American Thought Leaders

In 2022, New York fined three private Amish schoolhouses $118,000 in combined fines for allowing unvaccinated children to attend. This came after New York repealed its longstanding religious exemptions for school vaccination requirements in 2019.

New York law allows the state to fine a school up to $2,000 per student per day for noncompliance, which could add up to multi-million-dollar fines for a single school year.
In response, the Amish school administrators and parents filed suit against the state, arguing that compulsory vaccination violated their First Amendment rights and the parental right to direct the upbringing and education of children.
Now, Miller v. McDonald is on its second appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court.
In this episode, Aaron Siri, managing partner at Siri & Glimstad LLP, breaks down the profound implications of this case.
“If we can’t protect the Amish, if we can’t protect their religious freedom in the United States of America under the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution, then,” Siri said, “it really is concerning as to what real reach, almost if any, that right has.”
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

From security dossiers and advanced aerospace stealth designs to the mundane technology in your living room, virtually no sector of the American economy has remained untouched by the Chinese Communist Party’s intellectual property theft campaign.

In this interview, The Epoch Times senior editor Jan Jekielek sits down with David Shedd, former acting director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and co-author of “The Great Heist: China’s Epic Campaign to Steal America’s Secrets.”
Shedd describes how China’s economic growth over the past 25 years was bolstered by stealing American intellectual property, technology, data, and know-how.
Crucially, Shedd warns that this campaign extends beyond corporate espionage. No target is too small in the CCP’s eyes if it can benefit the Party, he argues.
Shedd addresses a host of questions: How does China’s civilian-military fusion strategy turn its citizens into spies on demand? What are some major instances of China stealing information from the United States? What are the implications for national security? And how can American citizens defend themselves against theft?
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

What does the U.S. government actually know about UFOs or unidentified anomalous phenomena (UAPs), and what aren’t they telling us? Have non-human intelligences visited Earth already? And what do we know about them?

There are few people who have interrogated the facts around UAPs as carefully as Dr. Phil. He and his team were given exclusive, early access by President Donald Trump to confidential files on these mysterious objects.
“The one thing that I know and can confirm without question is that our government has been lying to us for 79 years. They’ve been telling us that they have no evidence; [that] they have nothing that is unexplainable; that there’s not anything in their files that suggests that there might be something suggestive of non-human intelligence … that’s a lie,” he says.
“We’re talking about people that are admirals, generals, experienced lifetime pilots … seeing anomalous aerial phenomena that are doing things that our aircraft can’t do. They’re flying at speeds we can’t fly, doing maneuvers that would create G-forces we can’t sustain, or that our aircraft would come apart,” he says.
“And some of these have no visible signs of propulsion. Some of them don’t have heat signatures,” he continues.
In this episode, Dr. Phil reveals what he and his team have uncovered.
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 Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. He’s the longest-serving sitting governor, having spent 11 years in office, and is running for reelection this November.

Abbott has made some major policy bets in America’s second-most-populous state. Last year, he signed a large-scale $1 billion school voucher program after years of effort pushing it through the legislature. Now he wants to eliminate school district property taxes for homeowners by covering the costs with the state’s surplus.
Abbott has also made countering foreign infiltration a priority, from effectively barring individuals and companies linked to China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea from buying Texas land to setting up a state cyber command to guard critical infrastructure.
We discuss: How can Texas eliminate school property taxes sustainably? What are the plans for the $7.5 billion reimbursement from the Department of Homeland Security for border security costs? And why did Abbott recently put a pause on data center development in Texas?
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 2008 update to the landmark Trafficking Victims Protection Act (TVPA) is increasingly being used to target religious communities, says attorney John Lauro, and raising red flags for experts in constitutional law.

The definition of the term “serious harm” in the statute was altered to include psychological and other non-physical harms.
And in recent years, “that provision has been weaponized by plaintiffs’ lawyers,” Lauro says.
This could affect the many religious communities that involve members voluntarily giving their time or money to religious causes; some of whom may later become disillusioned.
“This statute … is like a dagger pointed at the soul of every voluntary religious community in the United States,” Lauro says.
An advocate for religious freedom, Lauro has worked as a criminal and civil defense attorney for decades.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.