American Thought Leaders

Katharine Birbalsingh has been deemed “Britain’s Strictest Headmistress”—and she wears the title proudly. Founder of Michaela Community School in London, Birbalsingh has built one of the UK’s top-performing schools by rejecting the educational fads of the last generation and returning to older principles: discipline, personal responsibility, and patriotism.

The Michaela Community School is an inner-city, non-selective charter school. Despite three and a half years of opposition from unions and councils, Birbalsingh fought to be able to provide a good schooling alternative for London’s poorer communities. And she’s succeeded. Her school has repeatedly ranked No. 1 in student progress in the entire country, and thousands of visitors from around the world have come to study and learn from her model.
In this episode, Birbalsingh reveals how Western institutions have quietly abandoned the moral formation of children. This, she argues, has driven civilizational decline more than any policy failure. Birbalsingh argues that many of today’s schools immerse children in a culture of grievance and victimhood rather than agency and duty.
Birbalsingh details the three pillars of Michaela’s educational approach: discipline, teacher-led instruction, and what she calls “small-c conservative values,” such as self-sacrifice, ownership, and accountability.
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’s one place in America where Chinese nationals can enter without a visa.
It’s called the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands (CNMI), a U.S. territory in the Pacific, right by Guam. And it has become a major security loophole for Chinese Communist Party (CCP) influence operations as well as Chinese organized crime and birth tourism ventures, said Cleo Paskal, a senior fellow at the Compass Institute.
Yet there has been little political will in Washington to close this loophole, Paskal argues.
In this episode, Paskal breaks down the CCP’s aggressive influence and gray-zone warfare operations in this region—areas critical to U.S. defense in any Taiwan conflict—and why this matters for U.S. security.
Every U.S. president who served in the Pacific theater in World War II understood that the security of the American mainland depends on a secure Pacific perimeter, Paskal said.
As such, in addition to two U.S. territories in the region, the United States has maintained Compacts of Free Association with Palau, the Federated States of Micronesia, and the Marshall Islands since the end of World War II.
These treaties give the U.S. military exclusive defense and strategic access to these countries in exchange for U.S. security guarantees and economic support.
But the Chinese Communist Party has sought to aggressively expand its influence in these islands through pressure, gray zone warfare, and disinformation campaigns. Amid all this, U.S. funding for these compacts nearly lapsed in recent years, because many in Washington apparently have forgotten their importance.
In this episode, Paskal walks me through a key question: if the security of America’s mainland has always depended on control of the central Pacific, what consequences will we pay now that so few Americans know these islands—or their citizens—even exist?
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 is becoming increasingly common to hear the American Dream is dead, with young people today often citing housing prices, the difficulty of finding jobs, and tax burdens.

Forbes Media chairman Steve Forbes has a very different take.
“A free people always finds ways to move ahead, even though times and circumstances change. The problems we face today are not anything inherent in America, but in mistakes made by government. And the nice thing about that is mistakes can be undone,” Forbes said.
He’s the editor-in-chief of Forbes Media and the co-author of “Inflation: What It Is, Why It’s Bad, and How to Fix It.”
In this wide-ranging episode, filmed at the FreedomFest conference in Las Vegas, we dove into the rise of democratic socialist candidates, DEI hiring, inflation, how the United States should approach Taiwan and Iran, and the basic truth about prosperity that no one is teaching today.
At the heart of this conversation is an extremely hopeful message: “Human ingenuity is unlimited. Have faith in the 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.

Nigeria has become perhaps the deadliest place on earth for Christians, accounting for the vast majority of Christians killed worldwide for faith-related reasons.

Beyond the killings, millions more have been displaced into camps, where many now die slowly from malnutrition rather than violence, says Judd Saul.
He is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, entrepreneur, and Christian missionary based in Iowa who founded Equipping the Persecuted, an organization dedicated to helping Christians facing jihadi violence in Nigeria.
Saul first traveled to Nigeria in 2011 on a mission trip with his grandfather, Duane Wessels.
It was an experience that reshaped the direction of his life and work. Since then, he has visited Nigeria multiple times a year.
In our interview, Saul explains what forces drive the violence against Christian Nigerians, who make up about 50 percent of the population.
“This is a well-organized and funded Fulani Islamic militia who are hell-bent on turning Nigeria into a caliphate,” he told me.
According to Saul, an estimated 5,000 to 10,000 Christians are killed each year, averaging about 35 deaths per day.
Roughly 800 Christian communities have been wiped off the map over the past three decades.
Views expressed in this video are the opinions of the host and the guest and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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Freya India is the author of “Girls: Generation Z and the Commodification of Everything.”
In this episode, India unpacks how the rise of social media has radically transformed how young women view themselves and the world. She argues that an increasing number of young women no longer view themselves as human beings, but as products competing in a marketplace of likes and followers.
India describes the pressure she felt growing up in the age of social media.
“I really felt like I had to sell my life to strangers constantly,” she said.
From Snapchat’s public friend rankings to TikTok’s algorithms that flood vulnerable users with more of what destabilizes them, many various social platforms are engineered to exploit the very insecurities almost all young people have, she argues.
In this episode, we dive into many important questions: Why are so many young women today anxious or unhappy? How has the messaging of modern feminism affected young women—and what are the true consequences? How has ubiquitous pornography altered relationships, and how is it especially impacting young men? And what may help shrink the growing rift between young men and women today?
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.