American Thought Leaders

In this exclusive interview with FBI Director Kash Patel, we dive into the agency’s crackdown on crime and foreign espionage, his trip to China, the “burn bags,” and recent criticisms. What exactly is the “764 network,” and how is the FBI working to target these actors? Why did President Donald Trump label Antifa a domestic terror organization, and how does this alter the playing field? Does the F...

For many Americans, the COVID-19 era revealed profound ruptures in American society. While some are eager to move on from that period and simply return to “normal,” there are others who wonder: Is it really that simple? How can we move forward without truly reconciling with the profound brokenness that was revealed in the last five years? How can we simply ignore or forget those who were censored,...

In a few years, America may not need to buy critical minerals from China anymore, says synthetic chemist and nanotechnologist James Tour. Why? Because of a method called flash Joule heating that he and his team have been studying at Rice University. China currently has a near-monopoly on global processing capacity for critical minerals, including rare earths. These are essential to much of our mod...

Most Americans have little understanding of the vast amount of private data harvested from their smartphones by third parties, said Joe Weil, a former Apple product manager and the founder of Unplugged. Where you go, who you associate with, what you like, is all easily discoverable, Weil said. “It’s publicly available. It’s purchasable.” What’s even worse is that the Fourth Amendment does not prot...

Modern medicine is veering away from the traditional Hippocratic Oath that required physicians to do no harm and use their knowledge and skills solely for the purpose of healing the patient, says psychiatrist and bioethics expert Dr. Aaron Kheriaty. Now, physicians are euthanizing patients, removing healthy organs in certain transgender-related surgeries, and injecting drugs for late-term abortion...

Declan Ganley’s company, Rivada Networks, is developing a technology that may revolutionize global connectivity and security—and it appears that the Chinese communist regime is desperately seeking to gain control of it. As much as 99 percent of global internet traffic today relies on a series of subsea fiber-optic cables around the world that are vulnerable to natural disasters and attacks. Chines...

Filmmaker Natalya Murakhver has recently released her new documentary “15 Days: The Real Story of America’s Pandemic School Closures.” It shows the devastating effects that remote learning had on children and families. What was the true impact of the school closures on a generation of children? How can we begin to measure it? “Viewers will bear witness to the stories of the people who experienced...

Why did Patrick Girondi, a successful singer and songwriter, become the founder and CEO of a pharmaceutical company? Originally from the South Side of Chicago, Girondi dropped out of high school and became a musician and also, quite by accident, a highly successful commodities trader. In the early 1990s, his young son Rocco was diagnosed with thalassemia, a rare blood disorder caused by a defect i...

Recently, Bill Gates very publicly pivoted on climate change, rejecting “doomsday” predictions and calling for a more pragmatic, human-centered approach. Is that a sign that the era of climate alarmism is coming to a close? That’s what I wanted to find out when I sat down with Michael Shellenberger, author of “Apocalypse Never” and founder of Public.news and the nonprofit Environmental Progress. F...

“We don’t want Americans to participate in any way, shape, or form in this kind of organ harvesting and transplantation scheme. … You can actually sit in America, [and] make an appointment for a heart, lung transplant in China right now,” says Congressman Neal Dunn (R-Fla.), a former Army surgeon who is also founding president of the Advanced Urology Institute in Florida. “I want to make that ille...

In this special episode of American Thought Leaders, I visited the Food Independence Summit, an annual event dedicated to homesteading, sustainable living, and reclaiming food autonomy, in Walnut Creek, Ohio. The 2025 summit, with a theme of “Seed to Spoon,” took place in mid-June earlier this year in the heart of Ohio’s Amish country. Homesteaders, farmers, gardeners, educators, and healthy food...

Dr. Irwin Goldstein is one of America’s leading sexual health physicians, a pioneer in the field, and the director of San Diego Sexual Medicine. In this episode, he breaks down his latest research into what’s known as post-SSRI sexual dysfunction (PSSD)—a condition that’s not uncommon but rarely discussed publicly. He’s found that a class of antidepressants known as SSRIs can cause lasting physiol...

What happens when a business decides faith matters more than profit? Apparently, it flourishes. Hobby Lobby, founded by David and Barbara Green in Oklahoma City in 1972, is a private, family-owned corporation now with over a thousand arts-and-crafts stores nationwide. The stores are closed on Sundays, do not sell any Halloween-themed products, operate debt-free, and are run according to Biblical p...

What if the most potent weapon that America has against the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) isn’t nukes or tariffs? “This isn’t a competition between the largest economy and the second largest economy. This is a competition of ideals—and we’ve got the better ones,” says former Ambassador-at-Large for International Religious Freedom Sam Brownback. “If you want to hit them where it hurts, hit them on...

More than 11 percent of Americans take antidepressants, including rising numbers of kids and adolescents and even pregnant women. The majority of Americans believe that depression is linked to a chemical imbalance in the brain, and that drugs can fix this imbalance—just as someone with Type 1 diabetes might take insulin. But that’s not true, according to board-certified psychiatrist Josef Witt-Doe...

Political scientist Charles Murray has written many well-known books over the course of his lifetime. Many of his works—including “Losing Ground,” “The Bell Curve,” and “Coming Apart”—have deeply influenced the intellectual discourse and zeitgeist of our times and provoked heated debate about the roots of major social problems in America. His latest book covers a topic that he has never covered de...

Rep. John Moolenaar (R-Mich.) has been spearheading efforts in Congress to combat the threat posed by the Chinese regime to American interests—from economic warfare to espionage and infiltration—as chairman of the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party. “With rare earths, China is basically firing a loaded gun ... on our economy,” he says. He’s pushing a bill that would phase in a 1...

NBA player Jonathan Isaac is known not just for his talent on the court, but for his convictions and outspoken faith. He’s the author of the 2022 best-selling memoir “Why I Stand.” As a youth, he struggled with anxiety—but a chance encounter in an elevator with the man who would later become his pastor changed the course of his life. Faith helped him triumph over his battle with anxiety, but it al...

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) recently imposed unprecedented export controls on rare earths, escalating the U.S.–China trade war. How is it that the Chinese regime managed to gain control of many of the most essential supply chains, from critical minerals to pharmaceuticals? How should the Trump administration approach this threat to national security? In this episode, we sit down with Lee Smi...

Few people understand the far-left extremist group Antifa as well as investigative journalist Andy Ngo, author of “Unmasked: Inside Antifa’s Radical Plan to Destroy Democracy.” He has been beaten, attacked, and nearly killed by Antifa for his undercover reporting of the group’s operations. In an executive order signed on Sept. 22, President Donald Trump designated the group a domestic terrorist or...

Larry Sanger is the co-founder of Wikipedia and coined the name “Wikipedia' in 2001. He established many of Wikipedia’s founding policies, including the original neutrality guidelines, before he left in 2002. Since then, he has become a vocal critic of Wikipedia’s growing ideological bias, particularly on politically charged issues. Sanger says certain outlets are favored as sources while others a...

While we often hear that free trade means cheaper goods, is it really that simple? What is the true cost of that? How can we measure the long-term decline of America’s manufacturing and industrial base and its impact on America? John Gardner is the author of “Manufacture Local: How to Make America the Manufacturing Superpower of the World.” “America has a lot of questions to ask itself about the m...

“What we’ve got today is too much money riding on seed oils. They can’t produce addictive, empty, junk food, processed food without the seed oils,” says Sally Fallon Morell. For decades, Morell has led a grassroots movement to see healthy foods in every household in America. “You need to get in the kitchen. [It] doesn’t mean you have to spend hours in the kitchen, but you need to get in the kitche...

Mollie Engelhart was once a celebrated vegan farm-to-table restaurateur in California. When she decided to put meat back on the menu, a targeted campaign forced her to close her business. She ultimately decided to make the painful decision to uproot her entire life, sell her farm, and rebuild from scratch in Texas. She’s the author of the new book “Debunked by Nature: How a Vegan-Chef-Turned-Regen...

“President Trump talks about ‘drill, baby, drill.’ We’ve also got to mine, baby, mine. We’ve got to get back into this business,” says U.S. Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum. China has a stranglehold on rare earths and critical minerals, controlling at least 85 percent of the refining of the 20 most important rare earth minerals, Burgum says. As secretary of the interior, Burgum oversees nearl...