American Thought Leaders

It’s time to fundamentally rethink America’s approach to the Chinese Communist Party, argues Sam Brownback, former U.S. senator, Kansas governor, U.S. ambassador-at-large for international religious freedom, and author of the new book “China’s War on Faith.”

Ahead of President Donald Trump’s high-stakes summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in Beijing, I’m sitting down with Brownback to understand what’s really at stake and why he believes America is wasting the greatest leverage it has had.
“I think we’ve just got to recognize: ... This is an evil regime. They’ve killed more of their own people than any other regime in the history of mankind, and we’ve been treating them like a normal country,” Brownback says.
Brownback lays out the case that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is currently conducting three genocides—against the Uyghur Muslims, Falun Gong practitioners, and Tibetan Buddhists—through mass detention, torture, cultural eradication, and forced organ harvesting. At the same time, the regime is escalating its war on Christianity, arresting pastors, and crushing underground churches, Brownback says.
Now, the CCP is also exporting the technologies it uses to surveil and persecute dissidents to at least 80 other countries, he says.
For decades, human rights and religious freedom has been a “red line” for the Chinese regime that American leaders and diplomats have tiptoed around.
But the reality is that human rights and religious freedom are the CCP’s deepest vulnerability and insecurity—and America’s most potent weapon and leverage against this regime, Brownback argues.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Paola Brown first turned to homeopathy, a form of alternative medicine based on the principle of “like cures like,” after many years of suffering from unbearable bladder pain. She had been diagnosed with interstitial cystitis, a disease with no known cure.

She jokes that homeopaths are called “the doctors of last resort,” and for her, they were exactly that.
When she went to see one for the first time, among the first things she asked her doctor was: “‘Do I need to believe in this? Because I don’t.’ And my homeopath says: ‘No, you don’t have to believe in this. I just need to find the right remedy.’”
During the interview, she breaks down what homeopathy actually is, where it originated, and why it’s faced regulatory barriers.
In the United States, homeopaths are nationally accredited through the Council of Homeopathic Certification. But the FDA has increased restrictions on homeopathic remedies over the last decade, just at a time when many Americans are starting to seek out new treatment options.
“We are so sick that we are looking for alternatives, and when we find those alternatives, we’re finding that those alternatives are harder and harder to get access to,” Brown says.
Earlier this year, lawmakers introduced the Homeopathic Drug Product Safety, Quality, and Transparency Act. Supporters say it would protect access to homeopathy by creating clearer rules.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

An island nation only one-third the size of Virginia, Taiwan produces more than 90 percent of the world’s most advanced chips and more than 90 percent of the servers powering the AI revolution. And last year, Taiwan became the United States’ fourth-largest trading partner—after Mexico, Canada, and China.

More than one-fifth of global maritime trade goes through the Taiwan Strait, according to a Center for Strategic and International Studies analysis, and any conflict over Taiwan would be devastating for the global economy—and likely far worse than the economic disruptions caused by the Iran War.
Chinese leader Xi Jinping has told the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to be ready for a successful Taiwan invasion by 2027, the PLA’s 100th anniversary.
In this episode, I sit down with Taiwan’s representative to the United States, Ambassador Alexander Yui, to understand why Taiwan matters and what’s at stake as the Chinese Communist Party has ramped up its campaign to isolate, intimidate, and encircle Taiwan in recent years.
Taiwanese President Lai Ching-te’s recent visit to Eswatini—Taiwan’s only African ally—had to be abruptly postponed when Seychelles, Madagascar, and Mauritius revoked overflight permissions—presumably due to pressure from Beijing.
“They are constantly harassing our naval and air surroundings, trying to create panic and uneasiness,” Yui says.
Since 2013, Beijing has built more than two dozen militarized outposts in disputed waters in the South China Sea and has recently been militarizing yet another artificial island known as Antelope Reef.
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 what was the third major attempt on President Donald Trump’s life in an era of escalating political violence, this year’s White House Correspondents Association (WHCA) dinner was abruptly cut short when multiple shots were fired, and a man was apprehended for trying to breach security.

The 31-year-old suspect, Cole Allen, could face up to life in prison.
Joining us today is Sean Spicer, who previously served as White House press secretary and White House communications director during the first Trump administration. Now, he’s the host of the Sean Spicer Show and author of the newly released book, “Trump 2.0: The Revolution That Will Permanently Transform America.”
Spicer is known for being a vocal critic of the WHCA for over a decade and has long refused invitations to attend its events. At the time of the shooting incident, he was on his way to the Renwick Museum Gallery to attend Substack’s annual alternative to the WHCA dinner called “The New Media.”
In this episode, we get his reaction to what happened, his new book “Trump 2.0,” and why he argues the second Trump administration will be far more consequential for America than the first.
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 recent landmark Jamestown Foundation report maps Chinese United Front operations, the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP’s) effort to co-opt and weaponize civil society against the CCP’s enemies.

The report, titled “Harnessing the People” and authored by researcher Cheryl Yu, identifies more than 2,000 such organizations operating in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, and Germany. More than 1,000 are operating in the United States.
They span a wide range, including student, business, professional, cultural, and “friendship” groups as well as media outlets.
In this episode, I sit down with Peter Mattis, president of The Jamestown Foundation. Few understand this complex web of Chinese influence and espionage operations as well as he does.
His storied career includes roles such as senior fellow with the U.S. House Select Committee on the CCP, staff director of the Congressional-Executive Commission on China (CECC), and counterintelligence analyst for the Central Intelligence Agency.
The United Front has two distinct areas of operation: inside China and outside China. Basically, every Party committee in China has a United Front department, Mattis said. But, he said, “the big part of the work that really matters to us happens outside. ... This is a system that involves hundreds of thousands of people.”
“Mao Zedong described United Front work as a tool to storm and shatter the enemy’s position,” Mattis said.
One key task of United Front operations overseas is to find people, in particular scientists and engineers, who “are susceptible to recruitment,” Mattis said.
Many seemingly innocuous civic groups in Western countries—for example, the China Overseas Friendship Association—are used to observe, identify, and then target people who could be useful for technology transfer or even intelligence purposes.
How are targeted people approached? Typically, it’s through one of the estimated 600 talent programs that Beijing has created for this objective, Mattis said.
Programs include the Young Thousand Talents Program, which targets early-career STEM researchers, and the Hundred Talents Program, which targets scientists under 45.
Out of the four Western countries explored in the report, Canada has by far the largest number of United Front organizations per capita, five times as many as the United States.
Why, I asked Mattis, is Canada so important to China?
“It is a soft underbelly to the United States [and] to the rest of NATO,” he replied.
In Canada, he told me, there has been far less pushback against United Front organizations than in the United States.
“These groups have never really had to hide themselves. They never really had to be careful, and therefore, they could just sort of move and operate,” he said.
There are even high-level Canadian officials, senators or MPs, “that you see embedded essentially in a network of these United Front organizations,” Mattis said.
In this episode, Mattis breaks down the playbook of Chinese United Front operations. Here’s how they co-opt overseas Chinese communities, monitor and pressure dissidents, and manipulate electoral outcomes.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.