American Thought Leaders

Ian Rowe is a charter school founder who believes hard work and accountability—and rejecting victimhood—are the secrets to a good education.

His school Vertex Partnership Academies just celebrated its first graduating class, with students moving on to college, the military, and futures that once felt out of reach in an area where only 7 percent of kids typically graduate college-ready.
His newest project, Westchester Aerospace and Virtues Academy (WAVA), pairs a classical education with a surprising real-world specialty: aviation and aerospace training.
Students will study great books and Western civilization while also learning air traffic control, piloting, aircraft maintenance, airport management, and related trades. The school will sit right next to Westchester County Airport in New York, so students can watch planes and hear real air traffic control, making technical training part of everyday school life.
So why aerospace—in an age when AI is upending every industry?
“While artificial intelligence is going to affect every industry … there will always be a need for some kind of aircraft to transport people from one location to the other,” Rowe says.
“The best defense against the worst excesses of artificial intelligence is to ensure that our students are steeped in the other form of AI—and that is ancient intelligence … virtue, moral formation, character development.”
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Ahead of the Republican Senate primary runoff tomorrow in South Carolina, I’m sitting down with Rep. Ralph Norman (R-S.C.) as he and Sen. Darline Graham make their final appeals to South Carolinian voters.

In this episode, Norman dives into his core political priorities, emphasizing fiscal conservatism, securing the integrity of elections through the SAVE America Act, and reforming major entitlement programs.
Drawing on his background in the private sector, Norman said Washington needs more business-minded leaders who understand how to balance a budget and tackle national debt.
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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In this episode, Adm. Brian Christine, assistant secretary for health at the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), joins me to break down a major new HHS report on gender medicine, the unspoken consequences of transgender procedures, the incentives involved, and how investigators uncovered potentially millions of dollars in fraudulent billing.
Christine reveals how certain diagnostic codes were used to circumvent both the difficulties of insurance reimbursement and laws in certain states that prohibited transgender procedures. Investigators found that coding for unspecified endocrine disorders accounted for more than $40 million in potentially fraudulent billing for puberty blockers. And a diagnosis of “precocious puberty” was used for over $11 million in billing for patients aged 13 to 17.
Financial incentives combined with the ideological capture of medical institutions create a dangerous mix, Christine warns. But this report, he said, is tremendously hopeful in spotlighting the bad science and bad actors that made the alleged abuses possible.
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 trove of newly released documents, colloquially known as the “Fauci Diaries,” offer an unusually revealing window into the decisions and dynamics that shaped the COVID-19 era.

Jeffrey Tucker spent days reading all the documents—over 1,100 pages of materials—which were prepared within the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and appear to have been intended, at least in part, as the foundation for an autobiography.
Tucker argues that these records offer key insights into what Dr. Anthony Fauci knew, when he knew it, and how that knowledge influenced public messaging and policy.
We discuss the early push for an mRNA vaccine, the influential WHO delegation to China in February 2020, the origins and consequences of lockdown policies, and Fauci’s relationship with the media.
Why did so many countries adopt elements of China’s COVID response? What do the documents reveal about the debate over the lab-leak theory? And why did the vaccination push intensify even as breakthrough infections became increasingly apparent?
We also examine the clash between Fauci and President Donald Trump, the treatment of dissenting scientists behind the Great Barrington Declaration, and the broader question of how the official history of the pandemic will be written.
Dr. Fauci did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Newly released documents reveal how evidence of Chinese penetration of voter registration files and plots to interfere in the election were withheld or downplayed.

The new files reveal one of the intelligence officers said they “deliberately massaged” the presidential daily briefing in 2020 to downplay election-related information, with another stating, “I’m basically running a shadow government across the FBI at this point.”
John Solomon is chair of the White House Government Transparency Task Force, an award-winning journalist, and founder of Just the News. He breaks down key documents his task force has released—and what more we can expect to see in the coming days and months.
Newly declassified documents also upend the prevailing narrative on the Biden–Ukraine story, revealing how the FBI allegedly ran a secret operation known as Round River. According to the documents, it labelled whistleblowers as Russian “conduits” and dismissed the evidence they provided on the Biden family as “Russian disinformation.”
John Solomon places Round River within a broader sequence of FBI operations targeting Trump that included Crossfire Hurricane, Plasmic Echo, and Arctic Frost. This is “a wash, rinse, repeat cycle,” he said, going all the way back to the 2016 election and the debunked “Trump–Russia collusion” narrative.
In this episode, we examine questions of accountability, the extent of the cover-up, and whether FBI Director Kash Patel will be successful in building a “grand conspiracy” case.
Note: This interview was filmed before the latest document drop related to former Rep. Eric Swalwell and alleged Chinese operative Fang Fang.
Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.