American Thought Leaders

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Why Maduro’s Capture Is a Major Blow for Beijing | J. Michael Waller Jan 06, 2026

Show notes

In this episode, we sit down with J. Michael Waller, a senior analyst for strategy at the Center for Security Policy and author of “Big Intel,” to understand the geopolitical implications of America’s capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.

“For the first time in a very long time, the President of the United States has reasserted the Monroe Doctrine to keep foreign empires out of our hemisphere,” he says.

By capturing Maduro, President Donald Trump sent a signal to all of America’s adversaries, but first and foremost to communist China. “Trump has just pulled out a linchpin in an elaborate piece of machinery for the CCP’s sprawling global empire,” he says.

How did Venezuela devolve from a once prosperous country into an authoritarian hub for drug cartels and a key node of Chinese and Iranian influence? How does Maduro’s capture affect Beijing’s strategy and calculations when it comes to Taiwan? How will this impact Cuba and Iran? And what does the future hold for Venezuela and its people?

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Link Between Antifa and Homelessness Nonprofits | Jonathan Choe Jan 03, 2026

Show notes

“I’m seeing crime, chaos, and death on the streets of America. ... The homeless are being used. And Antifa, the far left activists, they want to keep the tent encampments on America’s streets to show that capitalism isn’t working,” said Jonathan Choe, a reporter for Turning Point USA’s Frontlines and a senior journalism fellow at the Discovery Institute.

At Turning Point USA’s AmFest conference, I sat down with Choe to discuss his investigations into Antifa and the homelessness epidemic in America.

While some nonprofits are really helping people, Choe said, he believes a sizable portion of the sector has become a multi-billion-dollar “cash cow” of grift and counterproductive aid.

“For years now, the so-called experts of the medical community—instead of getting people into treatment and recovery—have been giving away free meth pipes, fentanyl foil,” he said.

In 2025, he and several of his colleagues worked on a joint study by the Capital Research Center and the Discovery Institute that revealed a notable intersection between Antifa and the homelessness nonprofit space, he said.

Antifa members have embedded in the homelessness nonprofit sector and many of them have day jobs in the space, he said.

“A lot of [Antifa’s] ideas to bring communism, Marxism, to destabilize America, to usher in a brand new communist revolution that’s part of the homeless industrial complex now,” he said.

In October 2025, Choe and other journalists, including Andy Ngo, participated in a White House roundtable to share their knowledge about Antifa with President Donald Trump.

A month earlier, Trump had signed an executive order designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. And in July 2025, he signed another order called “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets” that takes a more aggressive treatment-first instead of housing-first approach to homelessness.

Many states, including Washington and California, are now suing the Trump administration.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Alex Berenson: What Teens Should Know About Cannabis and THC Jan 01, 2026

Show notes

Former New York Times reporter and now independent journalist Alex Berenson is the author of “Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence.”

In this episode, we dive into the debate around cannabis and THC and President Donald Trump’s recent executive order directing the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to reclassify marijuana from a Schedule I to a Schedule III drug.

Berenson argues that it’s a bad move. Schedule I substances are defined as having high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use. Schedule III substances, in contrast, have medical uses and are regarded as having only moderate to low potential for abuse.

Rescheduling marijuana sends the wrong signal, Berenson says: “Do we want to be a society that, in general, encourages drug use?”

He believes the use of drugs should be stigmatized, including the use of marijuana: “In the U.S. we can’t stigmatize. And not to stigmatize in this case, as in so many cases, means we can’t be honest.”

In my interview with Berenson, he provides an overview of the dangers of marijuana use and why these have increased dramatically over the last half-century.

“Fifty years ago, cannabis that was in a joint that you smoked at Woodstock ... that might have been 1 or 2 percent THC, so a few milligrams of cannabis in a joint. ... When I was growing up in the ‘80s or in the ’90s, it might have been 5 percent THC. Now, if you go into a dispensary ... the bud tender will sell you a product that is 20 percent to 30 percent THC, if it’s flower cannabis,” he said.

And if it’s not smoked but vaped, then “that might be 95 percent THC. This is not a plant at all. It’s just a chemical to get you high,” Berenson said. “Now you can walk around with this little device and inhale massive amounts of THC, and that really is a change that has made the product a lot more dangerous.”

There is also a well-established link, Berenson says, between high-potency, frequent marijuana use, and severe mental health impacts such as psychosis and schizophrenia.

There’s even research suggesting THC causes heart damage. “There is a link to myocardial infarction, heart attacks, and that link is pretty strong. You can find papers that show a 3x increase over a multi-year period,” he said.

But what about its benefits as a pain reliever? Berenson said that he was surprised to discover that placebo-controlled studies showed only small and short-term pain relief effects.

“What cannabis and THC are really good at is enhancing sensation ... but if you’re in pain, in the long run, enhancing sensation actually is not a good thing for you. ... And so the idea that cannabis is a substitute or a way out of our opioid problem is just not true,” Berenson said.

“We as a society have to ... be honest with ourselves about what we are doing and what we are encouraging kids to do,” he said.

In our wide-ranging interview, we also discuss the overprescription crisis in America, the dangers of SSRIs, psychedelics, and stimulants such as Adderall that around 10 percent of teenage boys are taking in the United States, and his thoughts on vaccine policy in America.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Chloe Cole Breaks Down Major HHS Shift on Gender Medicine—and Why It Matters Dec 30, 2025

Show notes

At age 12, Chloe Cole began identifying as male and started socially transitioning. Soon after, she was put on puberty blockers. Testosterone injections followed at age 13, and she underwent a double mastectomy at 15.

Shortly after the surgery, she realized that it had all been a terrible mistake: “I didn’t believe that I was a boy ... until that idea was put in my head.”

When she decided to detransition, the community that once eagerly encouraged her to transition into a boy treated her like she was “subhuman,” she says.

“The moment that I detransitioned, I was human garbage to them,” she says.

Now she has become one of the most vocal critics of what’s been dubbed “gender-affirming care” for minors.

Under the Trump administration, several measures have been put in place to end the medical transitioning of minors: In January, President Donald Trump issued the executive order “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.”

Earlier this month, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services proposed a new rule that prohibits hospitals that perform “sex-rejecting” procedures on minors from participation in Medicare and Medicaid Programs. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently spoke out against such procedures for minors and described them as medical malpractice.

And days ago, the House of Representatives voted to pass a bill that could imprison health care providers for providing these procedures to minors.

Cole, who is 21 years old today, supports such measures to put an end to medical transitioning of minors, but she’s convinced that this is not enough: “This doesn’t end with bans. We have to go all out and hold everybody who was involved accountable.”

And that’s what she’s doing: Cole filed a high-profile lawsuit in California against her healthcare provider, Kaiser Permanente, as well as her surgeon, endocrinologist, and the psychologist who referred her to surgery, alleging medical negligence, lack of informed consent, and fraud in placing her on puberty blockers, testosterone, and performing a double mastectomy.

Her legal team, among them Dhillon Law Group and the Center for American Liberty, has added punitive damages claims, presenting her case as a test of whether “gender-affirming” treatment for minors will be treated as malpractice in U.S. courts.

“It’s something that has to be illegalized on both the state and federal level, so that no child ever is going to be hurt ever again,” she said, adding, “We have to go after the manufacturers or the drugs of the medical devices that they are giving to children.”

Since 2022, Chloe has testified before multiple state legislatures. She also testified in the 2023 U.S. House Judiciary Committee hearing titled “The Dangers and Due Process Violations of ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ for Children.”

“Testimonies of people like me, who come out of it, who speak to the truth, are so threatening to them, because it completely dismantles their ideology,” she said.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

The Woke Movement Has Peaked. What’s Next? | Andrew Doyle Dec 27, 2025

Show notes

Have we reached the end of “woke”? Comedian and writer Andrew Doyle thinks yes. But he believes new forms of what he calls the “authoritarianism impulse” will follow.

He’s the author of “The End of Woke: How the Culture War Went Too Far and What to Expect from the Counter-Revolution.”

Doyle is the creator of Titania McGrath, a fictional ultra-woke activist whose X account became hugely popular and currently has over 700K followers.

Doyle has also published satirical books under Titania’s name, including “My First Little Book of Intersectional Activism.”

In our conversation, we dive into the many ways woke ideology has transformed Western societies and explore growing restrictions on hate speech in Europe. In the United Kingdom, dozens of people are arrested for speech-related offenses every day, Doyle says.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

How Overdiagnosis Turns Healthy People Into Patients | Alan Cassels Dec 23, 2025

Show notes

“We get a lot of inappropriate over-prescribing for almost everything,” says drug policy researcher and journalist Alan Cassels.

Cassels is the co-author of “Selling Sickness: How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients.”

For Cassels, it was one disease in particular—osteoporosis—that changed his entire view of medicine.

Based on changing definitions of the disease, large swaths of Americans could suddenly be declared sick and in urgent need of drug treatment.

They “medicalized normal aging of basically the entire female population. Overnight,” he says.

In our interview, we discuss the influence of the pharmaceutical industry on overdiagnoses and prescriptions, and how the criteria for many diseases can be expanded arbitrarily.

“When you look closely at the quality of prescribing, a lot of times, the decision-making is not really driven by evidence. It’s driven mostly by … marketing, biases, influence from thought leaders, and influence from guidelines, medical guidelines themselves, which are often appallingly biased,” he says.

Many doctors, Cassels says, know little about the adverse effects of the many drugs they prescribe to their patients.

We also dive into the connection between psychiatric drug prescriptions and violence, how psychiatry labels normal behaviors as abnormal, and how exaggerated statistics are used to sell theories of disease and drug treatments.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Rob Schneider: Here’s What’s Wrong With Our Culture Today Dec 20, 2025

Show notes

“COVID was a really dark time for me and for a lot of people,” said Rob Schneider.

For the famous comedian and actor, the years of the pandemic were a time to take stock of what had become of America, speak up about it—and even write a book. “You Can Do it! Speak Your Mind, America” was published in September 2024.

“If we’re going to continue to have a free society, it’s going to require people to step up and be courageous,” Schneider said.

Schneider, who is also a screenwriter and director, rose to prominence as a cast member and writer of NBC’s Saturday Night Live. He earned three Primetime Emmy Award nominations for his writing on the show.

In this episode, he reflected on our current political and cultural moment.

What really happened when Rob bumped into Robert De Niro at the SNL reunion? What is the role of comedy in an age of outrage? And how do we turn around the tribalism he sees gripping America?

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

The Reagan-Era Strategy That Could Reignite America’s Technological Power | Michael Sekora Dec 18, 2025

Show notes

As early as 1989, intelligence officers in the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) recognized China as the next threat, says former DIA officer and physicist Michael Sekora.

“We identified what [China] was doing to become a superpower faster than any country in history, and we were on track to containment,” Sekora says.

Back in the 1980s, he led a classified Defense Intelligence Agency program called “Project Socrates” that was created under the Reagan administration to determine the cause of U.S. economic and military decline, find a way to reverse it, and outcompete Moscow. Later they turned their sights to Beijing.

“It was very obvious what was going on: China was executing a national technology strategy, which basically was playing ... a very adroit game of worldwide offensive, defensive, technology exploitation chess,” Sekora says. “What we had in Socrates could have easily contained China.”

The project was defunded by the Bush administration, and the United States went the opposite route, allowing many key technologies to be handed over to Beijing over the course of several decades.

In this episode, he breaks down why he believes the United States has lost its edge in technological innovation and how this can be turned around.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

What Americans Aren’t Told About Psychiatric Medications | Robert Whitaker Dec 16, 2025

Show notes

For the past half century, Americans have been told that psychiatric drugs fix chemical imbalances in the brain. But this is nothing but a myth, says journalist Robert Whitaker.

Whitaker is the publisher of MadInAmerica.com and is known for his influential critiques of modern psychiatry and psychiatric drug treatment.

It was hypothesized that depression was due to too little serotonin and that schizophrenia was caused by too much dopamine—and that drugs could fix that, just like insulin for diabetes. But that was never backed up by evidence, Whitaker said.

“That was the story that was used to sell a whole second generation of psychiatric drugs and dramatically expand the psychiatric enterprise worldwide,” he said.

In 1999, Whitaker co-wrote a series of articles for the Boston Globe on psychiatric research and became a finalist for the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, thereby establishing his reputation in this field. Later, he served as director of publications at Harvard Medical School.

“We have this story that we’re making great progress in diagnosing and treating mental disorders,” he told me.

U.S. spending on treating mental disorders has risen substantially over the past decades, from tens of billions in the late 1980s to more than $100 billion per year today. But there is no evidence, he says, that these drugs improve long-term outcomes. On the contrary, there is plenty of evidence that psychiatric drugs can actually make things worse, he says.

“They actually cause chemical imbalances, increase the chronicity of disorders, increase functional impairment, and you see rising disability rates wherever you see this paradigm of care adopted,” he says.

Certain antipsychotics for schizophrenia, for instance, can actually reduce brain tissue, particularly in the first year, and that’s been associated with cognitive decline and a worsening of symptoms.

Evidence shows that other countries, including developing nations, that have not adopted this same approach have seen much better outcomes, he says.

In this episode, he breaks down his findings from decades of studying this issue. Whitaker is the author of “Mad in America” and “Anatomy of an Epidemic.”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Former US Army Pacific Chief Reveals What’s Missing in US Taiwan Strategy | Gen. Charles Flynn (Ret.) Dec 13, 2025

Show notes

How might a potential Chinese invasion of Taiwan unfold? China’s anti-access/area-denial (A2/AD) strategy—a combination of missiles, submarines, sensors, and air defenses—is designed specifically to block and disrupt US air, sea, and even space and cyber power.

But the true outcome of the operation will hinge on the rapid mobilization of People’s Liberation Army (PLA) ground forces, argues recently retired four-star general Charles Flynn, former commander of U.S. Army Pacific.

He warns that the real “center of gravity” of a Chinese invasion will lie in its ability to rapidly assemble, deploy, and transport land forces across the Taiwan Strait.

“What keeps me up at night is their ability to actually pull that off in 96 hours,” Flynn says.

He is convinced that building a “strategic land power network” and forging deep, enduring ties with partner armies in Asia will be vital to deterring the Chinese regime.

In this episode, Flynn lays out a roadmap for how the U.S. military should rethink its strategy, technology, and partnerships to deter Beijing and safeguard its allies in the Indo-Pacific.

“This century is going to be defined by the relationship between the United States and China. … We’ve said we’ve pivoted to the Pacific for more than a decade, and in actual behavior and actions, that’s not accurate,” Flynn says.

Before commanding U.S. Army Pacific, Flynn served as the Army’s Deputy Chief of Staff for Operations, Plans and Training (G3/5/7). He is the brother of General Michael Flynn, former national security advisor to President Donald Trump.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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