At a time when our nation is portrayed as increasingly polarized, media often ignore viewpoints and stories that are worthy of attention. American Thought Leaders, hosted by The Epoch Times Senior Editor Jan Jekielek, features in-depth discussions with some of America’s most influential thought leaders on pertinent issues facing our nation today.
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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 devasta...
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 fir...
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,...
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 ...
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 ...
“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 ch...
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 tra...
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 a...
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 Re...
Mark Chenoweth of the NCLA discusses the landmark Missouri v. Biden settlement, where the government admitted to systematic social media censorship and agreed to a 10-year consent decree limiting its power. The conversation also covers the President's authority to remove appointed officials, including Federal Reserve governors, and details NCLA's other pivotal Supreme Court cases challenging the SEC's gag rule, judicial independence, and the non-delegation doctrine. This episode highlights ongoing efforts to curb government overreach and protect constitutional liberties.
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 hi...
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 Gen Z into an escap...
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 i...
“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 d...
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,” Suetting...
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-ba...
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, i...
“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 ther...
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. V...
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 Schneide...
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 becom...
“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 ...
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 repres...
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 Cen...
“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 Firs...
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 o...
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 uni...
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 i...
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 histor...
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 comple...
