American Thought Leaders

The Small Business Administration (SBA) recently suspended nearly 7,000 Minnesota borrowers for suspected fraud in pandemic-era small business loans totaling nearly $400 million.

“We worked through the holidays, from Thanksgiving up to New Year’s on about 20,000 different files, found about 8,000 instances of fraudulent loans, and moved quickly to make sure that those borrowers … could never access the services of the SBA again,” sa...

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, Pr...

“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 i...

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 ba...

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 eage...

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.

Do...

“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...

“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,” Schneide...

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...

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 dop...

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 ...

Amidst ongoing U.S. efforts to mediate a Russia–Ukraine peace and the release of a new U.S. national security strategy that has sent shockwaves through Europe, I’m sitting down with the foreign minister of Latvia, Baiba Braze, to get her unique perspective.

Latvia is a small Baltic country bordering Estonia, Lithuania, Belarus, and Russia. In the 1940s, the Soviets occupied Latvia and its neighboring countries—a reality that has mad...

Dr. Robert Redfield, former director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, says he’d like to see the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines phased out and eventually removed from the market.

Redfield led the CDC from 2018 to 2021. While an avid proponent of vaccines in general, he hopes that the fallout from the emergency-authorized mRNA vaccines will lead to a broader recognition that vaccine manufacturers must no longer be exempt fro...

“I’ve been fighting communism by teaching capitalism,” says Robert Kiyosaki, holding up a copy of Karl Marx’s “Communist Manifesto” and a copy of his book “The Capitalist Manifesto.”

Robert Kiyosaki became famous as the author of “Rich Dad Poor Dad,” a book that has sold 48 million copies worldwide since its 1997 publication.

Kiyosaki maintains that in today’s America, plagued by high inflation and a crumbling dollar, rich dads are g...

“Neuroscientists who stand up and say ‘we have souls’ are few and far between,” says pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Michael Egnor.

“But when you look carefully at the neuroscience—the best neuroscience over the past century—it clearly points to the existence of the soul and to the existence of aspects of our mind that don’t come from the brain.”

Egnor himself started off as a materialist and atheist. But 40 years and more than 7,000 brai...

Maryanne Demasi is an independent investigative journalist based in Australia and a former medical scientist with a PhD in rheumatology from the University of Adelaide.

For many years, she worked for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and gained wide attention for reporting on controversial medical topics, particularly the efficacy and safety of statins and psychiatric drugs.

Demasi was eventually suspended from her positi...

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 FBI director’s recent visit to China s...

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, deplatformed, surveilled, fired, so...

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 modern economy, from electronics to defe...