American Thought Leaders

Underground and urban warfare have become the decisive battlegrounds of modern warfare, yet for a long time, military doctrine has been built to avoid both, said John Spencer, a retired U.S. Army major and chair of Urban Warfare Studies at West Point’s Modern War Institute.
He’s repeatedly embedded himself in active war zones, from Gaza to Ukraine, and personally walked through the nearly two-mile-long Hamas tunnel, wide enough to drive a truck through, that led from Gaza City right up to the Israel-Gaza border wall.
A leading expert on urban and underground warfare, he argues that subterranean warfare is spreading globally. He also argues that enemies of the West have deliberately weaponized the laws of war itself, using civilians as shields.
How can democratic nations defend themselves when non-state actors intentionally weaponize civilian deaths to create political leverage? How are manipulated statistics and social media disinformation warping the public’s understanding of modern-day battlefield realities? And what do we keep getting wrong about modern warfare?
Spencer is the author of the new book “Twenty Times I Almost Died: Life Lessons from the Edge of Survival.”
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Modern American politics is commonly framed as a face-off between traditional conservative and contemporary progressive values.

Bradley Thayer, author of “America’s 100 Years’ War,” argues that a closer look at the tactics shaping Western institutions reveals a deeper ideological struggle—one whose roots trace back to Vladimir Lenin.
In this episode, Thayer argues that what threatens America today extends far beyond traditional Marxist economics. He says that neo-Leninist strategies actively work to subvert democracy by hijacking civil society, destabilizing Western borders, and replacing individual rights with group identity.
Thayer addresses a host of critical questions: How did Soviet political warfare evolve into a privatized network operating within the United States? Why is the Chinese Communist Party best understood as an illegitimate colonial export of Soviet imperialism rather than an authentic Chinese polity? And how can Americans draw upon our founding principles to end this century-long war?
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Many people have come to accept pervasive surveillance as the price of modern life: that our phones, browsers, messages, purchases, and movements will inevitably be collected, analyzed, and sold to those with enough money or power.

For many, there’s a growing sense that true privacy is irrevocably lost, and resistance is largely futile.
Naomi Brockwell disagrees.
She is the president of the Ludlow Institute, and with her YouTube channel, she educates people about the many choices they can make to reclaim their privacy—without totally disconnecting from modern life.
“I, as an individual, can actually make choices that reclaim basically all of my privacy in the digital age,” she says.
She connects the dots between digital privacy and the survival of whistleblowers, investigative journalists, protest movements, and opposition parties—none of which can function without it.
Her message is that some things are worth fighting for: “Because submission is its own kind of death.”
Her institute recently helped draft a new bill that aims to restore Fourth Amendment protections in the digital era by requiring warrants for the government to access your data online.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Modern biology often posits Darwinian evolution and natural selection as a settled explanation for the vast complexity of the natural world. Yet, looking closely at the nanoscale machinery inside the cell reveals molecular systems that seem to defy a gradual, evolutionary unfolding, says Michael Behe, professor of biochemistry at Lehigh University and author of “Darwin’s Black Box,” “The Edge of Evolution,” and “Darwin Devolves.”

“I was startled to see that a foundation concept of my worldview had no support; that it was all built on social considerations,” Behe says.
Importantly, Behe points out that he is not rejecting Darwinian evolution in its entirety. Minor evolutionary adaptations are well-established, he says. But can Darwin’s theory of evolution adequately explain the origin of complex biological mechanisms that require many interlocking components to function at all?
Also, what do recent discoveries in molecular genetics reveal about the boundaries of natural evolution? And why is the scientific consensus on Darwin’s theory far less unanimous than it appears?
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 rare to see large-scale bronze installations built today. In Washington, D.C., as part of America’s 250th anniversary celebration, Matthew Taylor has transformed the long-neglected Freedom Plaza with a beautiful new memorial celebrating Revolutionary War heroes. He is an artist, filmmaker, and senior adviser at the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Among those featured in the new Spirit of ‘76 installation is Samuel Whittemore, who was 78 when he decided to join the Revolutionary War effort against the British.
“They bayoneted him 13 times. They shot him in the head and left him for dead, and yet he lived another 18 years to the age of 96,” says Taylor.
“The great thing about these soldiers is most of these people either don’t have statues [or] are not very well-known, and this shows that this is the common citizen,” he says.
These were “ordinary people doing extraordinary things to help create and build this nation,” he says.
The equestrian statue of Caesar Rodney—which had been taken down in Wilmington, Delaware, during the 2020 Black Lives Matter protests—is now also on display on a new pedestal in Freedom Plaza.
He epitomizes the extraordinary determination of those who secured American independence.
“He had facial cancer and emphysema, and he rode 80 miles overnight in a storm to sign and … be the tiebreaker, Delaware, which would ultimately create the Declaration of Independence,” Taylor 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.