American Thought Leaders

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 relations moving forward, after the confrontational meeting between Trump and President Cyril Ramaphosa last month?“In South Africa, we have two farm attacks a day, two murders of farmers a week. And of those farm murders, 20 percent of them involve rape and torture,” says Hersov.“Cyril Ramaphosa went back to South Africa and proclaimed his meeting as a huge victory,” says Hersov. “I think America is about to unleash serious punishments—not on South Africa, but on the leaders.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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 [using cloud-seeding] is well-established to have been a successful weaponization of the weather. So, there is a pretty long history of weather modification and militarization of weather modification technology,” says Sayer Ji, chairman of the Global Wellness Forum and founder of GreenMedInfo.com.“What the main concern is, is that there are other operations that are clandestine [where] we don’t actually know what the agenda is, outside of official acknowledgement that solar radiation management technologies are being deployed, which include using things like sulfur, calcium, titanium—various elements to create a dimming effect,” he 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.

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 The Epoch Times.

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, but then lost their ability to make stuff, and now they’re paying the price.”Miller has close ties to Ohio’s entrepreneurial Amish community and is an advocate for what he calls “food freedom.”“We joined forces and started what we call the Food Independence Summit that basically brings specialists together to teach people how they can become self-sustaining on food, even if it’s only on a fractional basis,” says Miller. “To change culture, you have to change the structure.”Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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 replacing deterrence and reaction with prevention.”He is the author of the new book, “The Preventive State: The Challenge of Preventing Serious Harms While Preserving Essential Liberties.”Should someone charged—but not convicted—with a serious crime be denied bail to potentially prevent further crimes? Should governments be able to compel inoculations in a scenario where that could actually prevent deadly contagion? And notably, a few days after this interview was filmed, Israel launched preemptive strikes on Iran’s nuclear facilities. When is such preventive military action warranted?In this episode, we dive into the legal framework laid out in his new book—which he describes as the most important work he’s ever written—and get his insights into the debate around deploying the National Guard in Los Angeles, the Trump administration’s clash with Harvard University, the dilemma of tackling Chinese espionage on college campuses, and the growing erosion of free speech protections in Europe.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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 of the Chinese military’s bioweapons program in Ebola research,” Cooper says. “They were running, clandestinely, materials from China and connected to the Wuhan Institute of Virology into the Winnipeg lab.”For years, Cooper has been at the forefront of exposing Chinese Communist Party infiltration in the West.He is the founder of The Bureau and author of “Wilful Blindness: How a Criminal Network of Narcos, Tycoons, and Chinese Communist Party Agents Infiltrated the West.”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. 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 of the new platform for the COVID vaccine, we were seeing an increase in myocarditis in children that we’ve never seen before with any vaccine product in children.”In this episode, we dive into the apparent rise of cardiovascular conditions in children and how to better address and understand them.“We need to return the idea of a patient-doctor relationship,” says Dr. Milhoan. “You’re not a consumer. We’ve made this too marketing-oriented. We need to go back to: ‘I’m a physician who cares for you because I have compassion for you. And because of my compassion, I want you to do well, and I want you to be healthy.’”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 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 financier of Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood,” says Josh Hammer, host of the Newsweek podcast “The Josh Hammer Show” and author of “Israel and Civilization: The Fate of the Jewish Nation and the Destiny of the West.”“Iran is the source of evil in the Middle East. We should be very clear about that,” he says. “This is the world’s No. 1 state sponsor of terrorism. They have been ever since the hostage crisis that formed this horrific regime that ended the Jimmy Carter presidency in 1979.”What does an America First foreign policy look like? How does Trump’s Middle East strategy fit into it? And what about the U.S. relationship with Qatar?“America has always been engaged on the world stage. So the fact that we’re not necessarily going to be going around crusading in the name of spreading liberal democracy does not necessarily mean that we have no interest in the world. We’re America first, but you have to be America smart as well,” says Hammer.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and guest and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Jacob Howland, Provost of the University of Austin and Dean of the Intellectual Foundations program, emphasizes the need for a blended education rooted in Western traditions. He explores the isolating effects of digital interactions, drawing comparisons to Dante's visions of hell, and warns of the rise of echo chambers. Howland highlights the dangers of societal atomization linking it to historical totalitarianism, and discusses the complexities of individual morality amidst collective guilt. His insights shed light on the importance of critical thinking and historical context for navigating modern challenges.

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 scenarios where an uncontrollable superintelligent AI can wreak major havoc on humanity? Are concerns overblown? How do we prevent such scenarios?Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.