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.
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, b...
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 replacin...
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 ...
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 o...
“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 financie...
“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 ed...
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 scenario...
“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...
Dr. Lynn Fynn discusses systemic issues in medical research, including conflicts of interest, misallocated funds, and a broken peer review process. She explains how incentives and funding sources can introduce bias and even lead to reversing the scientific method to fit desired conclusions. Dr. Fynn shares her experience with regulatory bodies and proposes solutions like blinded submissions and independent review boards to restore integrity and public trust in science.
“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.” 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...
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,”...
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 ...
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,...
“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 disturbin...
“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 s...
“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...
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 t...
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...
“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, ...
“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 nati...
“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 im...
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 v...
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 kno...
“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 featur...
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 s...
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 repurpose...
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 way China 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...
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 U...
