American Thought Leaders

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 practiti...

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...

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 so...

Recently, the New Civil Liberties Alliance (NCLA) reached a major settlement concluding the landmark Missouri v. Biden lawsuit against government-induced social media censorship. I sat down with Mark Chenoweth, president and chief legal officer of the NCLA, to discuss what this settlement actually means. The 10-year consent decree blocks the surgeon general, the Centers for Disease Control and Pre...

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 C...

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‘...

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...

“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...

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...

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 th...

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 Chin...

“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...

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...

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 tu...

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,”...

“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...

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...

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. Bu...

“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...

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 Th...

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 l...

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...

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...

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...

“We are witnessing the turning point of the Chinese Communist Party rule. … The chain of command in the military is totally broken,” says veteran China analyst and Epoch Times columnist Heng He. On Jan. 24, China’s Ministry of National Defense announced that two top military generals, Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli, were under investigation for “serious disciplinary and legal violations.” This comes...