American Thought Leaders

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U.S. federal investigators recently discovered a sophisticated tunnel 55 feet underground between Mexico and California—among the largest ever found—with electricity, a rail system, ventilation, reinforced walls, and a complex hydraulic lift system.
White House “drug czar” Sara Carter estimated that it was used to transport narcotics worth hundreds of millions of dollars. This is just one of the over 200 tunnels of varying sizes and sophistication that have been discovered in the last four decades, with many more likely still undetected, she said.
As Director of the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP), Carter is fighting to end the narcotic epidemic killing Americans, seize cartel finances, and make a drug-free life the new norm in America.
Deaths from illicit narcotics in America have been rising for decades and reached an all-time high in 2022, with 112,000 Americans dying in a single year. Since the Trump administration took office, that number has dropped to about 68,000 for the 12-month period ending in November 2025. But Americans of all ages are still dying.
In this episode, Carter breaks down the complex pipelines that are driving this epidemic and how the Trump administration has been going on the offensive to attack both the supply and demand sides of this crisis.
How exactly do illicit narcotics and precursor chemicals make their way into the United States? How have America’s enemies weaponized these deadly drugs? And how can we begin to comprehend the truly devastating human cost—the many young lives that were abruptly cut short and the families left behind?
Carter revealed that she always thinks to herself, “This could be my child.”
On the evening of our interview, she told us she would be heading to meet an Angel family who recently lost their son, a recent law graduate, to a line of fentanyl-laced cocaine.
“His parents had all the hopes in the world for him. … He went to a party after law school in Miami and made a huge mistake. He did a line of cocaine that had fentanyl in it, seized, had a heart attack, and died in an instant in the party,” 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.

“We are definitively, with no debate, in a demographic winter in the history of the United States of America. We have never had a lower marriage rate, and we’ve never had a lower fertility rate,” says Timothy Goeglein, vice president of External and Government Relations at Focus on the Family.

Goeglein is the author of multiple books, including most recently “What Really Matters: Restoring a Legacy of Faith, Freedom, and Family.”
In our interview, we explore how America ended up where it is today. Why are millions of prime-age men neither working nor seeking a job? Why do women find it so hard to find a good partner? What is the antidote to America’s high rates of suicide, drug overdose, pornography addiction, and family dysfunction?
“The biggest single challenge facing America in its 250th year … is a spiritual crisis of a pretty substantial order,” Goeglein said. He believes we are witnessing in America “the practical ramifications of destroying an objective moral code … of saying you can’t really define good and evil.”
Luckily, this is not the whole story. In this interview, Goeglein explains the signs of hope he sees and what he calls “a quiet Renaissance.”
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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There are few people who understand the machinery behind modern disinformation and censorship better than Jacob Siegel. He’s a special features editor at Tablet Magazine and author of the new book “The Information State: Politics in the Age of Total Control.”
In this episode, we trace the origins of modern information control, from President Woodrow Wilson’s propaganda office during World War I and President Barack Obama’s “whole-of-society” framework, to the policing of information during the COVID-19 pandemic.
He breaks down how government agencies, major tech platforms, and large nonprofits can work together behind the scenes to control who gets to speak and who does not, and what ideas are expressed and which are obscured.
“If you can control the information, you can control the society,” Siegel said. And the digital age makes this possible to a degree never reached before, he added.
So, how has this transformed our society and our liberties?
“The principles of the constitutional order, the principles of the liberal nation state have begun to be profoundly eroded by this new kind of information-based political regime,” Siegel said.
“Those rights are relocated into the digital code, so the question of who can speak, who can express their ideas, is no longer clearly defined and delimited by these print-era documents. Now it becomes a question of who controls the digital code.”
According to Siegel, the transition to the digital era has resulted in a vast “sweeping away of previously existing local organizations [and] civic organizations.” And more recently, we have been witnessing, whether we are aware of it or not, what he calls the “vast acceleration of the erasure of core remnants of civil society.”
So how do we navigate this new digital arena, especially with the rise of artificial 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.

Hungary is undergoing a major transformation with the election of a new prime minister.

After 16 years in power, Viktor Orban’s Fidesz party was swept from office in a historic landslide election in April and with an equally historic turnout of almost 80 percent.
The new Tisza party, led by Peter Magyar, won the largest super-majority in Hungary’s post-communist history with a platform focused on anti-corruption and national renewal. They’ve promised major changes to Hungary’s constitution, known as the Fundamental Law.
So what does this election mean for Hungary and how might the new leadership reorient its relationship with America, the European Union, Russia, and China?
Orban was known for his pro-family and pro-tradition domestic policies, while at the same time cultivating close ties with Russia and communist China and distancing himself from the EU.
Joining us today to break all this down is Hungarian constitutional law scholar Marton Sulyok, a visiting researcher at the Georgetown Center for the Constitution.
Sulyok is, notably, also the son of Hungary’s current President, Tamas Sulyok.
Magyar has demanded the resignation of Sulyok and other Orban allies. It remains to be seen whether they will be forced out by constitutional amendment or other means.
Despite his family ties, the younger Sulyok has remained strikingly detached.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Ahead of the 250th anniversary of America’s founding, New York Times bestselling author and talk show host Eric Metaxas is publishing his latest book, a 600-page volume titled “Revolution: The Birth of the Greatest Nation in the History of the World.”

In the book, he argues that the American Revolution is the “only genuine revolution in the history of so-called revolutions.”
So what separated the American Revolution from other revolutions? What made it succeed? And what critical aspects of the American Revolution are no longer being taught in schools today?
Metaxas argues that America is currently facing its third existential crisis, after the American Revolution and the Civil War, and understanding the core principles behind America’s founding story is critical to preserving the liberties of this nation.
In the interview, we confront some key questions: How is the erosion of spiritual faith transforming American society? How does self-government work without the “moral and religious people” that John Adams described as a prerequisite for self-government? What is the proper role of a good citizen?
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.