American Thought Leaders

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.

A series of devastating inquiries have documented how networks of men—primarily of Muslim Pakistani heritage—groomed, trafficked, and gang-raped thousands of children, mostly white girls, in English towns such as Rotherham, Rochdale, and Telford for decades.

Independent reviews found that local authorities downplayed allegations and failed to crack down on these crimes in large part out of fear of being accused of racism or Islamophobia.
At the same time, dozens of sharia councils have emerged across the United Kingdom that run an informal legal system handling divorces, inheritances, and family disputes within Muslim communities. But they often leave women with virtually no rights and protections, especially if the marriage was not officially recognized by UK civil law in the first place.
British converts from Islam to Christianity, such as Nissar Hussain, describe years of targeted harassment, demonization, and even brutal physical assaults simply for choosing to change their faith, an act branded as “apostasy.”
Many are now asking: Have we witnessed the failures of the multiculturalism experiment in the United Kingdom? To what extent should immigrants be expected to integrate and assimilate into the cultural and civic norms, such as equal protection under the law and gender equality? How should police and other authorities enforce the laws impartially when cultural and religious sensitivities are involved?
These questions are all coming to a head in the United Kingdom—and the cultural clashes there serve as a cautionary tale for America, says Peter McIlvenna, co-founder of Hearts of Oak.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Artificial intelligence is radically reshaping the workplace, the digital ecosystem, the way we interact with each other, and the future of crime, surveillance, and warfare.

But conservatives in particular, argues Wynton Hall, risk falling dangerously behind in navigating this new world. Nobody will get to opt out of the AI revolution—whether conservatives like it or not, Hall said.
Hall is the social media director at Breitbart News and author of the new New York Times bestselling book “Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI.”
He’s spent two years researching what drives America’s tech elite to build ever more powerful, faster AI systems. The questions he wanted to answer, he told me, are: “What is their ultimate goal? What is the world that they foresee their technology creating?”
In our in-depth interview, we dive into the impact that this supersonic AI transformation will have on pretty much every facet of our lives: Will white-collar jobs disappear over the next few years? Will blue-collar jobs be lost to billions of robots? Will people live on Universal Basic Income? And, if so, how does that affect the structure and meaning of people’s lives?
Could AI companions replace humans as friends, partners, family? How and what will children learn—or will they only learn to cheat? Will AI-powered brain implants or chips become widespread?
And what are the national security implications of ever more powerful AI?
“Whoever achieves superiority in AI is going to have full-spectrum battlefield dominance in things like encryption, cybersecurity, hacking of missile systems, and hacking of infrastructure,” Hall said.
When it comes to the U.S.–China AI race, the problem that Americans have to figure out is “how to beat China without becoming China,” Hall said.
“We do not want to emulate a techno authoritarian CCP surveillance state,” he added.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.