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Subpoenaed documents released by Sen. Ron Johnson (R-Wisc.) reveal that American public health officials were well aware of COVID-19 vaccine safety signals for myocarditis and ischemic stroke in people over 65—well before they alerted the American public. Last year, as chairman of the Senate’s Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, Johnson issued a subpoena to the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) seeking six categories of COVID-related data, including vaccine safety surveillance data and myocarditis records. From the subpoenaed data—enormous dumps of what has ultimately become about 11 million pages—Johnson’s team found that the CDC was well aware of the myocarditis risk even in early 2021. Yet they downplayed it instead of alerting the public, Johnson said. Johnson’s team also found that the White House modified wording about a safety signal for ischemic stroke with the bivalent booster for people over 65, changing “moderately elevated” to “slightly elevated,” according to records. In our wide-ranging interview, we dive into what Johnson and his team discovered after sifting through millions of documents. What did America’s public health agencies really know about the COVID-19 vaccines back in 2021 and 2022? What was hidden from the American public? And what has compelled Johnson to make this issue his number one priority? Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

For decades now, we’ve been told the biggest questions of how life and our universe came to be were settled. But what if they’re not? Stephen Meyer has spent his career digging into the deepest mysteries of our existence. A philosopher of science, he is the founder of the Discovery Institute’s Center for Science and Culture and the author of the New York Times bestseller “Darwin’s Doubt” and “Return of the God Hypothesis.” “Many leading evolutionary biologists today are calling for a new theory of evolution, because they recognize that the mutation-natural selection mechanism has limited creative power,” Meyer says. While Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural selection can explain small-scale variations—for instance, finch beak size changes, moth wing color changes, or bacteria developing antibiotic resistance—it cannot explain the origins of new species or new body plans, Meyer contends. Now, in a new film, “The Story of Everything,” coming to theaters April 30, Meyer lays out a case that could reshape how we think about life itself. “The scientific discoveries of the last one hundred years and right up to the present are pointing in a very different direction than people thought in the late 19th century,” Meyer 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.

“Pornography is like a silent epidemic ... but nobody wants to talk about it much,” says child protection advocate Kristen Jenson. She’s the author of the “Good Pictures Bad Pictures” series of read-aloud books that teach children how to recognize and reject pornography. In America, kids are encountering porn at younger and younger ages—often without their parents knowing, Jenson says. Once a child has a smartphone, it is only a matter of time until the child is exposed to porn—often by other children. And it’s having a devastating impact on their impressionable young minds, Jenson says. “Every school bus in America is a triple X theater because children are showing pornography to other children in buses. I’ve heard so many stories of five-year-olds getting shown hardcore pornography on a school bus,” she says. Retroactive studies found that the average age kids first view pornography is around 11 years old, but Jenson concluded from her work and research that the average age is much lower. In our in-depth interview, she walks me through many aspects of porn consumption and how children are impacted by it: How does porn affect children’s overall development and their chances of meaningful sexual relationships later on in life? How does porn affect children’s mental health? How does it affect their sexual health? Do children get addicted to porn? How are girls impacted by porn? How do sexual predators use porn as a grooming tool for kids? Violent porn, in particular, is a huge problem in itself, Jenson said. By the age of 18, the vast majority of teenagers—about 80 percent—have been exposed to violent porn: “That’s the main fare out there. It’s violent porn. It’s hitting, it’s slapping, hair-pulling, strangling.” Many children’s perception of sex is poisoned by violent pornography. She told me a story of a girl who was kissed by her 12-year-old boyfriend for the first time: “And he strangled her because that’s what he'd seen in porn.” It is perhaps unsurprising then that there has been a steep increase in what is called child-on-child sexual abuse over the last decade. In fact, about 70 percent of all sexual child abuse cases are now child-on-child, she said: “Kids love to imitate. When you add in the factor of pornography ... it is not surprising that some of these children want to go ahead and act out what they see in pornography,” Jenson says. So what should parents do to protect their children? Simply telling your children that porn is bad is not good enough, she said. Children need to be given three basic things: a vocabulary to talk about pornography, a warning against it, and a plan of what to do when they are exposed to it. To help parents in this endeavor, she wrote her book series “Good Pictures, Bad Pictures.” These books, geared to different age groups, are meant as a tool to help parents with such conversations: “The point is to model parents talking to their children. It’s really important to open that conversation.” “One of the most loving things that you can do for your child is to give them a defense against not only pornography, but all forms of sexual exploitation,” 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.

For two decades, investigative journalist Ethan Gutmann has been researching how the Chinese Communist Party secretly harvests the organs of prisoners of conscience and kills them in the process. He authored the groundbreaking 2014 work “The Slaughter” and, more recently, “The Xinjiang Procedure.” In his latest book, he gathers evidence of how the regime—which has long targeted Falun Gong practitioners for their organs—is now exploiting captive Uyghurs for this same macabre industry. Gutmann traveled to Kazakhstan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, Uzbekistan, and Turkey to interview dozens of Uyghurs and Kazaks who had managed to escape after being imprisoned in camps in Xinjiang, China, also known as East Turkestan. Many spoke to him at great personal risk to themselves and their loved ones. What they revealed to him was nothing short of horrific. A central witness named “Samal” described working in one of four medical labs located several stories below the concentration camp. One of the clinics—the one she worked in—was used for intestinal removal. “The other three clinics were there to remove organs. You couldn’t see them, but occasionally the door would open. You‘d see somebody handling a kidney, a liver, and so forth. Every day that she worked there … there’d be eight or nine bodies. Sometimes it was as many as 20,” Gutmann said. During his research, Gutmann realized a disturbing pattern. Many of those who disappeared in the middle of the night from the camps were typically 28 or 29 years old. He believes the CCP has made this age demographic its primary target for forced organ harvesting. “You are at the peak of your health. At that point, your organs have stopped growing,” Gutmann says. In this episode, he breaks down the devastating evidence he’s uncovered—and the failure of Western institutions to address these crimes. The spread of extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (ECMO) technology—which keeps organs oxygenated and viable for many hours—has made the CCP’s organ trade even more lucrative than before. “Suddenly,” he told me, “you can pull a lot more organs off a single person and get them to distribute them around. And so the profit margin goes way up on a single human being from $100,000 up to almost a million dollars, if they were selling to foreigners.” 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 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.