American Thought Leaders

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.

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.