American Thought Leaders

At age 12, Chloe Cole began identifying as male and started socially transitioning. Soon after, she was put on puberty blockers. Testosterone injections followed at age 13, and she underwent a double mastectomy at 15.Shortly after the surgery, she realized that it had all been a terrible mistake: “I didn’t believe that I was a boy ... until that idea was put in my head.”When she decided to detransition, the community that once eagerly encouraged her to transition into a boy treated her like she was “subhuman,” she says.“The moment that I detransitioned, I was human garbage to them,” she says.Now she has become one of the most vocal critics of what’s been dubbed “gender-affirming care” for minors.Under the Trump administration, several measures have been put in place to end the medical transitioning of minors: In January, President Donald Trump issued the executive order “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.”Earlier this month, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services proposed a new rule that prohibits hospitals that perform “sex-rejecting” procedures on minors from participation in Medicare and Medicaid Programs. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently spoke out against such procedures for minors and described them as medical malpractice.And days ago, the House of Representatives voted to pass a bill that could imprison health care providers for providing these procedures to minors.Cole, who is 21 years old today, supports such measures to put an end to medical transitioning of minors, but she’s convinced that this is not enough: “This doesn’t end with bans. We have to go all out and hold everybody who was involved accountable.”And that’s what she’s doing: Cole filed a high-profile lawsuit in California against her healthcare provider, Kaiser Permanente, as well as her surgeon, endocrinologist, and the psychologist who referred her to surgery, alleging medical negligence, lack of informed consent, and fraud in placing her on puberty blockers, testosterone, and performing a double mastectomy.Her legal team, among them Dhillon Law Group and the Center for American Liberty, has added punitive damages claims, presenting her case as a test of whether “gender-affirming” treatment for minors will be treated as malpractice in U.S. courts.“It’s something that has to be illegalized on both the state and federal level, so that no child ever is going to be hurt ever again,” she said, adding, “We have to go after the manufacturers or the drugs of the medical devices that they are giving to children.”Since 2022, Chloe has testified before multiple state legislatures. She also testified in the 2023 U.S. House Judiciary Committee hearing titled “The Dangers and Due Process Violations of ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ for Children.”“Testimonies of people like me, who come out of it, who speak to the truth, are so threatening to them, because it completely dismantles their ideology,” she said.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Have we reached the end of “woke”? Comedian and writer Andrew Doyle thinks yes. But he believes new forms of what he calls the “authoritarianism impulse” will follow.He’s the author of “The End of Woke: How the Culture War Went Too Far and What to Expect from the Counter-Revolution.”Doyle is the creator of Titania McGrath, a fictional ultra-woke activist whose X account became hugely popular and currently has over 700K followers.Doyle has also published satirical books under Titania’s name, including “My First Little Book of Intersectional Activism.”In our conversation, we dive into the many ways woke ideology has transformed Western societies and explore growing restrictions on hate speech in Europe. In the United Kingdom, dozens of people are arrested for speech-related offenses every day, Doyle 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 get a lot of inappropriate over-prescribing for almost everything,” says drug policy researcher and journalist Alan Cassels.Cassels is the co-author of “Selling Sickness: How the World’s Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients.”For Cassels, it was one disease in particular—osteoporosis—that changed his entire view of medicine.Based on changing definitions of the disease, large swaths of Americans could suddenly be declared sick and in urgent need of drug treatment.They “medicalized normal aging of basically the entire female population. Overnight,” he says.In our interview, we discuss the influence of the pharmaceutical industry on overdiagnoses and prescriptions, and how the criteria for many diseases can be expanded arbitrarily.“When you look closely at the quality of prescribing, a lot of times, the decision-making is not really driven by evidence. It’s driven mostly by … marketing, biases, influence from thought leaders, and influence from guidelines, medical guidelines themselves, which are often appallingly biased,” he says.Many doctors, Cassels says, know little about the adverse effects of the many drugs they prescribe to their patients.We also dive into the connection between psychiatric drug prescriptions and violence, how psychiatry labels normal behaviors as abnormal, and how exaggerated statistics are used to sell theories of disease and drug treatments.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

“COVID was a really dark time for me and for a lot of people,” said Rob Schneider.For the famous comedian and actor, the years of the pandemic were a time to take stock of what had become of America, speak up about it—and even write a book. “You Can Do it! Speak Your Mind, America” was published in September 2024.“If we’re going to continue to have a free society, it’s going to require people to step up and be courageous,” Schneider said.Schneider, who is also a screenwriter and director, rose to prominence as a cast member and writer of NBC’s Saturday Night Live. He earned three Primetime Emmy Award nominations for his writing on the show.In this episode, he reflected on our current political and cultural moment.What really happened when Rob bumped into Robert De Niro at the SNL reunion? What is the role of comedy in an age of outrage? And how do we turn around the tribalism he sees gripping America?Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

As early as 1989, intelligence officers in the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) recognized China as the next threat, says former DIA officer and physicist Michael Sekora.“We identified what [China] was doing to become a superpower faster than any country in history, and we were on track to containment,” Sekora says.Back in the 1980s, he led a classified Defense Intelligence Agency program called “Project Socrates” that was created under the Reagan administration to determine the cause of U.S. economic and military decline, find a way to reverse it, and outcompete Moscow. Later they turned their sights to Beijing.“It was very obvious what was going on: China was executing a national technology strategy, which basically was playing ... a very adroit game of worldwide offensive, defensive, technology exploitation chess,” Sekora says. “What we had in Socrates could have easily contained China.”The project was defunded by the Bush administration, and the United States went the opposite route, allowing many key technologies to be handed over to Beijing over the course of several decades.In this episode, he breaks down why he believes the United States has lost its edge in technological innovation and how this can be turned around.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.