American Thought Leaders

National security expert T. Casey Fleming is the CEO of BlackOps Partners, a strategy and cybersecurity consulting firm that he founded in 2008. He’s also the author of the new book, “The Red Tsunami: The Silent Storm Killing Your Freedom.”
“It may look like a book, but it’s a whistleblower’s exposé and survival guide. … It basically tells you what to do to protect yourself,” Fleming said.
“Number one: Stop buying Chinese products and services and stop investing in companies that are investing in China,” he said.
The Chinese Communist Party has been using what are known as unrestricted warfare tactics against the United States for decades, and on multiple fronts, he said. Its purpose is to weaken the enemy from within—without firing a single shot.
There are dozens of tactics, including, for instance, cognitive warfare, drug warfare, and biological warfare. These manifest in the deployment of TikTok—which remains a powerful cognitive weapon in the CCP’s arsenal, Fleming argued—as well as the spread of both COVID-19 and fentanyl addiction in America.
For years, Americans have largely failed to notice this pattern of unrestricted warfare and how the pieces fit together. “The mosaic effect is you see bits and pieces and you don’t connect them, and so it doesn’t really mean much to you. … When you connect the dots… it becomes the mosaic. You now see what your enemy is doing and what the end goal is, and how you need to protect yourself.”
Casey said he believes this silent, unrestricted war is the final war: “The world will be won or lost within the next 10 years or less.”
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

“You can’t abandon the concept of normality, or societies will just completely fall apart,” said developmental psychologist and social science scholar J.D. Haltigan.
There has been a tremendous push in mental health to destigmatize mental illness, he said, and people are encouraged to regard themselves as “some sort of heroic person for having [mental] disorders.”
This is true especially for mood disorders like depression and anxiety. People nowadays increasingly define themselves through mood disorders—especially women, who often are more prone than men to depression and internalization of anxiety, he said.
This apparent valorization of mental illness is closely linked to a growing feminization of society, Haltigan said. Males, he told me, “tend to systemize more,” while women “tend to be more empathetic.”
But in recent decades, that empathy has been weaponized, he argued: “We’ve come to basically hijack the feminine ethic of care, the feminine impulse to be empathetic.”
He said this may explain why anti-ICE protests tend to skew disproportionately towards females.
At the same time, he said, masculinity and the enforcement of laws and standards became demonized in society.
Haltigan’s departure from the University of Toronto in 2023 coincided with his growing concerns about what he described as increasing ideological pressures in academic research and restrictions on what researchers could say about mental health and early child development.
In our wide-ranging interview, we discuss these shifts in society, their impacts, and the role of social media in fueling these changes.
Now, Haltigan is an honorary research fellow at the Centre for Heterodox Social Science at the University of Buckingham in the United Kingdom.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

To understand the significance of the sweeping military purges in China and how Beijing is reacting to America’s war with Iran, I’m sitting down with eminent China scholar Robert Suettinger, a former CIA and State Department intelligence analyst, a senior advisor at The Stimson Center, and author of “The Conscience of the Party: Hu Yaobang, China’s Communist Reformer.”
“There’s no question of the fact that Xi Jinping is now less of a dominant leader than he was six or eight months ago,” Suettinger says.
Earlier this year, Xi purged two top generals from the CCP’s military brass, on the heels of earlier purges last year. Now, only two of the originally seven members of the Central Military Commission remain. One of them is Xi himself; the other one, General Zhang Shengmin, is a political commander and has, like Xi, no combat experience.
After the January purges, Xi issued an order to the military demanding that everyone acknowledge him as the head of the military commission. “The silence from all those military commands has been deafening and has been noticed by everybody,” Suettinger says.
In the Chinese Communist Party itself, Xi is also facing trouble.
The CCP is not a monolithic party, he told me, but a complex entity with many competing factions: “There’s a Shanghai group, there’s a Shandong group, there’s a Shaanxi group, and they all don’t like each other,” Suettinger says.
Suettinger believes that Xi’s many purges have unified opposition against him not only in the military but also within the Communist Party. “Xi is hated by almost everybody in China,” he said.
Another reason the cracks in the system, as he put it, are beginning to be more evident, is that the Chinese economy hasn’t been doing well in many years: “The Chinese people are very unhappy that their wealth opportunities are disappearing. Graduates coming out of colleges are not able to find good jobs. People who have good jobs are losing them. People who are operating in the gig economy are losing their jobs. The farmers don’t have anything to do when they go back home.”
People outside of China don’t usually know how poor vast numbers of Chinese citizens still are, Suettinger told me. China’s Premier Li Keqiang himself stated in May 2020 during a press conference that 600 million people live below the poverty line and don’t even earn enough to rent a room in mid-sized Chinese cities.
Where is China’s totalitarian system headed? The system, Suettinger argued, is way more fragile than it looks. “It is brittle, and when it breaks, it tends to break hard, and it tends to melt in ways that are not predictable,” he said.
Notably, the CCP has not come out to meaningfully support its longtime ally, Iran. The CCP has long utilized Iran to distract America and keep its focus on the Middle East, Suettinger says, but now, to Beijing’s chagrin, America is effectively neutralizing this longtime CCP proxy.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Harvard astrophysicist Avi Loeb is not your typical astronomer. For many years, he’s been scouring the universe for the abnormal and the unknown. “Brushing anomalies under the carpet of traditional thinking,” as he puts it, is anathema for him.
“One way to learn more,” he told me, “is to pay attention to the anomalies, because they may lead us to something that we’ve never thought about … Maybe they will open up our eyes to extra dimensions … or new physics.”
In 2021, Loeb founded the Harvard-based Galileo Project to speed up the scientific search for evidence of extraterrestrial objects. Since then, Loeb has been supervising the construction of three state-of-the-art observatories in the United States: one in Massachusetts, one in Pennsylvania and one in Nevada. They make use of machine learning models to identify unexplained anomalies and use triangulation to infer the distance of objects from Earth.
“Instead of waiting for the U.S. government to release its data, we just look up and ask, are there any objects up there that are not human-made? And of course, anything that is human-made is boring, as far as I’m concerned,” he said.
Did his observatories find evidence of objects that might be extraterrestrial? Perhaps. They detected objects that, as he said, “arrive in our backyard from outside the solar system.” Such interstellar objects were purely theoretical before 2017, when the first one was discovered. Since then, two more have been found. This, he told me, is the new frontier in astronomy.
But are these interstellar objects of natural origin? Many astronomers believe they are, but Loeb is not so sure. Take, for example, Oumuamua, the first recognized interstellar object ever discovered: Its core features are undisputedly abnormal. Oumuamua moved very quickly without a recognizable method of propulsion. And as it left the solar system, it accelerated to a degree that could not be explained by gravity alone.
Loeb has been arguing that Oumuamua might be an artificial light sail propelled by solar radiation pressure and built by ancient civilizations that exist or existed beyond our solar system.
“Most of the stars formed billions of years before the sun. The sun formed only 4.6 billion years ago … There was plenty of time for Voyager-like probes to arrive in the solar system. And so we are searching for any technological artifacts, objects very different from traditional SETI,” he said.
SETI stands for “Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence” and refers to a project dedicated to detecting advanced extraterrestrial civilizations.
Here are some of the many other topics we discussed in our wide-ranging interview:
-What is the origin of hypervelocity stars that race through the universe at a significant fraction of the speed of light? -Are there other dimensions beyond our own? -How would the discovery of extraterrestrial life impact religious views? -Is AI a form of alien intelligence?
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Pastor Bob Fu was a student leader during the 1989 Tiananmen democracy movement and later led an underground Chinese house church. In 1996, he was imprisoned for “illegal evangelism.”
He later fled China and came to the United States, where he founded ChinaAid, a Christian human‑rights organization that documents cases of persecution, provides legal aid, and advocates for religious freedom in China.
In this episode, we dive into the escalation of religious persecution in recent years in China, including the growing dehumanization of Christians.
Echoing Mao Zedong’s targeting of “five black classes” during the Cultural Revolution, in 2012, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders labelled Christian underground churches as one of five new “black classes” or black categories.
Fu says that the CCP’s leadership is determined to destroy the positive image that Chinese people have of Christian believers.
“Xi Jinping wants to play God,” Fu says. “The Communist Party treats these people as a threat to the regime’s existence. The goal is to eradicate Christian faith from the map of China.”
We also discuss a case now at the Supreme Court, Cisco v. Doe, which could have important repercussions for American companies that enable China’s human rights atrocities.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.