American Thought Leaders

Ronald Reagan first visited the Berlin Wall in 1978, during the Carter administration. While there, he reportedly told his aides: “We’ve got to find a way to bring this down,” says Mark Joseph, producer of the 2024 film “Reagan.”“Reagan” is a biographical movie starring Dennis Quaid as Ronald Reagan and Jon Voight as KGB agent Viktor Petrovich.In this episode, Joseph shares why it took nearly 20 years to bring this film to the big screen, and what it was like to film during the height of COVID-era restrictions.Joseph, who’s also the founder of MJM Entertainment, is the author of “Making Reagan: A Memoir From the Producer of the Reagan Film.”The movie is based on Paul Kengor’s book “The Crusader: Ronald Reagan and the Fall of Communism.”That book, Joseph said, helped him understand Reagan and his passionate drive to end what he called the “evil empire,” the Soviet Union.“There have been hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of books written on Ronald Reagan, but Kengor was the only one who went to the church Reagan grew up in and said: ‘Can I see the sermons that young Ronald Reagan would have heard as a child?’ And the current pastor said they’re in the basement, in the box. Nobody has ever asked to see them before.’ So when he opened the box, he found a lot of anti-communist sermons by the preacher,” Joseph said.The film received sharply divided reviews: On “Rotten Tomatoes,” 98 percent of the audience gives a positive rating, but only 18 percent of critics’ reviews are positive.That may be a new record.“We have the greatest gap between critics and film goers of any movie ever made in Hollywood history. ... I’m really proud of that. I don’t make movies for critics. I make movies for the film goers,” Joseph 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.

It’s been almost a decade since then-House Intelligence Committee chairman Devin Nunes first launched his investigation with now-FBI director Kash Patel into the scandal that became known as “Russiagate.”His watershed memo back in 2018—dubbed the “Nunes memo”—detailed what he describes as grave abuses in how the FBI obtained surveillance warrants under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) to surveil Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign and later the first Trump administration.It’s “the biggest scandal in U.S. history, by a long way,” he says.In July 2025, the Trump administration released new documents shedding more light on the Russia probe, revealing the creation of an intelligence community assessment (ICA) at President Barack Obama’s behest that alleged Russian President Vladimir Putin had interfered in the presidential election in order to help Trump.Nunes is currently serving as chair of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, a body created in 1956 during the Eisenhower era to advise the president on U.S. intelligence activities and provide an external check on the intelligence community.In this episode, we sit down to reflect on the “Russiagate” saga, almost a decade later, and what accountability he’d like to see.We also dive into his work as CEO of Truth Media & Technology Group (TMTG), which owns Truth Social.TMTG recently announced an unexpected merger with the pioneering nuclear fusion company TAE Technologies. Why did they choose to make this move, and why is he convinced nuclear fusion technology will be critical to America’s 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.

The Small Business Administration (SBA) recently suspended nearly 7,000 Minnesota borrowers for suspected fraud in pandemic-era small business loans totaling nearly $400 million.“We worked through the holidays, from Thanksgiving up to New Year’s on about 20,000 different files, found about 8,000 instances of fraudulent loans, and moved quickly to make sure that those borrowers … could never access the services of the SBA again,” said SBA Administrator Kelly Loeffler.They’ll now be taking the same model to investigate other states for COVID-era abuse of the Paycheck Protection Program and Economic Injury Disaster Loans.In this episode, I sat down with Loeffler to understand her work targeting fraud nationwide, bolstering domestic manufacturing, cutting regulations, and ending politically motivated debanking.Loeffler grew up on a family farm in Illinois, was the first in her family to graduate from college, and later became a successful businesswoman in finance and FinTech before becoming a U.S. senator and now head of the SBA.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

In this episode, we sit down with J. Michael Waller, a senior analyst for strategy at the Center for Security Policy and author of “Big Intel,” to understand the geopolitical implications of America’s capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro.“For the first time in a very long time, the President of the United States has reasserted the Monroe Doctrine to keep foreign empires out of our hemisphere,” he says.By capturing Maduro, President Donald Trump sent a signal to all of America’s adversaries, but first and foremost to communist China. “Trump has just pulled out a linchpin in an elaborate piece of machinery for the CCP’s sprawling global empire,” he says.How did Venezuela devolve from a once prosperous country into an authoritarian hub for drug cartels and a key node of Chinese and Iranian influence? How does Maduro’s capture affect Beijing’s strategy and calculations when it comes to Taiwan? How will this impact Cuba and Iran? And what does the future hold for Venezuela and its people?Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

“I’m seeing crime, chaos, and death on the streets of America. ... The homeless are being used. And Antifa, the far left activists, they want to keep the tent encampments on America’s streets to show that capitalism isn’t working,” said Jonathan Choe, a reporter for Turning Point USA’s Frontlines and a senior journalism fellow at the Discovery Institute.At Turning Point USA’s AmFest conference, I sat down with Choe to discuss his investigations into Antifa and the homelessness epidemic in America.While some nonprofits are really helping people, Choe said, he believes a sizable portion of the sector has become a multi-billion-dollar “cash cow” of grift and counterproductive aid.“For years now, the so-called experts of the medical community—instead of getting people into treatment and recovery—have been giving away free meth pipes, fentanyl foil,” he said.In 2025, he and several of his colleagues worked on a joint study by the Capital Research Center and the Discovery Institute that revealed a notable intersection between Antifa and the homelessness nonprofit space, he said.Antifa members have embedded in the homelessness nonprofit sector and many of them have day jobs in the space, he said.“A lot of [Antifa’s] ideas to bring communism, Marxism, to destabilize America, to usher in a brand new communist revolution that’s part of the homeless industrial complex now,” he said.In October 2025, Choe and other journalists, including Andy Ngo, participated in a White House roundtable to share their knowledge about Antifa with President Donald Trump.A month earlier, Trump had signed an executive order designating Antifa as a domestic terrorist organization. And in July 2025, he signed another order called “Ending Crime and Disorder on America’s Streets” that takes a more aggressive treatment-first instead of housing-first approach to homelessness.Many states, including Washington and California, are now suing the Trump administration.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.