American Thought Leaders

An island nation only one-third the size of Virginia, Taiwan produces more than 90 percent of the world’s most advanced chips and more than 90 percent of the servers powering the AI revolution. And last year, Taiwan became the United States’ fourth-largest trading partner—after Mexico, Canada, and China.

More than one-fifth of global maritime trade goes through the Taiwan Strait, according to a Center for Strategic and International Studies analysis, and any conflict over Taiwan would be devastating for the global economy—and likely far worse than the economic disruptions caused by the Iran War.

Chi...

In what was the third major attempt on President Donald Trump’s life in an era of escalating political violence, this year’s White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) dinner was abruptly cut short when multiple shots were fired, and a man was apprehended for trying to breach security.

The 31-year-old suspect, Cole Allen, could face up to life in prison.

Joining us today is Sean Spicer, who previously served as White House press secretary and White House communications director during the first Trump administration. Now, he’s the host of the Sean Spicer Show a...

A recent landmark Jamestown Foundation report maps Chinese United Front operations, the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) effort to co-opt and weaponize civil society against the CCP’s enemies.

The report, titled “Harnessing the People” and authored by researcher Cheryl Yu, identifies more than 2,000 such organizations operating in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany. More than 1,000 are operating in the United States.

They span a wide range, including student, business, professional, cultural, and “friendship” groups as well as media outlets.

In this episode, I sit down with Peter Mattis...

Subpoenaed documents released by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) reveal that American public health officials were well aware of COVID-19 vaccine safety signals for myocarditis and ischemic stroke in people over 65—well before they alerted the American public.

Last year, as chairman of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Johnson issued a subpoena to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) seeking six categories of COVID-related data, including vaccine safety surveillance data and myocarditis records.

From the subpoenaed data—enormous dumps of what has ultimately become about 11 million pages—Johnson’s team found that...

For decades now, we’ve been told the biggest questions of how life and our universe came to be were settled. But what if they’re not?

Stephen Meyer has spent his career digging into the deepest mysteries of our existence. A philosopher of science, he is the founder of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture and the author of the New York Times bestseller “Darwin’s Doubt” and “Return of the God Hypothesis.”

“Many leading evolutionary biologists today are calling for a new theory of evolution, because they recognize that the mutation-natural s...

“Pornography is like a silent epidemic ... but nobody wants to talk about it much,” says child protection advocate Kristen Jenson.

She’s the author of the “Good Pictures Bad Pictures” series of read-aloud books that teach children how to recognize and reject pornography.

In America, kids are encountering porn at younger and younger ages—often without their parents knowing, Jenson says. Once a child has a smartphone, it is only a matter of time until the child is exposed to porn—often by other children. And it’s having a devastating impact on their impression...

For two decades, investigative journalist Ethan Gutmann has been researching how the Chinese Communist Party secretly harvests the organs of prisoners of conscience and kills them in the process.

He authored the groundbreaking 2014 work “The Slaughter” and, more recently, “The Xinjiang Procedure.”

In his latest book, he gathers evidence of how the regime—which has long targeted Falun Gong practitioners for their organs—is now exploiting captive Uyghurs for this same macabre industry.

Gutmann traveled to Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkey to interview dozens of Uyghurs and Kazaks who had managed to e...

A series of devastating inquiries have documented how networks of men—primarily of Muslim Pakistani heritage—groomed, trafficked, and gang-raped thousands of children, mostly white girls, in English towns such as Rotherham, Rochdale, and Telford for decades.

Independent reviews found that local authorities downplayed allegations and failed to crack down on these crimes in large part out of fear of being accused of racism or Islamophobia.

At the same time, dozens of sharia councils have emerged across the United Kingdom that run an informal legal system handling divorces, inheritances, and family disputes within Musl...

Artificial intelligence is radically reshaping the workplace, the digital ecosystem, the way we interact with each other, and the future of crime, surveillance, and warfare.

But conservatives in particular, argues Wynton Hall, risk falling dangerously behind in navigating this new world. Nobody will get to opt out of the AI revolution—whether conservatives like it or not, Hall said.

Hall is the social media director at Breitbart News and author of the new New York Times bestselling book “Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI.”

He’s s...

Recently, the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) reached a major settlement concluding the landmark Missouri v. Biden lawsuit against government-induced social media censorship.

I sat down with Mark Chenoweth, president and chief legal officer of the NCLA, to discuss what this settlement actually means.

The 10-year consent decree blocks the surgeon general, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency from pressuring social media companies to censor speech.

“The federal government has now admitted that it was engaged in a very...

In this episode, I’m sitting down with Frank Bisignano, who oversees not one, but two of America’s most consequential institutions: the Social Security Administration (SSA) and the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).

Before stepping into government, he built a career at the very top of finance as the youngest senior vice president in American Express history at just 25, co-COO of JPMorgan Chase, and CEO of the fintech company Fiserv.

Now, he’s taking on a different kind of challenge: bringing, in his words, “accuracy” to massive federal agencies that impact every American.

He’s clean...

Have Gen Z and Gen Alpha lost touch with the real world? Gen Z entrepreneur and founder of Touch Grass Together, Adnan Alkhalili, thinks so.

“I grew up very natively online, scarily so ... I grew up on the Discord world. I grew up on the gaming world as well ... and even the friends I had in real life, we would end up not even spending time together. We would spend all of our time online. So they‘d be in their house, I’d be in my house,” Alkhalili says.

The online world traps Ge...

National security expert T. Casey Fleming is the CEO of BlackOps Partners, a strategy and cybersecurity consulting firm that he founded in 2008. He’s also the author of the new book, “The Red Tsunami: The Silent Storm Killing Your Freedom.”

“It may look like a book, but it’s a whistleblower’s exposé and survival guide. … It basically tells you what to do to protect yourself,” Fleming said.

“Number one: Stop buying Chinese products and services and stop investing in companies that are investing in China,” he said.

The Chinese Communist Party has been using what are k...

“You can’t abandon the concept of normality, or societies will just completely fall apart,” said developmental psychologist and social science scholar J.D. Haltigan.

There has been a tremendous push in mental health to destigmatize mental illness, he said, and people are encouraged to regard themselves as “some sort of heroic person for having [mental] disorders.”

This is true especially for mood disorders like depression and anxiety. People nowadays increasingly define themselves through mood disorders—especially women, who often are more prone than men to depression and internalization of anxiety, he said.

This apparen...

To understand the significance of the sweeping military purges in China and how Beijing is reacting to America’s war with Iran, I’m sitting down with eminent China scholar Robert Suettinger, a former CIA and State Department intelligence analyst, a senior advisor at The Stimson Center, and author of “The Conscience of the Party: Hu Yaobang, China’s Communist Reformer.”

“There’s no question of the fact that Xi Jinping is now less of a dominant leader than he was six or eight months ago,” Suettinger says.

Earlier this year, Xi purged two top generals from th...

Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb is not your typical astronomer. For many years, he’s been scouring the universe for the abnormal and the unknown. “Brushing anomalies under the carpet of traditional thinking,” as he puts it, is anathema for him.

“One way to learn more,” he told me, “is to pay attention to the anomalies, because they may lead us to something that we’ve never thought about … Maybe they will open up our eyes to extra dimensions … or new physics.”

In 2021, Loeb founded the Harvard-based Galileo Project to speed up the scientific search for evidence of extrater...

Pastor Bob Fu was a student leader during the 1989 Tiananmen democracy movement and later led an underground Chinese house church. In 1996, he was imprisoned for “illegal evangelism.”

He later fled China and came to the United States, where he founded ChinaAid, a Christian human‑rights organization that documents cases of persecution, provides legal aid, and advocates for religious freedom in China.

In this episode, we dive into the escalation of religious persecution in recent years in China, including the growing dehumanization of Christians.

Echoing Mao Zedong’s targeting of “five black classes” during the Cultural...

“The U.S. went to war in Iran because Iran made itself a Chinese weapon,” argues policy analyst Zineb Riboua, a research fellow at Hudson Institute’s Center for Peace and Security in the Middle East.

Riboua is the founder of the “China in MENA Project,” which tracks communist Chinese expansion and influence across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA).

Is there a bigger dimension to the Iran war that people are missing?

“We have this tendency to just look at the countries involved ... but there’s a big player, and the big player her...

Dozens of Iranian leaders, including Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, have been killed in U.S.–Israeli joint strikes on Iran.

In this episode, I’m sitting down again with seasoned China analyst Gordon Chang, author of “Plan Red,” to understand how this is changing the global geopolitical landscape—especially for Beijing.

Including the Venezuela raid that captured regime leader Nicolás Maduro, this is the second time President Donald Trump appears to be neutralizing a key ally of Beijing.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not...

For twenty years, I’ve investigated a crime almost too horrific to name—now documented in my new book: “Killed to Order: China’s Organ Harvesting Industry and the True Nature of America’s Biggest Adversary.”

In America and other free countries, patients wait months or even years for an organ. But in China, transplant wait lists are measured in weeks—or even days.

In this episode, the tables are turned, and I’m in the guest seat this time.

I invited my good friend, actor and comedian Rob Schneider, who has become deeply personall...

Dr. Daniel Monti is the founding chair of the first integrative medicine department at an American medical university.

Rather than treating symptoms in isolation, integrative medicine takes a holistic approach to health, combining conventional Western medicine with mind-body therapies, nutritional medicine, and traditional practices such as acupuncture and herbal medicine.

“Integrative medicine,” Monti told me, “has become a subspecialty of medicine with its own board certification. ... To become an integrative medicine doctor, you have to first do your residency in something like internal medicine, neurology, OBGYN, and then do a fellowship in integrative medicine.”

Monti...

“What’s important for people to know is that the majority of California is actually not to the far left. We’re a very purple state,” says Elaine Culotti, a self-made entrepreneur, star of Discovery’s reality TV series “Undercover Billionaire,” and founder of the Mayors Matter project.

On a mission to understand the root causes of California’s challenges, Culotti recently went on a state-wide tour and talked to 50 out of California’s almost 500 mayors as well as countless regular Californians on the way.

“I’ve talked to people from Humboldt County, which is the very top of Califo...

In this episode, I sit down with Grace Jin Drexel, the daughter of detained Pastor Ezra Jin, the founder of one of China’s largest underground house-church networks.

Last October, Pastor Jin was arrested along with 27 other pastors and church leaders from Zion Church. It was one of the largest assaults on independent Christian congregations in China since the Cultural Revolution, said Drexel. She has since become a prominent voice speaking out against religious persecution in China.

State repression of Zion Church began in 2018 amid a broader wave of Communist Party efforts to subjugate faith co...

How polarized are Americans really? Are we really on the “brink of civil war” as some suggest?

That’s what I wanted to find out when I sat down with Jonathan Butcher, author of the recently released book “The Polarization Myth: America’s Surprising Consensus on Race, Schools, and Sex.”

“When we hear the term polarization, it makes us think that there’s 50% on one side and 50% on the other side. But that’s not what’s going on,” says Butcher, who is acting director of The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy.

Butcher conducted a su...

“People have misunderstood that [Greenland] is somehow a President Donald Trump issue, and it’s not,” says Alex Gray, who previously served as National Security Council chief of staff and deputy assistant to the president.

So why does Greenland matter? And why has it become such a massive issue?

In fact, Gray explained to me, multiple American presidents have tried to purchase or acquire Greenland over the last 160 years. Andrew Johnson was the first in 1867. Woodrow Wilson tried during the First World War. And Harry Truman tried right after World War II, Gray says.

In m...

Xi Van Fleet grew up in China during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. She was too young to be a real revolutionary Red Guard, but old enough to observe the astonishing scenes of violence and ideological fervor around her during those terrible years.

I sat down with her to discuss her new book, “Made in America: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Enabled Communist China and Created Our Greatest Threat.”

She says she felt compelled to write this book to help Americans understand the true nature of communism. Over the past hundred years or so...

In this no-holds-barred interview, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, breaks down how the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research is changing under his leadership.

Bhattacharya, a former professor of Stanford University, public health expert, and coauthor of the anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration, was sworn in as director of the NIH in April last year.

With an annual budget of almost $50 billion, the NIH sets the direction of research at universities, medical centers, and research institutes across America.

It encompasses 27 institutes and centers that cover different areas of...

In 2015, a whistleblower came forward to The Epoch Times to share an unthinkable story.

Years before, while a resident doctor at one of China’s largest military hospitals, he was summoned one day with other doctors for a “secret military mission.” They were brought before a 17-year-old young soldier—bound so tightly that the ropes cut into his flesh—and ordered to pin the boy down and extract his kidneys and eyes.

The young soldier had gotten on the wrong side of his army supervisor, and while imprisoned in military jail, military command discovered that he was a b...

Matthew Spalding is a professor of constitutional government at Hillsdale College and author of “The Making of the American Mind: The Story of The Declaration of Independence.”

A century ago, progressive historian Carl Becker argued that whether or not we have natural, inalienable rights as described in the Declaration had become a meaningless question. He believed that the idea of natural rights was not a veritable truth but merely a creed or faith of the men of his time and a product of historical circumstances.

Spalding disagrees. He argues that the existence of natural rights and...

A significant industry has emerged of expectant mothers flying from China to states such as California or U.S. territories such as Saipan to give birth to American citizens, says investigative reporter Peter Schweizer.

As soon as the newborn is old enough to fly, mother and child travel back to China with their babies. Chinese state-run media began promoting such services years ago, Schweizer says.

“They are exploiting this on a massive scale,” Schweizer said. “It’s industrial, and we are completely oblivious to it.”

He estimates there are tens of thousands of such cases...

“We are witnessing the turning point of the Chinese Communist Party rule. … The chain of command in the military is totally broken,” says veteran China analyst and Epoch Times columnist Heng He.

On Jan. 24, China’s Ministry of National Defense announced that two top military generals, Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli, were under investigation for “serious disciplinary and legal violations.” This comes on the heels of a series of purges of Chinese military leaders.

Of the seven original members of China’s Central Military Commission, five have now effectively been purged or removed. Only two remain. And on...

Dr. Joanna Moncrieff is a British psychiatrist and author of “Chemically Imbalanced: The Making and Unmaking of the Serotonin Myth.” She challenges the long-held belief that depression is caused by a lack of the hormone serotonin.

“The serotonin myth … was first put out there in the 1960s, then picked up by the pharmaceutical industry in the 1990s and widely propagated by them as part of their campaign to sell SSRIs, their new generation of antidepressants,” she said.

Contrary to what many people still believe, there’s no evidence that depression is caused by a lack of serotonin...

Erin Friday is an attorney and the co-lead of Our Duty, a parent-led international organization that opposes transgender procedures for minors.

When her daughter was 13 years old, she began identifying as male, and school staff began using a male name and pronouns to address her—without the knowledge or consent of her parents.

When Friday found out, she called the school and told them to stop. A week later, Child Protective Services showed up at her door—followed by the police a day later. No action was taken against Friday, but it was an alarming expe...

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy recently unveiled a new food pyramid and dietary guidelines for Americans that emphasize high-quality protein, dairy, healthy fats, vegetables, and fruits. Whole grains are downgraded, and processed foods and added sugars are discouraged.

“We’ve been consuming this ultra-processed food, which I call human pet food,” says Dr. Shawn Baker. A former orthopedic surgeon and world champion athlete, he’s the author of “The Carnivore Diet” and co-founder of the online clinic Revero.

“A lot of our food has become very similar to recreational drugs in the way we use and abuse them...

A typical vaccine stimulates a person’s immune system, yet only a portion of the immune response actually targets the disease it’s designed to protect against. However, a new technology may be changing that dynamic.

In this episode, I sit down with Lou Reese, an entrepreneur who has led or co-founded several biotech companies and has been working on synthetic peptide-based active immunotherapy medicines. He’s co-CEO of United Biomedical and co-founder of Vaxxinity, Cana Life, and Axxium.

He’s working on a product that could—if proven successful—transform our approach to treating and preventi...

An estimated one in six American adults today are taking some form of psychiatric medication. Yet it seems mental health outcomes across America have seen no significant improvement, despite the promises of the psychopharmacology revolution.

David Cohen, professor of social welfare and associate dean at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs, argues that many of the core assumptions of modern psychiatry are flawed.

Cohen is known for his research on psychotropic drugs and coercive mental health treatment.

In our interview, we also discuss why it is that America has one of the hi...

“Minnesota … is just the tip of the iceberg,” says Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).

Minnesota has become the epicenter of several overlapping fraud investigations of childcare programs, small business pandemic loans, and Medicaid services. Earlier this month, Dr. Oz traveled to Minnesota to tour suspected fraud sites and meet with whistleblowers and announced that over $2 billion in annual Medicaid funding might be withheld.

“What we’re seeing in Minnesota, which is billions of dollars of fraud that hurts our most vulnerable people and puts them at risk … is...

One of the first executive orders President Donald Trump signed after his inauguration last January was titled “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.” The order directed the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to produce a systematic review of pediatric transgender procedures and their impact on children within 90 days.

In May 2025, HHS published a more than 400-page review, titled “Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices.” In November last year, an updated, peer-reviewed version was published with additional appendices and supplements.

Leor Sapir, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institut...

Ronald Reagan first visited the Berlin Wall in 1978, during the Carter administration. While there, he reportedly told his aides: “We’ve got to find a way to bring this down,” says Mark Joseph, producer of the 2024 film “Reagan.”

“Reagan” is a biographical movie starring Dennis Quaid as Ronald Reagan and Jon Voight as KGB agent Viktor Petrovich.

In this episode, Joseph shares why it took nearly 20 years to bring this film to the big screen, and what it was like to film during the height of COVID-era restrictions.

Joseph, who’s also the founder of MJM E...

It’s been almost a decade since then-House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes first launched his investigation with now-FBI director Kash Patel into the scandal that became known as “Russiagate.”

His watershed memo back in 2018—dubbed the “Nunes memo”—detailed what he describes as grave abuses in how the FBI obtained surveillance warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to surveil Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and later the first Trump administration.

It’s “the biggest scandal in U.S. history, by a long way,” he says.

In July 2025, the Trump administration released new documents shedding...