American Thought Leaders

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 being accused of racism or Islamophobia.At the same time, dozens of sharia councils have emerged across the United Kingdom that run an informal legal system handling divorces, inheritances, and family disputes within Muslim communities. But they often leave women with virtually no rights and protections, especially if the marriage was not officially recognized by UK civil law in the first place.British converts from Islam to Christianity, such as Nissar Hussain, describe years of targeted harassment, demonization, and even brutal physical assaults simply for choosing to change their faith, an act branded as “apostasy.”Many are now asking: Have we witnessed the failures of the multiculturalism experiment in the United Kingdom? To what extent should immigrants be expected to integrate and assimilate into the cultural and civic norms, such as equal protection under the law and gender equality? How should police and other authorities enforce the laws impartially when cultural and religious sensitivities are involved?These questions are all coming to a head in the United Kingdom—and the cultural clashes there serve as a cautionary tale for America, says Peter McIlvenna, co-founder of Hearts of Oak.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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 social media director at Breitbart News and author of the new New York Times bestselling book “Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI.”He’s spent two years researching what drives America’s tech elite to build ever more powerful, faster AI systems. The questions he wanted to answer, he told me, are: “What is their ultimate goal? What is the world that they foresee their technology creating?”In our in-depth interview, we dive into the impact that this supersonic AI transformation will have on pretty much every facet of our lives: Will white-collar jobs disappear over the next few years? Will blue-collar jobs be lost to billions of robots? Will people live on Universal Basic Income? And, if so, how does that affect the structure and meaning of people’s lives?Could AI companions replace humans as friends, partners, family? How and what will children learn—or will they only learn to cheat? Will AI-powered brain implants or chips become widespread?And what are the national security implications of ever more powerful AI?“Whoever achieves superiority in AI is going to have full-spectrum battlefield dominance in things like encryption, cybersecurity, hacking of missile systems, and hacking of infrastructure,” Hall said.When it comes to the U.S.–China AI race, the problem that Americans have to figure out is “how to beat China without becoming China,” Hall said.“We do not want to emulate a techno authoritarian CCP surveillance state,” he added.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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 Prevention, and the Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency from pressuring social media companies to censor speech.“The federal government has now admitted that it was engaged in a very systematic operation of social media censorship,” Chenoweth says.So what does this mean exactly? What legal precedent does this set? What happens after the 10-year mark ends?And why a consent decree at all? Why was the lawsuit settled?We also discuss several other important cases that the NCLA has currently pending at the Supreme Court. One of them, Powell v. SEC, seeks to put an end to what Chenoweth calls the SEC’s “gag rule.”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 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 CEO of the fintech company Fiserv.Now, he’s taking on a different kind of challenge: bringing, in his words, “accuracy” to massive federal agencies that impact every American.He’s cleaning up records—including moving records of 12.4 million people aged 120 and over into the Social Security Administration’s Death Master File—and digitizing records to streamline systems.“There wasn’t really a routine to reconcile data. ... It wasn’t that people who weren’t alive any longer were getting paid social security. It was that there was a live social security number which could be used throughout the whole system,” Bisignano said.How is he transforming these agencies? What new benefits are there in this year’s tax season?How are the newly rolled out “Trump accounts” doing? And will Social Security be able to resolve insolvency challenges in the decades ahead?Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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‘d be in their house, I’d be in my house,” Alkhalili says.The online world traps Gen Z into an escapist reality that their parents do not comprehend. Even good parents, he said, have no idea what their kids are doing online and to what extent they live online: “If you talk to any Gen Z and have them explain it to somebody that’s not Gen Z, the person who’s not Gen Z—maybe a later millennial and older—will actually have no idea what they’re talking about. It sounds like another language.”Gen Z and Gen Alpha, he said, spend most of their time indoors on their devices; they don’t move much. They eat addictive processed food and drink lots of addictive energy drinks to combat tiredness.“My metabolic health was destroyed,” he told me in our interview. “I felt like my life was over. ... I was so tired of life that I felt like I was in my 70s or 80s.”Now he’s helping other young people exit this lifestyle with Touch Grass Together, a health and wellness initiative focused on metabolic health and real life community experiences: “We’ve come up with a framework called the touch grass moment. And ultimately, we’re trying to recreate human ritual.”This framework, he explained, is based on four core components: light, movement, nourishment, and human connection. The goal? Getting Gen Z off their devices and out of their rooms, getting them to do things together outside such as touching grass or jumping into leaf piles and eating healthy food.But how to achieve that? In our interview, Alkhalili talks about the constructive role technology can play in helping Gen Z to escape “brain rot” online. Is there also a constructive role for AI? What about social media? And should schools forbid smartphones?Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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 one: Stop buying Chinese products and services and stop investing in companies that are investing in China,” he said.The Chinese Communist Party has been using what are known as unrestricted warfare tactics against the United States for decades, and on multiple fronts, he said. Its purpose is to weaken the enemy from within—without firing a single shot.There are dozens of tactics, including, for instance, cognitive warfare, drug warfare, and biological warfare. These manifest in the deployment of TikTok—which remains a powerful cognitive weapon in the CCP’s arsenal, Fleming argued—as well as the spread of both COVID-19 and fentanyl addiction in America.For years, Americans have largely failed to notice this pattern of unrestricted warfare and how the pieces fit together. “The mosaic effect is you see bits and pieces and you don’t connect them, and so it doesn’t really mean much to you. … When you connect the dots… it becomes the mosaic. You now see what your enemy is doing and what the end goal is, and how you need to protect yourself.”Casey said he believes this silent, unrestricted war is the final war: “The world will be won or lost within the next 10 years or less.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

“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 disorders like depression and anxiety. People nowadays increasingly define themselves through mood disorders—especially women, who often are more prone than men to depression and internalization of anxiety, he said.This apparent valorization of mental illness is closely linked to a growing feminization of society, Haltigan said. Males, he told me, “tend to systemize more,” while women “tend to be more empathetic.”But in recent decades, that empathy has been weaponized, he argued: “We’ve come to basically hijack the feminine ethic of care, the feminine impulse to be empathetic.”He said this may explain why anti-ICE protests tend to skew disproportionately towards females.At the same time, he said, masculinity and the enforcement of laws and standards became demonized in society.Haltigan’s departure from the University of Toronto in 2023 coincided with his growing concerns about what he described as increasing ideological pressures in academic research and restrictions on what researchers could say about mental health and early child development.In our wide-ranging interview, we discuss these shifts in society, their impacts, and the role of social media in fueling these changes.Now, Haltigan is an honorary research fellow at the Centre for Heterodox Social Science at the University of Buckingham in the United Kingdom.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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 fact that Xi Jinping is now less of a dominant leader than he was six or eight months ago,” Suettinger says.Earlier this year, Xi purged two top generals from the CCP’s military brass, on the heels of earlier purges last year. Now, only two of the originally seven members of the Central Military Commission remain. One of them is Xi himself; the other one, General Zhang Shengmin, is a political commander and has, like Xi, no combat experience.After the January purges, Xi issued an order to the military demanding that everyone acknowledge him as the head of the military commission. “The silence from all those military commands has been deafening and has been noticed by everybody,” Suettinger says.In the Chinese Communist Party itself, Xi is also facing trouble.The CCP is not a monolithic party, he told me, but a complex entity with many competing factions: “There’s a Shanghai group, there’s a Shandong group, there’s a Shaanxi group, and they all don’t like each other,” Suettinger says.Suettinger believes that Xi’s many purges have unified opposition against him not only in the military but also within the Communist Party. “Xi is hated by almost everybody in China,” he said.Another reason the cracks in the system, as he put it, are beginning to be more evident, is that the Chinese economy hasn’t been doing well in many years: “The Chinese people are very unhappy that their wealth opportunities are disappearing. Graduates coming out of colleges are not able to find good jobs. People who have good jobs are losing them. People who are operating in the gig economy are losing their jobs. The farmers don’t have anything to do when they go back home.”People outside of China don’t usually know how poor vast numbers of Chinese citizens still are, Suettinger told me. China’s Premier Li Keqiang himself stated in May 2020 during a press conference that 600 million people live below the poverty line and don’t even earn enough to rent a room in mid-sized Chinese cities.Where is China’s totalitarian system headed? The system, Suettinger argued, is way more fragile than it looks. “It is brittle, and when it breaks, it tends to break hard, and it tends to melt in ways that are not predictable,” he said.Notably, the CCP has not come out to meaningfully support its longtime ally, Iran. The CCP has long utilized Iran to distract America and keep its focus on the Middle East, Suettinger says, but now, to Beijing’s chagrin, America is effectively neutralizing this longtime CCP proxy.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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 they will open up our eyes to extra dimensions … or new physics.”In 2021, Loeb founded the Harvard-based Galileo Project to speed up the scientific search for evidence of extraterrestrial objects. Since then, Loeb has been supervising the construction of three state-of-the-art observatories in the United States: one in Massachusetts, one in Pennsylvania and one in Nevada. They make use of machine learning models to identify unexplained anomalies and use triangulation to infer the distance of objects from Earth.“Instead of waiting for the U.S. government to release its data, we just look up and ask, are there any objects up there that are not human-made? And of course, anything that is human-made is boring, as far as I’m concerned,” he said.Did his observatories find evidence of objects that might be extraterrestrial? Perhaps. They detected objects that, as he said, “arrive in our backyard from outside the solar system.” Such interstellar objects were purely theoretical before 2017, when the first one was discovered. Since then, two more have been found. This, he told me, is the new frontier in astronomy.But are these interstellar objects of natural origin? Many astronomers believe they are, but Loeb is not so sure. Take, for example, Oumuamua, the first recognized interstellar object ever discovered: Its core features are undisputedly abnormal. Oumuamua moved very quickly without a recognizable method of propulsion. And as it left the solar system, it accelerated to a degree that could not be explained by gravity alone.Loeb has been arguing that Oumuamua might be an artificial light sail propelled by solar radiation pressure and built by ancient civilizations that exist or existed beyond our solar system.“Most of the stars formed billions of years before the sun. The sun formed only 4.6 billion years ago … There was plenty of time for Voyager-like probes to arrive in the solar system. And so we are searching for any technological artifacts, objects very different from traditional SETI,” he said.SETI stands for “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence” and refers to a project dedicated to detecting advanced extraterrestrial civilizations.Here are some of the many other topics we discussed in our wide-ranging interview:-What is the origin of hypervelocity stars that race through the universe at a significant fraction of the speed of light? -Are there other dimensions beyond our own? -How would the discovery of extraterrestrial life impact religious views? -Is AI a form of alien intelligence?Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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 China.In this episode, we dive into the escalation of religious persecution in recent years in China, including the growing dehumanization of Christians.Echoing Mao Zedong’s targeting of “five black classes” during the Cultural Revolution, in 2012, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders labelled Christian underground churches as one of five new “black classes” or black categories.Fu says that the CCP’s leadership is determined to destroy the positive image that Chinese people have of Christian believers.“Xi Jinping wants to play God,” Fu says. “The Communist Party treats these people as a threat to the regime’s existence. The goal is to eradicate Christian faith from the map of China.”We also discuss a case now at the Supreme Court, Cisco v. Doe, which could have important repercussions for American companies that enable China’s human rights atrocities.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 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 that people are missing?“We have this tendency to just look at the countries involved ... but there’s a big player, and the big player here is China,” she says. “China has been investing immensely in the region in the last two decades, in courting, in coordinating, in cooperating with Gulf countries, with Iran itself, and also with its proxies.”And why, I ask her, has China been so keen on gaining strategic influence over the Middle East?It’s because the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) understands that “China cannot rise without having the United States weakened in one of the most important regions in the world,” she said.“Iran has been that tool. China has built Iran’s military arsenal. It has collaborated extensively with Iran’s proxies, especially the Houthis.“And reversing that calculus is what Operation Epic Fury is doing.”In our interview, we delve deep into the symbiotic relationship between the two countries—why China needs Iran and why Iran needs China:Which role does Iran play on China’s geopolitical chessboard?Why did China turn Iran into one of its strategic allies, and how did the Islamic Republic benefit?How dependent is the Iranian regime on China’s military support and surveillance infrastructure?How dependent is China on Iran’s oil?The goal of America’s military operation, Riboua believes, is to dismantle the whole structure of the Islamic Republic. “The United States is destroying ... every single launcher, every single missile facility. Their whole Navy has been absolutely crushed. ... It’s 2,000 targets so far, and they’re hitting even more.”We also discuss what the Chinese regime will do if the Islamic Republic disappears.How will its geopolitical strategy be impacted? What will happen to the CCP’s Belt and Road initiative, in which Iran played a central role? And how will China’s economy and its relationships with its Middle Eastern and North African proxies be affected?Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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, this is the second time President Donald Trump appears to be neutralizing a key ally of Beijing.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessari

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 turned, and I’m in the guest seat this time.I invited my good friend, actor and comedian Rob Schneider, who has become deeply personally invested in this issue, to be the guest host for this special episode.This is the dark reality: When someone decides to go to China and pay a hefty sum for a scheduled transplant, then on the other side, an incarcerated prisoner of conscience, who has already been blood-typed and tissue-typed, is likely being killed to order.China’s transplant industry began its exponential expansion at the exact same time as the state launched its aggressive, nationwide campaign to eradicate the spiritual practice of Falun Gong. There is growing evidence of Uyghurs being targeted as well. There is even an underground global market for what are called “Halal organs,” which means organs from Muslim donors.And it’s not just wealthy foreigners who travel to China for organ transplants.China’s super elite have access to a secretive longevity program dubbed “Project 981” with eerie ties to this macabre organ industry. This project entered the spotlight last year after the revealing hot mic exchange between Chinese leader Xi Jinping and Russian President Vladimir Putin, where they talked about extending lifespans in part through repeated organ transplants.American institutions have, wittingly or unwittingly, helped facilitate the rise of China’s transplant system through partnerships with Chinese transplant centers, the training of hundreds of Chinese surgeons, and the supply of China’s organ preservation solutions, surgical instruments, immunosuppressive drugs, and transplant diagnostics.The stories I share in this episode are disturbing, but we cannot afford to look away.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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,” Monti told me, “has become a subspecialty of medicine with its own board certification. ... To become an integrative medicine doctor, you have to first do your residency in something like internal medicine, neurology, OBGYN, and then do a fellowship in integrative medicine.”Monti, who holds board certifications in both psychiatry/neurology and holistic/integrative medicine, said that integrative physicians “take a deep dive into whole-person health and understanding who the person is.” They look, for example, at genomics, the patient’s microbiome, and maximal oxygen consumption.A powerful technique Monti studied in depth is the neuro-emotional technique (NET), developed in the 1980s. It’s a mind-body therapy designed to release emotional stress from within the body. And through advanced brain scans, they can see how the brain changes after applying the technique to alleviate distress.NET merges principles from conventional medicine with traditional Chinese medicine and psychology, he says. The goal is to “get at what is underneath the issue that’s bothering the person. ... Most of the time I’m experiencing a block in my life in some way. And then we have to kind of figure out what the life experiences were that are contributing to that present-day block.”During the interview, Monti used me as a test subject to demonstrate the integrative medicine technique.We also discuss additional integrative medicine therapies, such as vitamin infusions and stress-reduction treatments. We also dive into a recent study into a powerful antioxidant’s power to benefit Parkinson’s patients.Monti is the founder and CEO of the Marcus Institute of Integrative Health and chair of the Integrative Medicine and Nutritional Sciences at Sidney Kimmel Medical College, Thomas Jefferson University. He’s the co-author of “Brain Weaver” and “Tapestry of Health.”He’s also the host of “House Call with Dr. Dan Monti.”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’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 and talked to 50 out of California’s almost 500 mayors as well as countless regular Californians on the way.“I’ve talked to people from Humboldt County, which is the very top of California, to Chula Vista, all the way into the Central Valley ... to Santa Monica and Pacific Palisades. ... And it does not matter if you have an R or a D,” Culotti said.The fifty mayors she spoke to—on both sides of the aisle—have two overarching priorities for their cities: security and economic development, Culotti said.But no matter how hard they try, they find it difficult to achieve either one. Why? Because of Sacramento, Culotti said.Most taxpayer money goes to the state government with its over half a million employees, Culotti noted. The cities receive little money but lots of crippling orders from Sacramento, and fraud at the state level is rampant, she said.When California’s top politicians “are pushing downstream what’s called unfunded mandates onto people, you create war in those city halls. You create war with those mayors because they are saying, ‘No, no, stop oppressing us with your mandates. We don’t want to do it,’” Culotti said.“We’re all being boiled to death by Sacramento,” 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.

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 has since become a prominent voice speaking out against religious persecution in China.State repression of Zion Church began in 2018 amid a broader wave of Communist Party efforts to subjugate faith communities, Drexel said.“You saw the tearing down of crosses [and] putting portraits of Xi Jinping and Mao Zedong on church buildings,” she said.Zion Church was deemed an illegal business operation, forcing them to shift to a hybrid online model of worship. Authorities also placed an exit ban on Pastor Jin.“There’s so many parts of our lives that he has missed out on. He was not able to walk me down the aisle at my wedding. He was not able to attend my baby’s baptism,” Drexel said.She sees her father’s detention as part of a new wave of persecution targeting not only her father’s church but also many other underground churches and religious groups as well. As in 2018, authorities are again installing pictures of Xi in churches again, sometimes even replacing crosses, to “showcase who is the true leader of the church,” she said.Another sign of a new wave of suppression is the sentencing of Jimmy Lai, the 78-year-old founder of Apple Daily and a practicing Catholic. He was recently given 20 years in prison, which marks the longest sentence handed down to date under Beijing’s national security law.Since Pastor Jin’s arrest, he has not been allowed any family visits, phone calls, or even letters from his loved ones. He is also suffering from severe Type 2 diabetes, and Drexel is deeply concerned about his wellbeing.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 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. But that’s not what’s going on,” says Butcher, who is acting director of The Heritage Foundation’s Center for Education Policy.Butcher conducted a survey of more than 2,000 Americans and asked participants for their opinions on contentious cultural and political issues.What did he find? Contrary to what Americans are constantly told on social media and in legacy media, there is no deep divide on the issues that drive the so-called culture wars, he says. His survey found the following:-Biological sex: A majority of respondents maintain that sex is unchanging -Gender and schools: 61% oppose teaching young children that they can change their “gender”​ -Sexual content in schools: 69% do not support access in schools to books that depict sexual activity -College admissions: 52% oppose the use of racial preferences in college admissions, which are central to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs​The culture war, Butcher concludes from his survey findings, is a narrative propagated by a small faction of radical activists and amplified by the media to instill fear.“It’s really like a majority of Americans and … a small minority of activists on the other [side] that just have a very loud voice,” he says.The survey responses, he told me, also show a surprising degree of consensus among Americans on basic principles and core beliefs.For example, he found that a large majority of survey respondents want their children to be taught about virtue and character at school. More than half favor increased civics education.“The important thing to remind Americans is that on the issues, they’re not alone. If [you] think that individuals should be judged, promoted, accepted to school based on their merit instead of their skin color, right, you’re not alone. You’re not alone if you think that we should be protecting women from men accessing their bathrooms or locker rooms,” he 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.

“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 over the last 160 years. Andrew Johnson was the first in 1867. Woodrow Wilson tried during the First World War. And Harry Truman tried right after World War II, Gray says.In my deep-dive interview with Gray, a senior fellow at the Atlantic Council and co-founder of American Global Strategies, he lays out Greenland’s geostrategic importance to America’s national security and what it would mean if Greenland became dependent on China.In 1952, the United States signed a treaty with Denmark, still in effect today, that provides America with extensive military access to Greenland. Gray’s overarching concern is what will happen when Greenland is likely to become independent in five or 10 years.For many years, China has shown great interest in establishing dominance over the Arctic region and is regularly moving its submarines up to the North Pole.Gray is convinced that after independence, Greenland is likely to fall prey to the Chinese Communist Party’s “well-worn playbook” to gain influence and eventually control the island. He calls it the “Solomon Islands scenario.”“They start offering Belt and Road projects. They start buying dual-use facilities. They buy ports. They’re taking over airfields. Next thing you know, we’re hearing conversations about potentially having [China’s People’s Liberation Army] naval access to ports in the Solomons. … This is a well-worn Chinese playbook,” Gray says.Beyond Greenland, we also dive into security threats related to America’s northern neighbor and the implications of Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney’s overtures in Beijing.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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 Threat.”She says she felt compelled to write this book to help Americans understand the true nature of communism. Over the past hundred years or so, the United States has made one grave mistake after another because of this major blind spot, she says.In our deep-dive interview, Van Fleet takes me on a tour of China’s history starting in the late 19th century and explains how America—over and over again—made decisions that helped the Chinese Communist Party: first to gain influence, then to defeat the Nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek, and eventually to rescue the CCP from certain collapse in the 1970s.By visiting Beijing and re-opening US-China relations at a time when China’s economy was in shambles, President Richard Nixon effectively “saved the CCP from the ruins,” she says.The history of how the United States helped the CCP survive is “hidden history,” as she calls it, one that is not taught in the schools and not discussed publicly: “A lot of people want to hide it. But in order for us to understand, we have to learn this very, very important piece of history that my book is all about.”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 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 last year.With an annual budget of almost $50 billion, the NIH sets the direction of research at universities, medical centers, and research institutes across America.It encompasses 27 institutes and centers that cover different areas of health and employ some 20,000 people. One of those is the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which was headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci for nearly 40 years.The NIH, Bhattacharya told me, “really hasn’t had a change in leadership in decades. ... We’ve had new directors, but the fundamental structure and direction of the NIH has been basically the same until last year.”Bhattacharya says his top priority is to end the practice of “funding the scientific enterprise for the sake of funding science” and ensure that NIH-funded scientific research actually produces better health outcomes for the American people. The goal should be improvements in health and longevity, not just more scientific papers, he says.During our interview, we covered a lot of ground, including:-Has the NIH completely stopped funding gain-of-function research?-Is the NIH continuing to fund research with China?-How has funding for international research institutes been restructured?-Has the NIH stopped funding all research grants related to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives?-What is being done to reverse the politicization of science?-What is the NIH doing to help those who suffered injuries from the mandated COVID-19 mRNA vaccines?-What can the NIH do to alleviate the massive replication crisis in research?-How does he view the controversy surrounding vaccines and autism? Is the NIH looking into potential links?-How is the NIH restructuring the allocation of funding?What America needs, Bhattacharya told me, is a “second scientific revolution,” saying: “The NIH has the capacity to induce that second scientific revolution. That’s what I’m going to work toward for the next few years.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.