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American Thought Leaders

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Dec 24, 2024 • 15min

Kari Lake Reveals Plans for Voice of America

At Turning Point USA’s AmFest conference in Phoenix, I sat down with former TV anchor Kari Lake, President-elect Donald Trump’s pick to head Voice of America (VOA).VOA is an international broadcaster funded by Congress that releases content in nearly 50 languages to more than 300 million people weekly around the globe.It was founded in 1942 to combat Nazi propaganda and share the “policies of the United States clearly and effectively.” VOA later played a major role in the ideological fight against communism during the Cold War.The director of Voice of America is officially nominated by the head of the U.S. Agency for Global Media. After Senate approval, the candidate must also be approved by a majority vote of the International Broadcasting Advisory Board.What would Voice of America look like under Kari Lake?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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Dec 24, 2024 • 56min

Sen. Johnson: Why Trump Needs a ‘Secretary of Information Extraction’ to Restore Transparency

Sponsor special: Up to $2,500 of FREE silver AND a FREE safe on qualifying orders - Call 855-862-3377 or text “AMERICAN” to 6-5-5-3-2As part of our special series on the U.S. presidential transition period, I’m sitting down with Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.).In the next Congress, Johnson will become chairman again of the homeland security committee’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, which has uniquely powerful subpoena powers to investigate crime and corruption within the U.S. government and beyond.In this wide-ranging episode, we dive into the future of the Make America Healthy Again movement; what Johnson believes key steps are for the incoming administration to restore transparency, scientific integrity, and small government; and why Congress needs to retake its oversight authority.“Our oversight authority is probably our greatest authority and greatest responsibility. ... We’ve got to fund government. But then once we funded it, we need to take a look at what we funded. … What we passed, did it actually work?”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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Dec 20, 2024 • 50min

Sebastian Gorka: How the Trump Admin Will Tackle Terrorism and National Security Threats

As part of our special series on the U.S. presidential transition period, Sebastian Gorka breaks down the complexities of recent events in Syria, and what the incoming Trump administration’s foreign policy may look like when it comes to NATO, the Middle East, Russia, and China.Gorka will serve as Trump’s deputy assistant and senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council.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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Dec 18, 2024 • 1h 3min

45 Hongkongers, 250 Years: The Grim Realities of Hong Kong’s Political Trials–Mark Clifford

Sponsor special: Up to $2,500 of FREE silver AND a FREE safe on qualifying orders - Call 855-862-3377 or text “AMERICAN” to 6-5-5-3-2Forty-five key figures in Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement were recently sentenced to up to 10 years each. More than 1,900 political prisoners have been convicted and imprisoned in Hong Kong in the last five years. Thousands more are simply being held without bail for years on end. About 40 percent of Hong Kong’s entire prison population is being held without a conviction.“They haven’t even taken the trouble to convict these people in a kangaroo court,” says Mark Clifford, president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation.Clifford has lived in Asia since the late 1980s and witnessed Hong Kong’s transformation from a largely free society in 1997, to an increasingly repressive one. He previously served as editor-in-chief of the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post and executive director of the Hong Kong-based Asia Business Council.He’s the author of multiple books, including “Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World” and most recently “The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic.”Hong Kong, once celebrated for its economic freedom and rule of law, has now become a key node for authoritarian regimes to evade sanctions, Clifford says. According to a report by Samuel Bickett, Hong Kong has become an indispensable location for the transfer of money, military technology, and prohibited products to Russia, Iran, and North Korea.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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Dec 17, 2024 • 50min

How to Protect Civil Rights in Schools Without a Department of Education: Fmr. Assistant Sec. Kenneth L. Marcus

“Despite decades of a US Department of Education, we’re not doing any better in educating our students. If anything, we’re now doing worse ... I think the question is how the American people can best be served. The goal shouldn’t be to preserve jobs of bureaucrats. The goal shouldn’t be to preserve the status quo. We should ask, how can we best serve students and their families?”As part of our special series on the U.S. presidential transition period, I’m sitting down with Kenneth L. Marcus, former assistant secretary of education for civil rights and the founder and chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law.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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6 snips
Dec 15, 2024 • 44min

‘Universities Have Lost Their Way’: Ralston College President Stephen Blackwood

Stephen Blackwood, the founding president of Ralston College, champions the revival of a transformative humanities education. He critiques modern universities' focus on job training and the rise of ideological nihilism, calling for a return to deep, meaningful learning. Blackwood emphasizes the importance of community in education, the dual mission of universities in preserving and discovering knowledge, and the significance of graduation rituals in marking personal transformation. He advocates for fostering human dignity through shared cultural values.
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Dec 13, 2024 • 1h 3min

Whistleblowers Reveal the Reality of Child Trafficking in America and What Trump Could Do About It

There is an unprecedented child trafficking crisis in America today. Large numbers of unaccompanied migrant children are being released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to sponsors that are not thoroughly vetted, including individuals associated with dangerous criminal organizations like MS-13 and the 18th Street gang, whistleblowers say.Many migrant children now work backbreaking shifts in slaughterhouses, restaurants, or factories. Others are being sold for sex.From 2019 to 2023, immigration authorities transferred more than 448,000 unaccompanied minors from the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the HHS. A recent watchdog report found that ICE is unable to account for more than 32,000 unaccompanied children who failed to appear for court hearings. Another 291,000 unaccompanied children simply did not receive notices at all.So how many children in America have fallen victim to trafficking? To what extent are international actors facilitating this? What can the incoming administration do to stem child trafficking? What will be the greatest challenges they must tackle?Join me for this special live crossover episode with NTD’s International Roundtable program, hosted by Cindy Drukier. The two of us will be sitting down with three key individuals who have been at the forefront of exposing child trafficking and demanding policy change.Guests:Tara Rodas, HHS whistleblower and 20-year public servant, primarily working in the federal inspector general communityAaron Stevenson, DHS whistleblower and former intelligence research specialist for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration ServicesMary Flynn O’Neill, executive director of the America’s Future nonprofit
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Dec 10, 2024 • 37min

Dr. Drew: From the Opioid Crisis to COVID, the Physician–Patient Relationship Is Increasingly Impaired

Drew Pinsky, popularly known as Dr. Drew, is an addiction medicine specialist and host of the TV series “Ask Dr. Drew.” For decades, he has been studying public health and drug addiction in America, exposing its ongoing challenges in nationally syndicated television and radio programs. He saw early on during the COVID-19 pandemic that the response from the authorities would cause unnecessary harm and suffering.“A member of the school board came in and said, ‘We’re going to lock the schools down.’ And I said, ‘Why? Why are you doing that? Who did you consult with? Did an infectious disease doctor come in and say you’ve got to do this?’ ‘No, it’s just the right thing to do.’ ... I knew then that was big, big, big trouble,” says Pinsky.He says that how authorities reacted to the pandemic followed a similar playbook to how they responded to the opioid crisis. And in both cases, he argues, the physician-patient relationship has degraded.“The physician-patient unit is so badly encumbered and so badly adulterated right now that it’s hard for it to function,” says Pinsky. “There are some of us that can’t get over COVID—not the virus—the way our country dealt with the COVID, just mind-boggling.”Pinsky is particularly concerned about the centralization and algorithmizing of medicine.“The young folks are being taught to look at the computer and just fill out forms, do an algorithm, look things up if you don’t know—I mean, I don’t know how you develop judgment. I don’t know how you think about a risk-reward if all you’re doing is following an algorithm on your electronic medical record. It’s really disturbing,” 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.
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Dec 7, 2024 • 1h 11min

How China Controls Our Vital Medicines and the Health Care Supply Chain: Victor Suarez

“You can literally make all the components of all these drugs in China, you can ship them in a barrel to some plant in New Jersey, mix it, compound it, package and label it, and say ‘made in the USA,’ and then sell it to the Department of Defense. Now, that’s the number one thing I would ask a Congress and the president—to fix that loophole through legislation immediately. They can fix that in the NDAA a week from now, if they were really serious about it.”As part of our special series on the U.S. presidential transition period, I’m sitting down with Victor Suarez, a retired U.S. Army colonel who served for 27 years and saw, firsthand, serious problems with America’s medical supply chains.In this episode, he breaks down key steps America can take to secure its vital medicines.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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Dec 5, 2024 • 28min

I’m Suing Harvard for Violating the Civil Rights of Jewish Students: Shabbos Kestenbaum

Following the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in Israel, universities throughout America experienced a sharp rise in hostility toward Jews.“I have lost every single non-Jewish friend I had at Harvard—every single one,” said student activist Shabbos Kestenbaum.A proud Orthodox Jew and a former self-described “die-hard liberal,” Kestenbaum endorsed Donald Trump and voted Republican for the first time in his life, believing that the Democratic Party had systematically abandoned Jewish Americans.“As an Orthodox Jew, I grew up with the ideals of: You are an American and proudly so, and you’re Jewish and proudly so. The two were never contradictory. They were quite complimentary. ... They very much influenced each other. As I said in my speech at the Republican Convention, Jewish values are American values. American values are Jewish values,” says Kestenbaum.Harvard University came under particular scrutiny for its failure to combat anti-Semitism on campus, ultimately leading to the forced resignation of its president, Claudine Gay. Today, Kestenbaum is suing his alma mater, alleging federal violations of the Civil Rights Act, under which, due to Trump’s 2019 executive order concerning Title VI, Jewish students are now protected.“When we filed our lawsuit in mid-January, Harvard’s response was not to apologize. It was not to acknowledge the reality of anti-Semitism. It was not to tell us what they were going to do. They filed a motion to dismiss with prejudice, meaning they were asking a judge not only to toss out our lawsuit but to make it so that no other Jewish student in the future would be able to hold them accountable for anti-Semitism,” says Kestenbaum. “To this day, they have not articulated a single policy that would prevent what happened to me from ever happening again to any student, Jew or not.”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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