American Thought Leaders

“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...

A few months ago, Canada unveiled its national memorial to the millions of victims of communism.

In this episode, Ludwik Klimkowski, chair of the Tribute of Liberty, gives us a tour of the memorial and reveals the 17-year battle to realize it as the group navigated changing political winds.

“This is a memorial to those who still struggle. This is the memorial given to those who still want to escape. This is the memorial to those who are still sitting in prison, whose organs are being harvested,” Klimkowski says.

The memorial was inaugurated last...

In this episode, we sit down again with Victor Davis Hanson, a classicist, military historian, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, and author of two dozen books, including most recently “The End of Everything.”

In this interview, we dive into the multifaceted dimensions of what he describes as Trump’s “counterrevolution” in the foreign policy space, from Canada to China to the Middle East to Ukraine and Russia.

What might the end of the wars in Ukraine and Gaza look like?

Should Trump have accepted a plane from Qatar’s royal family? Was it a good id...

There are few people who understand the workings of Chinese espionage as well as Nicholas Eftimiades.

After a 34-year government career—including time at the CIA, Department of State, and Defense Intelligence Agency—he’s now a professor at Penn State University’s Homeland Security Program and a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council.

“China uses what we call a whole-of-society approach to conducting espionage. … We’re not talking about thousands [of people]. We’re talking about tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands of people engaged globally in carrying out the CCP’s will,” Eftimiades...

“One of the major driving factors of the extreme polarization that we’re living through right now is that most news consumers can very easily … tune in somewhere where they are just being force fed worldviews and perspectives that confirm all their priors,” says journalist Isaac Saul.

“Think about what media outlets are really making their audience uncomfortable on a regular basis, and there’s very few of them,” he says.

After writing for a wide variety of media outlets and seeing some disturbing trends, Saul decided to found Tangle, a newsletter that puts viewpoints from both the...

“This system I had been turning to for help through all of these years, through the most formative years of life, that I had been assuming existed to take care of me ... was actually a system of control. And I just hadn’t seen it for what it was, because I had never said no to it before,” says Laura Delano, author of “Unshrunk: A Story of Psychiatric Treatment Resistance.”

For 14 years, Delano was a “professional mental patient,” as she puts it, after being diagnosed with bipolar disorder when she was a teenager.

Now she wonders whethe...

“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...