American Thought Leaders Jan Jekielek

“The fact that America’s foremost geopolitical adversary controls an app that about 170 million Americans use regularly means that the CCP can leverage the app to influence the political debate of Americans, and ultimately … degrade the integrity of our democracy,” says Michael Sobolik, senior fellow at the American Foreign Policy Council and the author of “Countering China’s Great Game: A Strategy for American Dominance.”
In this episode, he breaks down why TikTok is a major national security threat and how America can outmaneuver the Chinese Communist Party in the new U.S.–China Cold War.
For years, America has been playing defense, he says.
“To win cold wars, you have to go on the offensive to figure out: What is my adversary’s strategy? Where am I strong? Where are they weak? And how do I move the competition to that terrain?”
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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“People don’t know where to go to cultivate wisdom. I will ask my students: ‘Where do you go for information?’ They‘ll hold up their cell phones right away. ‘Where do you go for knowledge?’ And they’re ... a little bit more suspicious. They’ll say, ‘Well, the university, science …’ and then I'll say, ‘And where do you go for wisdom?’ And they don’t have an answer.”
John Vervaeke is a professor of cognitive science and Buddhist psychology at the University of Toronto. He is the creator of the internationally acclaimed lecture series “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis.”
“There’s no possibility of truth without trust,” he says.
Mr. Vervaeke’s work merges science and spirituality, and reaches into the past to understand the history of ideas. He has developed a set of practices to cultivate insight in the quest to regain meaning.
“On social media, you have connections, but you don’t have actual social relationships with people. So people pile up the number of connections they have, but they’re not actually connected,” says Mr. Vervaeke. “The deepest truths are not accessed by us. They don’t get disclosed by us unless we’re willing to go through transformation, and unless we’re willing to grow our personhood.”
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

“I would suggest that, actually, we’ve been living in the transhumanist era for 50 years or more. We’re half a century into the transhumanist age, and really, it began with the contraceptive pill.”
Mary Harrington is a self-described “reactionary feminist,” contributing editor at UnHerd, and author of “Feminism Against Progress.” We sat down together at the Dissident Dialogues Festival to discuss the intersection of progress, individual freedom, technology, and, ultimately, transhumanism.
“What that opens up is a whole theoretically infinite spectrum of engineering of ourselves—if you like—of seeing human nature itself as a set of problems to be solved,” says Ms. Harrington.
She believes that believing a “progress narrative” leads to the misguided attempt to create heaven on earth.
“It just won’t matter how often we set out trying to wage war on our own nature. It will just find a way of coming back,” she 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.

In this episode, I sit down with Sen. Dr. Roger Marshall (R-Kan.), an obstetrician and gynecologist, to get his take on gain of function research, the origins of the virus, and Dr. Anthony Fauci’s recent testimony before the House Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic.
Dr. Marshall shares what he believes are the “smoking guns” that link the origins of the coronavirus to a lab leak in Wuhan, China.
“If we’re funding this type of research in a place like Wuhan, China, where we know that the CCP military is working hand in glove with all those scientists, I mean ... this whole thing is a national security issue,” says Dr. Marshall. He argues all grants moving forward must be assessed for national security risks.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

“At the age of 10, I formed a question in my mind, which was: how can you hate me when you don’t even know me? And now, for the next 56 years, I’ve been looking for the answer to that question.”
The son of American Foreign Service members, Daryl Davis grew up in many different countries and was exposed to a variety of cultures, religions, and ideologies. He became an internationally renowned musician, touring and performing with the likes of Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, and B.B. King. But a personal experience with bigotry at a young age made him curious about why people hate.
“When I met this guy, he was a Grand Dragon. And he rose through the ranks to Imperial Wizard. And when he dropped out, because of this perception change and hanging out with me, he gave me his Klan robe and his hood,” says Mr. Davis.
Today, Mr. Davis has made a second career out of befriending white supremacists, neo-Nazis, and members of the Ku Klux Klan, helping over 200 of them to renounce their racist ideology.
“People ask me: Daryl, why don’t you burn that stuff? No, I’m not going to burn it,” says Mr. Davis, referring to his Klan paraphernalia. “Yes, it is despicable. But it’s also a part of our history. And you don’t burn our history: the good, the bad, the ugly, and the shameful. You expose it, so it doesn’t happen again.”
In this episode, we dive into Mr. Davis’s childhood, his passion for music, his encounters with the Klan, and the methodology he uses for helping them to renounce their racism.
“The greatest weapon to combat racism, anti-Semitism, [and] all types of discrimination is the least expensive weapon known to man. It’s free, yet it is the most underused. It’s called conversation,” says Mr. Davis.
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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The failures of our COVID response and the “gender-affirming” care model have made a lot of people question science and medicine in the West.
Mihai Nadin argues that science and medicine went awry a long time ago—in foundational ways.
He’s a scholar and researcher with broad insights spanning electrical engineering, computer science, aesthetics, human-computer interaction, and post-industrial society, and he’s the author of “Disrupt Science: The Future Matters.”
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.