American Thought Leaders

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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Episodes

Why Women Can’t Find Good Husbands | Timothy Goeglein

“We are definitively, with no debate, in a demographic winter in the history of the United States of America. We have never had a lower marriage rate, and we’ve never had a lower fertility rate,” says Timothy Goeglein, vice president of External and Government Relations at Focus on the Family. Goeglein is the author of multiple books, including most recently “What Really Matters: Restoring a Legacy of Faith, Freedom, and Family.” In our interview, we explore how America ended up where it is toda...

Jun 12, 2026•43 min

How Constitutional Liberties Moved Into Hidden Algorithms | Jacob Siegel

🏆Sponsor: FreedomProject Academy enrollment open now! 10% discount on tuition w/code: EPOCH10 Click here: https://ept.ms/ATL—FPE There are few people who understand the machinery behind modern disinformation and censorship better than Jacob Siegel. He’s a special features editor at Tablet Magazine and author of the new book “The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control.” In this episode, we trace the origins of modern information control, from President Woodrow Wilson’s propagand...

Jun 06, 2026•1 hr 25 min

What the End of the Orban Era Means for Hungary and Its Constitution | Marton Sulyok

Hungary is undergoing a major transformation with the election of a new prime minister. After 16 years in power, Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party was swept from office in a historic landslide election in April and with an equally historic turnout of almost 80 percent. The new Tisza party, led by Peter Magyar, won the largest super-majority in Hungary’s post-communist history with a platform focused on anti-corruption and national renewal. They’ve promised major changes to Hungary’s constitution, know...

Jun 05, 2026•58 min

One Key Fact About America’s Founding That Isn’t Taught Anymore | Eric Metaxas

Ahead of the 250th anniversary of America’s founding, New York Times bestselling author and talk show host Eric Metaxas is publishing his latest book, a 600-page volume titled “Revolution: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World.” In the book, he argues that the American Revolution is the “only genuine revolution in the history of so-called revolutions.” So what separated the American Revolution from other revolutions? What made it succeed? And what critical aspects of the A...

May 30, 2026•50 min

Is Canada Becoming the CCP’s Backdoor into America? | Former Canadian Intel Analyst Scott McGregor

Could communist Chinese infiltration of Canada become an existential threat to American security—or is it already one? Scott McGregor has spent decades in the Canadian military and Canadian intelligence studying the threat that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) poses to Canada and North America more broadly. He has known about the CCP’s infiltration of Canada for many years and briefed major intelligence agencies in both Canada and the United States about it. According to McGregor, the strategic...

May 29, 2026•29 min

Gordon Chang Breaks Down Trump-Xi Summit and What’s Next

In this episode, I sit down with China analyst Gordon Chang to understand his view of the recent Trump–Xi talks in Beijing. Who had the upper hand? Why did President Donald Trump take 17 CEOs of America’s largest corporations with him? And what was accomplished? While Xi Jinping tries to present America as a declining power and China as an ascending one, the reality is that China faces several grave problems, Chang says: a collapsing demography, an ailing economy, and a military in disarray afte...

May 23, 2026•52 min

How Cartels Force Children Into Prostitution, Drug Dealing and Even Killing | Rosi Orozco

Rosi Orozco is one of the world’s leading voices against human trafficking. She has been working in human rights advocacy for over three decades, and as a member of the Chamber of Deputies of Mexico, she was the driving legislative force behind Mexico’s famous anti-trafficking law. “There are 50 million people in the world in slavery,” Orozco tells me. And that, she believes, is a low estimate. She was recently involved in helping three rescued girls, who are now at secure shelter in Mexico. “Th...

May 22, 2026•1 hr

The Charter School Founder Turning Children Toward Plato, Virtue, and the Eternal | Caylan Ford

“People have lost sight of what education is supposed to be,” said Caylan Ford. In 2022, she founded Canada’s first tuition-free classical charter school, the Calgary Classical Academy, with just a dozen faculty members. Since then, it has grown to 1,500 students across three campuses in Calgary and Edmonton, with thousands more on the waitlist, and has changed its name to Alberta Classical Academy. For Ford, classical education is all about, as she put it, “turning around the soul so that it’s ...

May 16, 2026•56 min

The CCP’s Greatest Insecurity—and America’s Greatest Weapon | Sam Brownback

It’s time to fundamentally rethink America’s approach to the Chinese Communist Party, argues Sam Brownback, former U.S. senator, Kansas governor, U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, and author of the new book “ China’s War on Faith .” Ahead of President Donald Trump’s high-stakes summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing, I’m sitting down with Brownback to understand what’s really at stake and why he believes America is wasting the greatest leverage it has had. “...

May 13, 2026•45 min

Homeopathy Cured Her Disease, Now She’s Fighting for More Access | Paola Brown

Paola Brown first turned to homeopathy, a form of alternative medicine based on the principle of “like cures like,” after many years of suffering from unbearable bladder pain. She had been diagnosed with interstitial cystitis, a disease with no known cure. She jokes that homeopaths are called “the doctors of last resort,” and for her, they were exactly that. When she went to see one for the first time, among the first things she asked her doctor was: “‘Do I need to believe in this? Because I don...

May 09, 2026•33 min

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