring financially today compared to a few months ago?

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

John Miller is the CEO of Superb Industries. He resisted mounting pressure to move his production overseas to China, and instead innovated and grew a thriving made-in-America component manufacturing business.

“Do you make decisions based on the long-term benefit that are principle-based, or do you make decisions for financial gain in the short term, at the cost of the long term?” he asks, rhetorically. “[Other businesses] made a lot of money by outsourcing to China over a short period of time, but then lost their ability to make stuff, and now they’re paying the price.”

Miller h...

Say we had credible intelligence about an impending terrorist attack or major acts of violence, what actions are justifiable to prevent these crimes from occurring? How do we balance the urgency of preventing harm, with the importance of safeguarding civil liberties?

“We have to make trade-offs all the time, and there’s no jurisprudence to that trade-off. We live in the preventive state,” says Alan Dershowitz, professor emeritus at Harvard Law School. “We are moving more and more toward replacing deterrence and reaction with prevention.”

He is the author of the new book, “The Preventive State: The C...

A 33-year-old researcher and her 34-year-old boyfriend, both Chinese nationals, were recently charged with allegedly smuggling into America a fungus called Fusarium graminearum, a potential bioterrorism weapon.

This recent case is just the tip of the iceberg, says investigative reporter Sam Cooper.

He played a key part in uncovering a similar case in Winnipeg, Canada.

“A married couple from China had been allegedly—according to the documents we now have access to—working with the highest levels of the Chinese military’s bioweapons program in Ebola research,” Cooper says. “They were running, clandestinely, materials fr...

Dr. Kirk Milhoan is a pediatric cardiologist and senior fellow at the Independent Medical Alliance. He has been treating children with myocarditis and other cardiovascular issues associated with COVID-19 and the COVID-19 vaccines.

“Four years later, five years later, I’m seeing this constant and dramatic change in who I’m seeing coming to see me. They’re complaining their heart doesn’t beat normally. And it beats fast for no reason at all,” says Dr. Milhoan. “Specifically after the second dose of the new platform for the COVID vaccine, we were seeing an increase in myocarditis in children th...

“You can essentially divide the region between two sets of players. You have the, broadly speaking, Western-aligned players, which essentially consist of Israel and the non-Islamist Arab countries—countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, UAE—and then, on the other hand, you have the axis of Islamism—of support for Hamas, the Muslim Brotherhood and jihadism. And that, these days, is mostly the Iranian regime of course, Turkey unfortunately under Tayyip Erdogan, and Qatar, Qatar being the lead financier of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood,” says Josh Hammer, host of the Newsweek podcast “The Josh Hammer Show” and author of “Israel and Civil...

“When we are dispersed and we interact with other human beings only online, and the algorithms feed back our preferences and desires to us, what it effectively does is kind-of isolate us in these multiple sub caves.”

Jacob Howland is the provost of the University of Austin, a new, private liberal arts university that is pushing back against censorship and politically popular narratives in higher education.

As dean of the Intellectual Foundations program, Howland gives students a comprehensive education in the Western tradition, emphasizing both “Athens and Jerusalem,” he says.

“After communism fell, it’s as if...

Few people understand artificial intelligence and machine learning as well as MIT physics professor Max Tegmark. Founder of the Future of Life Institute, he is the author of “Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence.”

“The painful truth that’s really beginning to sink in is that we’re much closer to figuring out how to build this stuff than we are figuring out how to control it,” he says.

Where is the U.S.–China AI race headed? How close are we to science fiction-type scenarios where an uncontrollable superintelligent AI can wreak major ha...

“It’s now been revealed that the Chinese—who manufacture virtually all of our solar panels, both in the United States and Europe—have been installing cellular radios inside the inverters, which can act as kill switches,” says Michael Shellenberger, an investigative journalist, author, founder of Public, and CBR Chair of Politics, Censorship, and Free Speech at the University of Austin.

Shellenberger is the author of the books “San Fransicko” and “Apocalypse Never.”

In this wide-ranging interview, we dive into key vulnerabilities in America’s energy grid, how Trump is transforming America’s energy future, the current status of...

Dr. Lynn Fynn is a clinical research scientist and a retired infectious disease specialist. We sat down together to discuss issues she sees plaguing medical research, including the misallocation of funds, a broken peer review process, and major conflicts of interest.

”Any time you incentivize something, you’re creating a bias. And when you create a bias, there’s an element of truth that’s removed from the equation,” says Dr. Fynn.

“When a pharmaceutical company gets to pour money into a program, the curriculum is going to reflect what they want it to reflect, to make it a...

“Hollywood is about as left and progressive a community as there is in this country. And unfortunately, part of the box you have to check in that very left, super progressive space is being anti-Israel and being pro-Palestine in an anti-Israel way,” says Jonah Platt.

Platt is a jack of all trades in the entertainment industry—an actor, director, producer, and singer. In the aftermath of the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre of Israelis led by terrorist group Hamas, he launched the podcast “Being Jewish.”

He recently visited Auschwitz, the largest German death camp, alongside over a dozen Muslims. H...

“Service … it’s a great healer for a broken heart. It helped me a lot through our fight for our son, and the difficulties and the challenges of fighting for him and then losing him,” says Gary Sinise.

An Emmy Award-winning actor, producer, director, and musician, Sinise has dedicated his life to supporting America’s active-duty military, veterans, first responders, and their families.

The Gary Sinise Foundation has raised over $500 million in support of these communities, and Sinise has won many awards for his humanitarian contributions, including the Presidential Citizen Medal, the second-highest civilian honor in the Uni...