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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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 mak...
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....
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 ...
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 ...
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,”...
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 relati...
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 [...
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 ...
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...
