American Thought Leaders

Xi Van Fleet grew up in China during Mao Zedong’s Cultural Revolution. She was too young to be a real revolutionary Red Guard, but old enough to observe the astonishing scenes of violence and ideological fervor around her during those terrible years.I sat down with her to discuss her new book, “Made in America: The Hidden History of How the U.S. Enabled Communist China and Created Our Greatest Threat.”She says she felt compelled to write this book to help Americans understand the true nature of communism. Over the past hundred years or so, the United States has made one grave mistake after another because of this major blind spot, she says.In our deep-dive interview, Van Fleet takes me on a tour of China’s history starting in the late 19th century and explains how America—over and over again—made decisions that helped the Chinese Communist Party: first to gain influence, then to defeat the Nationalists led by Chiang Kai-shek, and eventually to rescue the CCP from certain collapse in the 1970s.By visiting Beijing and re-opening US-China relations at a time when China’s economy was in shambles, President Richard Nixon effectively “saved the CCP from the ruins,” she says.The history of how the United States helped the CCP survive is “hidden history,” as she calls it, one that is not taught in the schools and not discussed publicly: “A lot of people want to hide it. But in order for us to understand, we have to learn this very, very important piece of history that my book is all about.”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 no-holds-barred interview, Dr. Jay Bhattacharya, director of the National Institutes of Health, breaks down how the world’s largest public funder of biomedical research is changing under his leadership.Bhattacharya, a former professor of Stanford University, public health expert, and coauthor of the anti-lockdown Great Barrington Declaration, was sworn in as director of the NIH in April last year.With an annual budget of almost $50 billion, the NIH sets the direction of research at universities, medical centers, and research institutes across America.It encompasses 27 institutes and centers that cover different areas of health and employ some 20,000 people. One of those is the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which was headed by Dr. Anthony Fauci for nearly 40 years.The NIH, Bhattacharya told me, “really hasn’t had a change in leadership in decades. ... We’ve had new directors, but the fundamental structure and direction of the NIH has been basically the same until last year.”Bhattacharya says his top priority is to end the practice of “funding the scientific enterprise for the sake of funding science” and ensure that NIH-funded scientific research actually produces better health outcomes for the American people. The goal should be improvements in health and longevity, not just more scientific papers, he says.During our interview, we covered a lot of ground, including:-Has the NIH completely stopped funding gain-of-function research?-Is the NIH continuing to fund research with China?-How has funding for international research institutes been restructured?-Has the NIH stopped funding all research grants related to diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives?-What is being done to reverse the politicization of science?-What is the NIH doing to help those who suffered injuries from the mandated COVID-19 mRNA vaccines?-What can the NIH do to alleviate the massive replication crisis in research?-How does he view the controversy surrounding vaccines and autism? Is the NIH looking into potential links?-How is the NIH restructuring the allocation of funding?What America needs, Bhattacharya told me, is a “second scientific revolution,” saying: “The NIH has the capacity to induce that second scientific revolution. That’s what I’m going to work toward for the next few years.”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 2015, a whistleblower came forward to The Epoch Times to share an unthinkable story.Years before, while a resident doctor at one of China’s largest military hospitals, he was summoned one day with other doctors for a “secret military mission.” They were brought before a 17-year-old young soldier—bound so tightly that the ropes cut into his flesh—and ordered to pin the boy down and extract his kidneys and eyes.The young soldier had gotten on the wrong side of his army supervisor, and while imprisoned in military jail, military command discovered that he was a blood and tissue match with a high-ranking superior in need of an organ transplant.“When I looked at him, I saw fear in his eyes. His eyelids were moving. He was alive,” recounted the whistleblower Dr. George Zheng.His testimony is featured in the harrowing documentary “State Organs,” directed by Peabody Award-winning filmmaker Raymond Zhang.A powerful film that exposes the brutal reality of China’s forced organ harvesting industry, the documentary follows two families’ decades-long search for their disappeared loved ones. It’s a story of tragedy and brutal inhumanity, but also faith and redemption.It seems the film hit such a nerve in Beijing that theaters in Taiwan received threatening letters and even bomb threats ahead of film screenings.In this special episode, I sat down with Zhang to hear about his incredible journey of making this film and what he uncovered along the way.“State Organs” is now streaming on Apple TV, Amazon Prime Video, YouTube, etc. Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Matthew Spalding is a professor of constitutional government at Hillsdale College and author of “The Making of the American Mind: The Story of The Declaration of Independence.”A century ago, progressive historian Carl Becker argued that whether or not we have natural, inalienable rights as described in the Declaration had become a meaningless question. He believed that the idea of natural rights was not a veritable truth but merely a creed or faith of the men of his time and a product of historical circumstances.Spalding disagrees. He argues that the existence of natural rights and natural law lies at the very heart of the Declaration of Independence. “It’s a claim of truth,” Spalding says.Spalding regards the Declaration as America’s “epic poetry”: “It’s the heart of America ... really the heart of Western civilization.”The founders saw themselves as part of, and as a continuation of, a deep and long tradition, in particular the Greek, Roman, and Judeo-Christian beliefs in natural law and free will.However, after the American Civil War, early American progressives no longer viewed it that way, he says.Their goal was to transform the United States into what they considered a modern state, and they turned away from natural law and God-given rights, and they viewed the U.S. Constitution as a “living document.”Now more than ever, it is vital to rediscover the true meaning and importance of the Declaration, Spalding argues.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 significant industry has emerged of expectant mothers flying from China to states such as California or U.S. territories such as Saipan to give birth to American citizens, says investigative reporter Peter Schweizer.As soon as the newborn is old enough to fly, mother and child travel back to China with their babies. Chinese state-run media began promoting such services years ago, Schweizer says.“They are exploiting this on a massive scale,” Schweizer said. “It’s industrial, and we are completely oblivious to it.”He estimates there are tens of thousands of such cases per year. When the child turns 21, their parents can then potentially claim green cards through them.There are also growing anecdotes of surrogacy as another preferred route.“Politically connected elites in China ... are hiring women in the United States to carry their children. They call them carriers. And these women are American citizens,” Schweizer says.Schweizer is the author of multiple New York Times bestsellers, including most recently “The Invisible Coup: How American Elites and Foreign Powers Use Immigration as a Weapon.”In this episode, he breaks down some of the incredible findings of his book.Over the course of history, “migration has oftentimes been used as a weapon: a weapon of subversion, a weapon to overwhelm an enemy, a weapon to divide an enemy, a weapon to sow chaos,” he 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.

“We are witnessing the turning point of the Chinese Communist Party rule. … The chain of command in the military is totally broken,” says veteran China analyst and Epoch Times columnist Heng He.On Jan. 24, China’s Ministry of National Defense announced that two top military generals, Zhang Youxia and Liu Zhenli, were under investigation for “serious disciplinary and legal violations.” This comes on the heels of a series of purges of Chinese military leaders.Of the seven original members of China’s Central Military Commission, five have now effectively been purged or removed. Only two remain. And one of those two is Xi Jinping himself.In my deep-dive interview with He, he lays out why he’s convinced the latest purges are the signs of something historic happening in China.“They have open rules, and they have hidden rules. But what Xi Jinping did was against every single rule,” He says.What’s really going on behind the scenes now? And what does this turmoil mean for the Chinese Communist Party’s plans to invade Taiwan? What are the policy implications for the United States?Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Dr. Joanna Moncrieff is a British psychiatrist and author of “Chemically Imbalanced: The Making and Unmaking of the Serotonin Myth.” She challenges the long-held belief that depression is caused by a lack of the hormone serotonin.“The serotonin myth … was first put out there in the 1960s, then picked up by the pharmaceutical industry in the 1990s and widely propagated by them as part of their campaign to sell SSRIs, their new generation of antidepressants,” she said.Contrary to what many people still believe, there’s no evidence that depression is caused by a lack of serotonin in the brain, Moncrieff said.“A few years ago, we published what’s called an umbrella review, a sort of meta review of all the different areas of research that have looked at this. … And we show that there is no consistent or convincing evidence in any of these areas of research for any association between serotonin and depression. So hence, the idea is a myth,” she said.In our interview, she explains how this narrative took hold and how it reshaped modern psychiatry.So what causes depression if not a lack of serotonin? Dr. Moncrieff, who is a professor of critical and social psychiatry at University College London, regards depression as “meaningful human reactions to the circumstances of life now, and that is indeed how people used to think about them.”It’s not a biological disease, she said, but a normal reaction that anyone may experience at times throughout life.“It’s not something that we naturally just get over in a couple of weeks. It can take weeks and months of grieving, even for a short-term relationship that’s finished.”To label deep sadness as a pathological medical condition that needs to be fixed with drugs is the wrong approach and precludes seeing a person “who is suffering, who is going through a period of difficulty and trying to work out what that is and how we can support them with it,” Moncrieff 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.

Erin Friday is an attorney and the co-lead of Our Duty, a parent-led international organization that opposes transgender procedures for minors.When her daughter was 13 years old, she began identifying as male, and school staff began using a male name and pronouns to address her—without the knowledge or consent of her parents.When Friday found out, she called the school and told them to stop. A week later, Child Protective Services showed up at her door—followed by the police a day later. No action was taken against Friday, but it was an alarming experience for her.A few months later, her daughter ran away in the middle of the night. Under normal circumstances, a parent would probably call the police, but Friday didn’t dare to, having heard about parents who had lost custody of their children when they refused to go along with their child’s transgender identity.“It’s two o‘clock in the morning, three o’clock in the morning, and I can’t make that phone call because I know that there’s already a file open on me, and that Child Protective Services can swoop in at any time and take my child,” Friday said.“I made a deal that if I could safeguard my daughter from this—which I did—that I would help save other parents and save other children.”For years now, she has joined the legal fight against school policies that allow social transitioning of minors without parental consent and medical guidelines that support puberty blockers and hormones for minors.“When have we ever treated a mental illness by cutting off body parts?” Friday says.In our wide-ranging interview, we discuss the legal battles Friday has been involved in against Child Protective Services and the state of California over the past few years.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy recently unveiled a new food pyramid and dietary guidelines for Americans that emphasize high-quality protein, dairy, healthy fats, vegetables, and fruits. Whole grains are downgraded, and processed foods and added sugars are discouraged.“We’ve been consuming this ultra-processed food, which I call human pet food,” says Dr. Shawn Baker. A former orthopedic surgeon and world champion athlete, he’s the author of “The Carnivore Diet” and co-founder of the online clinic Revero.“A lot of our food has become very similar to recreational drugs in the way we use and abuse them,” he says.Eating a lot of addictive, ultra-processed food—high in carbs, sugars, and seed oils—drives inflammation and can lead to obesity, diabetes, arthritis, cardiovascular problems, gut malfunction, depression, and cancers, he explains.In our in-depth interview, he explains how and why the adoption of low-carb, high-fat diets reduces inflammation and can even reverse chronic diseases such as diabetes and cardiometabolic disease.There is even significant evidence that such diets can be used therapeutically for neurological and mental health issues, he says.One of those low-carb, high-fat diets is the ketogenic diet. But what happens when you take keto one step further and go on the carnivore diet?“Carnivore is basically a diet consisting primarily of animal products. So it would be meat. It would be fish. It would be eggs. It would be dairy products,” he says. This means no plant products at all.The carnivore diet is not for everyone, but many people suffering from debilitating autoimmune diseases have healed themselves with such a diet, he says. Mikhaila Peterson has famously documented her transformative experience on an even more restricted version of this diet called the “lion diet.”In our in-depth interview, we discuss many more questions regarding food as medicine and the benefits of a protein-heavy diet, including:- Why people on ketogenic or carnivore diets experience something called ‘keto calm’ or ‘zero carb zen.’- Why going on the carnivore diet does not harm your nutritional intake, contrary to what many may think.- Why such diets can help reverse inflammatory bowel disease, Tourette syndrome, and hypermobility, also known as Ehlers-Danlos syndrome.It’s time for Americans to stop simply relying on America’s “disease management system” of drugs and pharmaceuticals, he argues, and instead take their health into their own hands.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 typical vaccine stimulates a person’s immune system, yet only a portion of the immune response actually targets the disease it’s designed to protect against. However, a new technology may be changing that dynamic.In this episode, I sit down with Lou Reese, an entrepreneur who has led or co-founded several biotech companies and has been working on synthetic peptide-based active immunotherapy medicines. He’s co-CEO of United Biomedical and co-founder of Vaxxinity, Cana Life, and Axxium.He’s working on a product that could—if proven successful—transform our approach to treating and preventing Alzheimer’s. He and his team also have a product that has shown preliminary promise in phase 1 trials in treating Parkinson’s.In this episode, he also reveals an incredible story: He and his team previously developed a peptide-based active immunotherapy vaccine candidate for COVID-19, and they successfully completed Phase 1 and Phase 2 trials. Institutional backing, however, favored Pfizer and Moderna. In 2022, Lou Reese’s team was invited to the White House “Summit on the Future of COVID‑19 Vaccines,” where they presented their candidate as an alternative to Pfizer’s mRNA vaccine, which by then had been associated with serious side effects.In the end, their product was never approved, and related content on YouTube was marked as misinformation.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

An estimated one in six American adults today are taking some form of psychiatric medication. Yet it seems mental health outcomes across America have seen no significant improvement, despite the promises of the psychopharmacology revolution.David Cohen, professor of social welfare and associate dean at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs, argues that many of the core assumptions of modern psychiatry are flawed.Cohen is known for his research on psychotropic drugs and coercive mental health treatment.In our interview, we also discuss why it is that America has one of the highest involuntary mental hospitalization rates in Western countries, and what it means that suicide rates are exceedingly high among people who were just released from a mental hospital.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

“Minnesota … is just the tip of the iceberg,” says Dr. Mehmet Oz, the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS).Minnesota has become the epicenter of several overlapping fraud investigations of childcare programs, small business pandemic loans, and Medicaid services. Earlier this month, Dr. Oz traveled to Minnesota to tour suspected fraud sites and meet with whistleblowers and announced that over $2 billion in annual Medicaid funding might be withheld.“What we’re seeing in Minnesota, which is billions of dollars of fraud that hurts our most vulnerable people and puts them at risk … is dwarfed by what I saw in California, which is whole-scale cultural malfeasance around health care,” Dr. Oz says.“The magnitude of fraud there, we believe, is approximating $4 billion just in hospice and home health care,” he says.Dr. Oz oversees programs that together constitute about one-fourth of the entire U.S. federal budget.In this episode, he breaks down how the home health care and hospice systems are being exploited on a massive scale and also how Medicare beneficiary numbers are being stolen and weaponized for fraudulent billing schemes.As the administration approaches its one‑year mark, he reflects on efforts to cut waste, lower drug prices, and transform health in America.President Donald Trump has recently unveiled his new “Great Healthcare Plan” to lower prices and increase transparency.“For decades, Americans have been paying three times more than Europeans and other developed nations have been paying for the exact same drugs made in the same facilities,” Dr. Oz 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.

One of the first executive orders President Donald Trump signed after his inauguration last January was titled “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.” The order directed the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to produce a systematic review of pediatric transgender procedures and their impact on children within 90 days.In May 2025, HHS published a more than 400-page review, titled “Treatment for Pediatric Gender Dysphoria: Review of Evidence and Best Practices.” In November last year, an updated, peer-reviewed version was published with additional appendices and supplements.Leor Sapir, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is one of the report’s main outside co-authors. In our in-depth interview, Sapir provides a detailed overview of the review’s findings and conclusions.“We tried to be as factual and defensible as we possibly could,” he said.The goal of the report, he says, is to “engage with people in the medical profession who may not be aligned with the administration, but who do care about questions of medical evidence and medical ethics.”In this episode, he breaks down:- The prevalence of sex-changing procedures in the United States, as well as the reversal in approaches in various Scandinavian countries and in the UK.- How misleading and unscientific language was used by professionals across many fields to promote pediatric sex transitioning.- The role of the organization, World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), in establishing “gender-affirming care” as the accepted standard.- How clinicians, in his view, distorted the principle of patient autonomy to increase pediatric sex change surgeries.There is one chapter in the report that everyone should read, Sapir said. And that is the chapter about ethics.“The question on everybody’s mind is: Should we do it? That’s an ethical question. And medical ethics is, you would hope, [what] governs the field of medicine,” he told me.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

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.

Former New York Times reporter and now independent journalist Alex Berenson is the author of “Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence.”In this episode, we dive into the debate around cannabis and THC and President Donald Trump’s recent executive order directing the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) to reclassify marijuana from a Schedule I to a Schedule III drug.Berenson argues that it’s a bad move. Schedule I substances are defined as having high potential for abuse and no accepted medical use. Schedule III substances, in contrast, have medical uses and are regarded as having only moderate to low potential for abuse.Rescheduling marijuana sends the wrong signal, Berenson says: “Do we want to be a society that, in general, encourages drug use?”He believes the use of drugs should be stigmatized, including the use of marijuana: “In the U.S. we can’t stigmatize. And not to stigmatize in this case, as in so many cases, means we can’t be honest.”In my interview with Berenson, he provides an overview of the dangers of marijuana use and why these have increased dramatically over the last half-century.“Fifty years ago, cannabis that was in a joint that you smoked at Woodstock ... that might have been 1 or 2 percent THC, so a few milligrams of cannabis in a joint. ... When I was growing up in the ‘80s or in the ’90s, it might have been 5 percent THC. Now, if you go into a dispensary ... the bud tender will sell you a product that is 20 percent to 30 percent THC, if it’s flower cannabis,” he said.And if it’s not smoked but vaped, then “that might be 95 percent THC. This is not a plant at all. It’s just a chemical to get you high,” Berenson said. “Now you can walk around with this little device and inhale massive amounts of THC, and that really is a change that has made the product a lot more dangerous.”There is also a well-established link, Berenson says, between high-potency, frequent marijuana use, and severe mental health impacts such as psychosis and schizophrenia.There’s even research suggesting THC causes heart damage. “There is a link to myocardial infarction, heart attacks, and that link is pretty strong. You can find papers that show a 3x increase over a multi-year period,” he said.But what about its benefits as a pain reliever? Berenson said that he was surprised to discover that placebo-controlled studies showed only small and short-term pain relief effects.“What cannabis and THC are really good at is enhancing sensation ... but if you’re in pain, in the long run, enhancing sensation actually is not a good thing for you. ... And so the idea that cannabis is a substitute or a way out of our opioid problem is just not true,” Berenson said.“We as a society have to ... be honest with ourselves about what we are doing and what we are encouraging kids to do,” he said.In our wide-ranging interview, we also discuss the overprescription crisis in America, the dangers of SSRIs, psychedelics, and stimulants such as Adderall that around 10 percent of teenage boys are taking in the United States, and his thoughts on vaccine policy in America.Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

At age 12, Chloe Cole began identifying as male and started socially transitioning. Soon after, she was put on puberty blockers. Testosterone injections followed at age 13, and she underwent a double mastectomy at 15.Shortly after the surgery, she realized that it had all been a terrible mistake: “I didn’t believe that I was a boy ... until that idea was put in my head.”When she decided to detransition, the community that once eagerly encouraged her to transition into a boy treated her like she was “subhuman,” she says.“The moment that I detransitioned, I was human garbage to them,” she says.Now she has become one of the most vocal critics of what’s been dubbed “gender-affirming care” for minors.Under the Trump administration, several measures have been put in place to end the medical transitioning of minors: In January, President Donald Trump issued the executive order “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.”Earlier this month, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services proposed a new rule that prohibits hospitals that perform “sex-rejecting” procedures on minors from participation in Medicare and Medicaid Programs. HHS Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. recently spoke out against such procedures for minors and described them as medical malpractice.And days ago, the House of Representatives voted to pass a bill that could imprison health care providers for providing these procedures to minors.Cole, who is 21 years old today, supports such measures to put an end to medical transitioning of minors, but she’s convinced that this is not enough: “This doesn’t end with bans. We have to go all out and hold everybody who was involved accountable.”And that’s what she’s doing: Cole filed a high-profile lawsuit in California against her healthcare provider, Kaiser Permanente, as well as her surgeon, endocrinologist, and the psychologist who referred her to surgery, alleging medical negligence, lack of informed consent, and fraud in placing her on puberty blockers, testosterone, and performing a double mastectomy.Her legal team, among them Dhillon Law Group and the Center for American Liberty, has added punitive damages claims, presenting her case as a test of whether “gender-affirming” treatment for minors will be treated as malpractice in U.S. courts.“It’s something that has to be illegalized on both the state and federal level, so that no child ever is going to be hurt ever again,” she said, adding, “We have to go after the manufacturers or the drugs of the medical devices that they are giving to children.”Since 2022, Chloe has testified before multiple state legislatures. She also testified in the 2023 U.S. House Judiciary Committee hearing titled “The Dangers and Due Process Violations of ‘Gender-Affirming Care’ for Children.”“Testimonies of people like me, who come out of it, who speak to the truth, are so threatening to them, because it completely dismantles their ideology,” she 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.