American Thought Leaders

“Donald Trump is looming so large in the Canadian consciousness right now,” says Brian Lee Crowley.

“And I have seen a lot of my compatriots running around like chickens with their heads cut off, saying, ‘Oh my God, Donald Trump is a mad man. You can’t understand what he’s doing. There’s no rhyme or reason to it.’ And I looked at what Donald Trump was doing, and I thought, ‘Okay, I don’t have to like it. That’s a separate question. But if the question is, ’Can I understand it?' The answer is yes.”

Crowley i...

Dr. Paul Marik is a pulmonary and critical care specialist and a founding member of the Independent Medical Alliance, formerly known as the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance.

“Our healthcare system is completely and utterly broken. From the top to the bottom, it’s a broken, dysfunctional system,” says Marik. “If you do an experiment, it should be reproducible. And I think that’s the most important qualifier of good science; the results are reproducible, because then, it’s likely to be true.”

Best known for his revolutionary, lifesaving protocol for Sepsis and for being the seco...

How is the Trump administration transforming the Department of Justice’s civil rights priorities?

Joining us today for a deep dive is DOJ Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon of the civil rights division.

Their jurisdiction includes a wide range of constitutional issues, from religious freedom to Title IX protections, race-based discrimination, and enforcing voting rights laws.

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

“Never before in history have two great trading entities ever engaged in outright economic warfare, like is being engaged today. And that’s why I say we’re living in historic times,” says Steve Bannon, former White House chief strategist during President Donald Trump’s first administration and host of the “War Room” show.

“It’s not just tariffs. They’re a tool. [Trump]’s reorganizing the world system of commerce and of trade,” Bannon says.

In this episode, we dive into the U.S.–China trade war, Trump’s tariff strategy, his first 100 days in office, and where America...

“They picked me up, and I’m hopping on one leg. And I saw Commander Griffin, Major Gray, Major Kennedy, and then USAID [officer] at the time, Ragaei Abdelfattah, were all killed by the same bomber that didn’t kill me,” said Florent Groberg.

Groberg is a retired U.S. Army Captain who fought in Afghanistan and was severely injured attempting to thwart a suicide bomber. For his actions, he received the Medal of Honor, America’s highest award for military valor.

“Everything that we have in this nation is because of men and women who put thei...

“What happened during COVID is exactly a perfect illustration of the harms of sacrificing some for the many,” says Leslie Manookian, founder and president of the Health Freedom Defense Fund.

She played a pivotal role in getting her state of Idaho to pass the first legislation in the United States banning most medical mandates, including vaccines and masks.

“One of my missions at Health Freedom Defense Fund, in founding this organization, was to educate the public and raise awareness about the importance of medical freedom, because I think it’s the most basic and fundamental of human...

A recently leaked directive details the Chinese Communist Party’s strategy to respond to Trump’s tariffs.

How is the CCP trying to leverage this moment? Will this be the end of China as the “factory of the world?”

And what’s behind the purges in the military, the apparent removal of two Xi Jinping loyalists, and recent changes in top CCP leadership? Why did two top CCP officials recently swap positions?

Joining us today is longtime China analyst and commentator Heng He.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host a...

David Zweig is a journalist and author of “An Abundance of Caution: American Schools, the Virus, and a Story of Bad Decisions.” His book is a searing criticism of the policy to close schools across America during the COVID-19 pandemic. The result: Major lags in education achievement, a mental health disaster, and so much more that simply cannot be easily quantified.

“How do we track what happened to that kid who could have gotten into college and instead is doing something else now? We don’t know exactly the kids who were lost, who just stopped going to schoo...

“I felt like I was a Rip Van Winkle therapist. I left my profession due to a health condition in 2017 ... In 2021, I came back, and it was radically different,” says licensed clinical social worker Pamela Garfield-Jaeger. “All the teens that I had worked with before had never talked about being trans, and then the new program I was working at, half the girls were identifying as trans.”

Known as “The Truthful Therapist,” she is the author of “A Practical Response to Gender Distress” and is featured in the Epoch Times documentary “Gender Transformation.”

How has the mental health pr...

In this episode, I sit down with Mikki Willis, an award-winning filmmaker and producer of the Plandemic Series. His new film, “Follow the Silenced,” tells the stories, over the course of three years, of individuals injured by the COVID-19 genetic vaccine.

“We followed the science, we got harmed, and now Facebook won’t even let us have a group where we can talk to each other? What is happening here in this country? And so, we have made this film to give them a voice, and to make sure that their story and their sacrifice doesn’t go unnotic...

Dr. Joseph Varon is a critical care physician, medical professor, and president of the Independent Medical Alliance (IMA), formerly the Front Line COVID-19 Critical Care Alliance (FLCCC). Their mission is to provide and advocate for patient rights, informed consent, and medical transparency, and they’ve played a major role supporting Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

“Hopefully, now with the new NIH director, we'll be able to fund some of these studies for these repurposed drugs that are really going to cut on cost of health care expenses,” he says.

Varon has contri...

As the U.S.-China trade war continues to escalate, I’m sitting down with China analyst Gordon Chang.

“Jamie Dimon said this: ‘Why don’t you just pick up the phone?’ Well, the reason is we’ve had that attitude for five decades … and look where it’s gotten us. So, if the Chinese want to do something about our tariffs, it’s up to them to pick up the phone,” says Chang.

What is the current state of play when it comes to Trump’s tariff strategy? Is it working in America’s favor?

“The only w...

“More and more Iranian-supported, anti-American, Islamic terrorist cells are established on U.S. soil with the aim of eliminating key American personnel, and eliminating key American institutions and installations. This has been the ayatollah’s vision from day one,” says former Ambassador Yoram Ettinger.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Ettinger held a number of high-profile positions within Israel’s government, from minister of congressional affairs in D.C. to director of its press office. A now retired insider and expert on U.S.–Israel relations, he regularly advises Israel and America’s legislators, and produces a weekly newsletter c...

David Mansdoerfer served as deputy assistant secretary for the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) during the first Trump administration. Now, he’s chief strategist at the Independent Medical Alliance and describes himself as the MAGA-MAHA Connector.

“We have seen a complete reset of a federal agency within 60 days of Secretary Kennedy getting there. To me, that is unprecedented, and it is going to be one of the most impactful approaches to public health and the health economy in the United States,” he says. “We have not won this fight. We’ve begun the fight. And we have in...

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“The United States depends on China for 95 percent of the key components that are necessary to make our generic drugs, and if China shut the door on exports, within months, our health care system would begin to collapse.”

Rosemary Gibson is a national authority on health care policy and patient safety, and the author of “China Rx: Exposing the Risks of America’s Dependence on China for Medicine.”

“How come we don’t know t...

After Beijing retaliated to U.S. tariffs, President Donald Trump has now announced a tariff hike to 125 percent on Chinese products—and a 90-day pause on reciprocal tariffs on other countries.

To understand what’s really going on, we’re speaking with one of the world’s leading experts on the Chinese economy.

Christopher Balding was a professor at Peking University’s HSBC School of Business until 2018 when he was fired for pushing back against censorship. Now, he is a senior fellow at the Henry Jackson Society and the founder of New Kite Data Labs.

“I th...

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Joel Salatin is one of America’s most revered regenerative farmers. At Polyface Farms, he avoids synthetic fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, and vaccines. He doesn’t take any government subsidies. And he’s been a major source of inspiration for many seeking to build farms of their own with symbiotic, sustainable ecosystems—ones that enrich rather than deplete the soil.

For decades, he’s been fighting government overregulation of small food producers.

Salatin is...

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Dr. Eithan Haim said he was working as a resident surgeon at the Texas Children’s Hospital when he discovered that doctors were secretly continuing and expanding their program of transgender medical procedures for minors—after publicly shutting it down.

He blew the whistle, and ended up under federal investigation. After three indictments and 148 legal files, his case has now been dismissed with prejudice, meaning it cannot be filed again.

Views expr...

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Tens of millions of Americans are unwittingly investing in Chinese companies involved in military weapon production, surveillance technologies, and egregious human rights abuses, says former Reagan adviser Roger Robinson.

Through a complex web of investment vehicles and regulatory loopholes, Americans are pouring trillions of dollars into companies that directly threaten American national security, including ones blacklisted by the U.S. government—often without even knowing. Chinese companies often make up the bulk of in...

Emma Reilly worked as a human rights lawyer at the United Nations. She discovered that for years, the Human Rights Council had been handing over the names of Chinese dissidents slated to attend the U.N. to the Chinese regime. Included were the names of U.S., Canadian, and European citizens.

“The CCP demands get listened to because the U.N. takes them seriously, whereas they believe that the money from the U.S. will always flow, no matter what the law says in Congress, and that’s a problem,” Reilly says. “You see the way that individu...

Caroline Glick is a journalist, author, and recently, adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“The discussion that we’ve had about the war itself is just sort of blind to the basic realities of the situation. And that, to me, is the ground zero of all of the problems,” she says.

“The stronger Israel is, the more secure the United States is. I think that the more Israel is able to project its power in the region, the more stable the region is, because Israel is a fundamentally peaceful country that doesn’t seek war and do...

From cutting programs under the U.S. Agency for International Development to putting Voice of America employees on paid administrative leave, the Trump administration and its Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) have been aggressively seeking to reduce government spending on international initiatives.

But some such spending may be worth keeping.

Cleo Paskal, senior fellow at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, breaks down how certain U.S. measures in the Pacific are vital to deter increasing Chinese encroachment in the region, but they may not be well-understood.

Views expressed in this video are...

“Fifteen or 16 percent of the population [is] now taking antidepressants … When they’ve gone out and asked people who actually use these medications whether they’re experiencing sexual dysfunction, approximately 60 percent of people will [affirm] it.”

Dr. Josef Witt-Doerring is a board certified psychiatrist, former FDA medical officer, and director of the Taper Clinic. He treats patients suffering from post-SSRI sexual dysfunction (PSSD), and protracted withdrawal—two conditions becoming more common, and in some cases permanent, in people who have stopped taking antidepressants.

“SSRIs and antidepressants are really popular drugs. Some people just don’t want to believe...

Michael Lucci is the founder, CEO, and chairman of State Armor. He helps states enact policies and solutions that protect their assets from foreign adversaries like communist China.

“They’re trying to invade our homeland, and they likely have developed the capacity to make life very difficult, to create crises within the United States—whether it’s power, whether it’s wastewater treatment, whether it’s telecommunications,” he says. “They have laws that require those companies to engage in espionage. So why are we letting them sell connected devices of any type into the United States?”

In this episode...

Over the years, Pano Kanelos, the founding president of the University of Austin, observed a growing “homogenization” and “bureaucratization” of higher education. He saw school programs becoming more and more similar, administrators outnumbering students and young adults being taught that the pathway to success is dependent on censorship and adherence to the status quo.

“We’ve created a culture of conformity at universities—a culture of conformity in higher education,” he says. “This just flattens out, I think, the potential for higher education to do great things and be dynamic.”

So, in 2021, along with a group of similarly c...

In this episode, we sit down with Rep. Rich McCormick (R-Ga.), a decorated veteran who served over 20 years in the U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Navy as a helicopter pilot and a medical corps officer.

As a lawmaker, he has co-sponsored legislation to challenge the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) rampant economic espionage and tech influence campaigns, and a resolution supporting formal recognition of Taiwan.

“We now are in a new evolution of warfare where we’re heavily reliant on technologies. This has changed conventional warfare forever,” McCormick says.

Three U.S. Army...

In this episode, we dive into President Donald Trump’s multi-pronged strategy to revitalize America’s economy, from aggressive reciprocal tariffs to massive DOGE cuts, and a large-scale deregulation effort to promote business growth.

The Code of Federal Regulations is now over 190,000 pages long. A 2017 Auburn University study found that each federal regulator effectively “costs the U.S. economy the equivalent of 138 private sector jobs per year.” The researchers said that equated to a $11 million annual loss for the U.S. economy for every additional regulator.

What will be the impacts of the Trump administration’s policies...

Half a million unaccompanied minors entered the United States between 2019 and 2023, and experts fear many of them have been trafficked. And that does not include the children who crossed the border with individuals falsely claiming to be their family members. So where are all these children now?

Alina Habba, who is currently serving as counselor to the president, says she’s working with the different agencies involved to identify and rescue trafficking victims and prosecute the perpetrators.

“I am drafting a couple executive orders regarding that currently that I think will be important to properly get...

There are few people who have played a more important role in broadly supporting the rights of religious believers in China than Marco Respinti, director-in-charge of the Bitter Winter magazine.

“In the first six to eight months of our existence online as a magazine, some 40 people who were connected to us on the ground were arrested in China. … Half of them simply disappeared,” Respinti says.

During the International Religious Freedom Summit in Washington, I had the great pleasure of finally sitting down with Respinti to discuss how the Chinese Communist Party systematically infiltrates, coopts, and destro...

President Donald Trump has promised that he will bring back American manufacturing during his presidency. What if there aren’t enough Americans who want to work those jobs?

“Every year for the last decade or so, for every five tradesmen who retire, two replace them,” says Mike Rowe, Emmy Award-winning TV host of the Dirty Jobs series.

“If we don’t have a workforce who is disabused of the stigmas and the stereotypes and the myths and the misperceptions that have kept millions of kids from giving these jobs an honest look ... you’re going to wind up i...

President Donald Trump has been widely criticized for his “transactional” approach to diplomacy. But is that really such a bad thing?

In this episode, I sit down with China expert and retired U.S. Marine Col. Grant Newsham, a senior research fellow with the Center for Security Policy, to discuss Trump’s approach to diplomacy and negotiations and how America can leverage what he describes as the “kryptonite” of the Chinese regime.

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

A few weeks ago, I had the pleasure of sitting down with the President Santiago Peña of Paraguay. He shared why Paraguay is one of only 12 countries in the world that recognizes Taiwan instead of communist China and one of only six countries that have moved their embassies from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem.

Now I’m sitting down with his foreign minister, Rubén Ramírez Lezcano, to learn more about Paraguay, the region, and Lezcano’s candidacy for secretary general of the Organization of American States (OAS).

“Paraguay matters in the agenda of the Unite...

“When I got my COVID vaccine, my reaction started within an hour, and it started with tingling down the same arm as my injection. It moved to my other arm, then it moved to my legs, and then it moved to my head, into my brain, and I had this horrific electrical, pulsating sensation through my body 24/7.”

Brianne Dressen was left severely injured after participating in the AstraZeneca COVID-19 vaccine trials. She’s the co-founder of the nonprofit React19, which helps people impacted by COVID-19 vaccine injuries. React19 now advocates on behalf of over 36,000 people.

“We can’t...

Joining me today is Gov. Jeff Landry of Louisiana. Since he took office last year, he’s implemented sweeping changes in public safety, tax policy, and education.

We discuss gains made in the state’s educational rankings, as well as his plans for boosting election integrity, increasing manufacturing, and ensuring fiscal responsibility.

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, we dive into China’s influence and the communist regime’s propaganda efforts worldwide. Joining us is Piero Tozzi, a longtime China expert and staff director of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China.

What are some key misconceptions we have about China and the Chinese regime? And are we finally seeing a real “pivot to Asia” as the Trump administration signals a dramatic reduction in U.S. military presence in Europe and demands that NATO allies pitch in more for Europe’s defense?

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

In January, the western province of Alberta in Canada released a 269-page report—the first of its kind—examining the information and data that informed its response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Doctors felt pressure to do things they didn’t agree with. We need to have good autonomy where a physician is doing things safely, but they’re allowed to treat their patients in what they believe is the best for them. It still has to be regulated. You can’t just have everybody off on their own, but it has to be done,” says Dr. Gary Davidson, an e...

Andrew Hale is a senior trade policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation. In this episode, we discuss how Trump is using various trade tools to strengthen alliances and weaken adversaries.

“I look upon what he’s trying to do as a negotiating tactic. He’s using tariffs as an instrument of statecraft, and also for economic coercion, to achieve matters that sometimes go well beyond trade policy,” Hale says.

Hale says that tariffs should be used against America’s foreign adversaries, but not necessarily against its allies.

“Among [those on] the protection side, there’s a kn...

“We had a case of a little cell of Christian believers who were all converts from Islam, and they were meeting secretly. And they were infiltrated by a radical terrorist group called Al Shabaab, and they burnt down the house. They captured some of them, they took them onto the beach, and only two of them managed to survive, because they killed the rest of them.”

Charmaine Hedding is the founder and president of the Shai Fund, a humanitarian organization that aids, protects, and even rescues persecuted minorities throughout the Middle East and Africa.

“In 2014, I watc...

“In the last four years, we’ve seen an aggregate inflation of about 26 percent. So that’s a quarter of your purchasing power—phoosh gone—just disappeared across the board,” says Stefan Rust, founder and CEO of Truflation, a blockchain-based financial data service that provides real-time economic and inflation data.

What will be the impact of DOGE’s aggressive cost-cutting? Could it cause a short-term reduction in the size of the U.S. economy?

Some people have been talking about risks of deflation—is that really a concern? And what will be the economic impact of Trump’s tarif...

In this episode, I sit down with John O’Sullivan, a former policy and speech writer for British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, and former editor-in-chief of National Review and executive editor of Radio Free Europe. Today, he’s the president of the Danube Institute, a Hungary-based think-tank.

A “unified national identity is an absolute essential for a successful democracy,” he says. “If we continue on a multicultural path, it’s a path which is going to go in the directions of ever more aggressive and hostile identity politics, and people will feel that their neighbors are their enemies.”