American Thought Leaders - The Epoch Times

What shocked Alex Berenson most in his marijuana research was not the psychosis link, but these two things: emerging data on severe heart damage in young users and spikes in high‑speed crashes after legalization. “There's increasing evidence in the last ten years that cannabis and THC…can cause really severe heart damage. There is a link to myocardial infarction, heart attacks, and that link is pretty strong. Now you can find papers that show a 3x increase over a multi-year period, and these are young people,” he says. States that have legalized marijuana use have also seen a lot more high-speed car accidents, directly contradicting the popular belief that cannabis users drive more slowly or cautiously. 🔴 WATCH FULL: https://ept.ms/3YWXEWo

Journalist and marijuana expert Alex Berenson is convinced that Trump made a mistake with his executive order rescheduling the drug to Schedule III. Jan asked him why: “Cannabis and THC are really good at doing one thing, getting people high. That's what they're good at,” he told me. According to him, they are not useful as pain killers: “You don't find lasting effects of pain relief from cannabis. I think the reason for that is that what cannabis is really good at, what THC is 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.” Nor does he think studies show that marijuana is beneficial against cancer and other health conditions. https://rumble.com/v73r1ie-marijuana-does-not-work-as-pain-killer-says-alex-berenson.html

“Definitely he made a mistake,” was Alex Berenson’s unequivocal response when I asked him about President Trump’s executive order regarding the rescheduling of marijuana from Schedule I to Schedule III. Berenson is convinced that the move sends the wrong signal: “Do we want to be a society that, in general, encourages drug use?” A former New York Times reporter and now independent journalist, Berenson is the author of “Tell Your Children: The Truth About Marijuana, Mental Illness, and Violence.” According to him, the use of drugs should be stigmatized - including the use of marijuana: “Why wouldn't we want to stigmatize drug use? Why wouldn't we want to stigmatize THC use?” 🔴 PREMIERE 9PM ET on @EpochTV: https://ept.ms/3YWXEWo

“It’s not about revenge. It is about accountability.” Chloe Cole underwent a double mastectomy at 15 years old. Now, she’s suing Kaiser Permanente and her doctors—not just for herself, but to set a legal precedent that could protect countless children and families, she says. “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…We have to go after the manufacturers of the drugs or the medical devices that they are giving to children.” 🔴 WATCH FULL: https://ept.ms/4qAxvZy

This is the harrowing reality of what detransitioners face, says Chloe Cole: “The moment that I detransitioned, I was human garbage to them. I was subhuman even. … They told me: ‘This is all your fault. Don't put this on us. You were the one who said yes, you were the one who wanted this. You were a complete idiot for not knowing that you weren't truly transgender. So don't come crying to us. And you should shut up about this because you might scare somebody out of getting the care that they really need.’ …There were people who were trying to compel me to retransition, people who were trying to tell me to kill myself, even just for the fact that I was going against the dogma.” https://rumble.com/v73nysk-i-was-human-garbage-to-them-chloe-cole-on-the-harrowing-realities-of-detran.html

“The moment that I detransitioned, I was human garbage to them,” says Chloe Cole. At just 12 years old, she began identifying as male and socially transitioning. Soon after came puberty blockers. Then testosterone injections. By 15, an irreversible double mastectomy. Then came the realization: it was all a terrible mistake. When she decided to detransition, the same movement that eagerly encouraged her to transition now treated her as “subhuman,” she says. RFK Jr. has now condemned and announced major new restrictions on these “sex-rejecting” medical procedures. For Chloe and others who have been sounding the alarm for years, it’s a long-overdue turning point—one she calls “incredibly vindicating.” But this is only the beginning, says Chloe, who is now 21. “This doesn't end with bans. We have to go all out and hold everybody who was involved accountable.” 🔴 PREMIERE 9PM ET on @EpochTV: https://ept.ms/4qAxvZy

“If you look at all the various definitions of hate speech across European statute books, none of them agree. No one knows what it is really,” says comedian and writer Andrew Doyle, the author of “Free Speech and Why It Matters.” The concept of hate speech is being used to erode free speech across Europe, Doyle says. “No one can define hate speech. No one knows what it means. … You can't wish away a human emotion with the stroke of a pen. You may as well try and legislate against envy. It doesn't make sense,” he says. Free speech, he says, is never something that’s won, it’s something that needs to be fought for always. 🔴 WATCH FULL: https://ept.ms/3YNS6NW

The UK's grooming gang scandals is a clear example of the failures of multiculturalism, argues Andrew Doyle. The official Jay Report found an estimated 1,400 children were abused and sexually exploited between 1997 and 2013. Children as young as 11 were trafficked, beaten, and raped by multiple perpetrators, predominantly men of Pakistani heritage. "So great was the fear of being accused of racism, so great was this sense that we have to have community cohesion, that they were willing to allow the mass rape of children to preserve the myth that multiculturalism has been a success," Doyle says. https://rumble.com/v73jeju-andrew-doyle-the-grooming-gangs-scandal-and-the-failures-of-multiculturalis.html

Have we reached the end of wokeism? Comedian and author Andrew Doyle thinks yes—but he believes a new form of authoritarianism will replace it. “Woke is the latest manifestation of the authoritarian impulse that recurs throughout human history…Wokeness was just the latest version of it,” he says. His latest book is titled “The End of Woke: How the Culture War Went Too Far and What to Expect from the Counter-Revolution.” 🔴 PREMIERE 5PM ET on @EpochTV: https://ept.ms/3YNS6NW

Alan Cassels, author of “Selling Sickness,” says his entire view of medicine changed 30 years ago because of one disease: osteoporosis. In the early 1990s, a major pharmaceutical company created a new drug to treat this condition at a time when it was not well understood and there was not a clearly agreed upon definition. Representatives from pharmaceutical companies and doctors convened at the WHO and decided which level of bone density ought to be considered “normal.” As a result, some 50 percent of the female population over 70 now would be considered to have osteoporosis. They effectively “medicalized normal aging of the basically entire female population. Overnight,” he says. 🔴 WATCH FULL: https://ept.ms/3YFlxBN

“American medicine is on steroids,” says drug policy researcher Alan Cassels, co-author of “Selling Sickness: How the World's Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients.” America is one of only two countries that allow direct-to-consumer drug advertising, which works in two ways: it exposes millions of Americans to constant disease mongering, and it makes mainstream media heavily reliant upon pharma ad dollars. This then affects editorial decisions in the newsroom, he says. And this explains why few Americans know the story of the pain reliever drug Vioxx, Cassels says. This is the story he told me: “I did this little experiment with friends of mine a few months ago. I went to a reunion of a bunch of old Navy buddies… We're in our 60s, successful businessmen. Some are doctors, some are lawyers. And I asked them: ‘You guys ever heard of the term Vioxx?’ And they said: ‘What's that? Vioxx?’’ I said: ‘Have you ever heard of the Vietnam War?’ ‘Oh, yeah, of course… everyone's heard of the Vietnam War.’’ ‘’Did you know that Vioxx, which was a major pharmaceutical in the early 2000s, was taken by hundreds of thousands of Americans and killed 60,000 Americans in three years from excess heart attacks and strokes? The Vietnam War took 12 years of American involvement to kill about 60,000 Americans. So Vioxx did in three years what took the Viet Cong 12 years in terms of killing Americans.” And what was so astonishing about this is that this is…the biggest drug disaster probably in our lifetime, and these guys hadn't ever heard of it.” https://rumble.com/v73e7ma-how-a-pain-reliever-killed-as-many-americans-in-3-years-as-the-vietnam-war-.html

“We get a lot of inappropriate over-prescribing for almost everything,” argues drug policy researcher Alan Cassels. He’s the co-author of “Selling Sickness: How the World's Biggest Pharmaceutical Companies Are Turning Us All Into Patients.” For Cassels, it was one disease in particular that changed his entire view of medicine: osteoporosis. Based on arbitrarily changing definitions of the disease, large swaths of Americans could suddenly be declared sick and in urgent need of drug treatment. “What you ended up doing is you medicalized normal aging of the basically entire female population. Overnight.” 🔴 PREMIERE 9PM ET on @EpochTV: https://ept.ms/3YFlxBN

For years, Rob Schneider has met and heard from parents of severely autistic children in America who say their children were injured by vaccines: “I met people—parents who knew that their kids were fine. And as young children, they were actually meeting the markers or exceeding them. And then they got a series of shots that was required to go to school, and then the kids were never the same again. …I saw 18-year-olds, 19-year-old kids who had lifelong problems and were still in diapers with horrible gut issues and [were] violent. …Their kids were fine, and then all of a sudden, they were not fine.” 🔴 WATCH FULL: https://ept.ms/3KSt6C1

The "Reagan" biopic took nearly 20 years to make. The first director passed away before filming began. So Joseph brought on Sean McNamara in 2016. It was one of the few major motion pictures to film during the height of the pandemic. "My co-producer, John Sullivan, came to me and said…'Should we wait till it's over with or just shoot? And I thought about it for a second. I had friends dying on me. I thought: 'If I died almost making this movie after 18 years, I'd be pretty pathetic.' So I thought: let's just go." Then came more obstacles: CDC-mandated shutdowns; an actor's strike that stopped filming for months; special effects companies overseas disrupted by the Russian invasion of Ukraine; and investors backing out and threatening to cancel the film. Producer Mark Joseph tells the incredible tale in his memoir "Making Reagan." I sat down with him at @TPUSA's #amfest2025 conference. Stay tuned for the full episode!

"This treatment is not affirming anything but these children's misgivings about who they really are, their confusion, their normal adolescent discomfort that, frankly, everybody goes through." ChloeCole reacts to HHS Gov Secretary Bobby Kennedy's recent comments about "gender-affirming" care: "I just love how he lays out how destructive this is and how he says, this is not medicine, but malpractice. This is what the children who have been harmed and regret this…have been waiting to hear for years." And to finally hear this—our concerns being echoed by the federal government—is incredibly vindicating." I sat down with her @TPUSA's #amfest2025 conference. Stay tuned for the full episode!

Comedian Rob Schneider and Charlie Kirk had planned to go and speak at Berkeley together again, in the fall of 2025. After Charlie was assassinated, he went alone. “I asked him over the summer. I said, ‘Let's do another university. It was so fun, and it was fun because you had people challenging us. To be a vibrant society, we must be able to be challenged. We’ve got to challenge ourselves. And as the great Andrew Doyle says, we must challenge our certainties. …I went alone after his murder, and I went with his mentor, Frank Turek, and there was a group of people at Berkeley who rioted outside and set off tear gas and devices that sounded like gunfire, threw things, spit at people.” 🔴 PREMIERE 5PM ET on @EpochTV: https://ept.ms/3KSt6C1

“COVID was a really dark time for me and for a lot of people,” says Rob Schneider. For the famous comedian and actor, the years of the pandemic were a time to take stock of what had become of America, speak up about it—and even write a book. “You Can Do it! Speak Your Mind, America” was published in September 2024. “If we're going to continue to have a free society, it's going to require people to step up and be courageous,” Schneider says. 🔴 PREMIERE 5PM ET on @EpochTV: https://ept.ms/3KSt6C1

🚨Here's what people don't realize about marijuana and THC, says AlexBerenson: "Beyond the psychosis connection and this increased link to schizophrenia…there's increasing evidence in the last 10 years that cannabis and THC—and this is not from smoking, this apparently is from the effect of the chemical itself—can cause really severe heart damage. There is a link to myocardial infarctions, heart attacks. and that link is pretty strong now. You can find papers that show a 3x increase over a multi-year period. And these are young people, right? So they're very low baseline risk, but the risk is very real and increased. And then the other is…in states that have legalized, they see a lot of high-speed car accidents with cannabis.…This idea that when you get stoned, you just drive 10 miles an hour, and if anything, your problem is that you're not moving at all, turns out not to be true." I sat down with Berenson, author of "Tell Your Children" and "Pandemia" at @TPUSA's #amfest2025 conference.

During the Reagan administration, DIA intelligence officer Michael Sekora warned key figures in government and industry that China was soon going to match America in aerospace: “They laughed their a** off. They said, ‘You're telling me a country that doesn't have indoor plumbing in 90% of the homes is going to eat our lunch in the marketplace?’” Sekora insisted that China would do exactly that. 🔴 WATCH FULL: https://ept.ms/4jeO6j1

As early as 1989, Michael Sekora and other Defense Intelligence Agency officers had identified China as the next threat. Sekora says that in the very year the Soviet bloc was falling apart and the wall between East and West Germany was torn down, participants in a classified DIA program called “Project Socrates” already knew that China was going to “become a superpower, faster than any country in history.” “We were on track to contain them, because what we had in Socrates could have easily contained China,” he says. Project Socrates was originally created by President Reagan in 1983 in order to figure out how to regain a competitive edge against the Soviet Union. The project was so successful that President Reagan drafted an executive order in 1989 to create a new federal agency out of Project Socrates to make it permanent. But it never came to fruition. The project was axed under the subsequent Bush administration—and the rest is history. America went the opposite route, turning over unprecedented technologies to Beijing and fueling its rise as an adversary to America. https://rumble.com/v736piw-how-defense-intelligence-officers-identified-china-as-americas-next-threat-.html