American Thought Leaders

💰Protect your wealth with precious metals! Call American Hartford Gold today & get up to $20,000 in free silver on your 1st order! Call 855-862-3377 or text AMERICAN to 65532 or click here: https://ept.ms/ATL-AHG

There’s one place in America where Chinese nationals can enter without a visa.
It’s called the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), a U.S. territory in the Pacific, right by Guam. And it has become a major security loophole for Chinese Communist Party (CCP) influence operations as well as Chinese organized crime and birth tourism ventures, said Cleo Paskal, a senior fellow at the Compass Institute.
Yet there has been little political will in Washington to close this loophole, Paskal argues.
In this episode, Paskal breaks down the CCP’s aggressive influence and gray-zone warfare operations in this region—areas critical to U.S. defense in any Taiwan conflict—and why this matters for U.S. security.
Every U.S. president who served in the Pacific theater in World War II understood that the security of the American mainland depends on a secure Pacific perimeter, Paskal said.
As such, in addition to two U.S. territories in the region, the United States has maintained Compacts of Free Association with Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands since the end of World War II.
These treaties give the U.S. military exclusive defense and strategic access to these countries in exchange for U.S. security guarantees and economic support.
But the Chinese Communist Party has sought to aggressively expand its influence in these islands through pressure, gray zone warfare, and disinformation campaigns. Amid all this, U.S. funding for these compacts nearly lapsed in recent years, because many in Washington apparently have forgotten their importance.
In this episode, Paskal walks me through a key question: if the security of America’s mainland has always depended on control of the central Pacific, what consequences will we pay now that so few Americans know these islands—or their citizens—even exist?
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

It is becoming increasingly common to hear the American Dream is dead, with young people today often citing housing prices, the difficulty of finding jobs, and tax burdens.

Forbes Media chairman Steve Forbes has a very different take.
“A free people always finds ways to move ahead, even though times and circumstances change. The problems we face today are not anything inherent in America, but in mistakes made by government. And the nice thing about that is mistakes can be undone,” Forbes said.
He’s the editor-in-chief of Forbes Media and the co-author of “Inflation: What It Is, Why It’s Bad, and How to Fix It.”
In this wide-ranging episode, filmed at the FreedomFest conference in Las Vegas, we dove into the rise of democratic socialist candidates, DEI hiring, inflation, how the United States should approach Taiwan and Iran, and the basic truth about prosperity that no one is teaching today.
At the heart of this conversation is an extremely hopeful message: “Human ingenuity is unlimited. Have faith in the future.”
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Nigeria has become perhaps the deadliest place on earth for Christians, accounting for the vast majority of Christians killed worldwide for faith-related reasons.

Beyond the killings, millions more have been displaced into camps, where many now die slowly from malnutrition rather than violence, says Judd Saul.
He is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, entrepreneur, and Christian missionary based in Iowa who founded Equipping the Persecuted, an organization dedicated to helping Christians facing jihadi violence in Nigeria.
Saul first traveled to Nigeria in 2011 on a mission trip with his grandfather, Duane Wessels.
It was an experience that reshaped the direction of his life and work. Since then, he has visited Nigeria multiple times a year.
In our interview, Saul explains what forces drive the violence against Christian Nigerians, who make up about 50 percent of the population.
“This is a well-organized and funded Fulani Islamic militia who are hell-bent on turning Nigeria into a caliphate,” he told me.
According to Saul, an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 Christians are killed each year, averaging about 35 deaths per day.
Roughly 800 Christian communities have been wiped off the map over the past three decades.
Views expressed in this video are the opinions of the host and the guest and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

🔥IMMERSED: Round closes July 30. Invest before the round closes. Learn more about Immersed here:
https://ept.ms/4yurCls

Freya India is the author of “Girls: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything.”
In this episode, India unpacks how the rise of social media has radically transformed how young women view themselves and the world. She argues that an increasing number of young women no longer view themselves as human beings, but as products competing in a marketplace of likes and followers.
India describes the pressure she felt growing up in the age of social media.
“I really felt like I had to sell my life to strangers constantly,” she said.
From Snapchat’s public friend rankings to TikTok’s algorithms that flood vulnerable users with more of what destabilizes them, many various social platforms are engineered to exploit the very insecurities almost all young people have, she argues.
In this episode, we dive into many important questions: Why are so many young women today anxious or unhappy? How has the messaging of modern feminism affected young women—and what are the true consequences? How has ubiquitous pornography altered relationships, and how is it especially impacting young men? And what may help shrink the growing rift between young men and women today?
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

China’s new ethnic unity law has taken effect, and it’s going to be used to justify and expand transnational repression overseas in combination with existing laws on promoting “separatism,” said Guermantes Lailari, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel and longtime China researcher.

“In this new ethnic law, they encourage people to report on other Chinese who are not promoting ‘unity.’” Lailari said.
“So if you’re a Chinese person in the United States promoting Taiwan, they can prosecute you in absentia, and the court will have a ruling. And they can put out a red notice or Interpol notice on that person who’s overseas, and if that person ever travels to a country that China has bilateral extradition laws with, that person can be detained and transferred to China,” Lailari added.
Lailari moved to Taiwan a few years ago to study the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) up close.
“This place,” he said, “is being attacked every day, whether it’s cyber, cognitive warfare, media warfare, economic warfare, diplomatic warfare.”
In our interview, he argues that the CCP poses the most serious long-term threat to Western civilization—not just militarily, but through a combination of legal, economic, psychological, and intelligence operations.
In this episode, we dive into why the CCP is fixated on taking Taiwan, and what the global fallout of such a takeover would look like.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.