American Thought Leaders - The Epoch Times

A new investigational monoclonal antibody could potentially help HIV patients who've developed resistance to other treatments. Unlike other HIV drugs, which target viral proteins and enzymes inside the infected cell to block replication, UB-421 works by targeting the human host cell — specifically the CD4 receptor on the surface of immune cells. This means, HIV would have a harder time developing resistance through escape mutations. So far, in limited trials, that seems to be true. The FDA is set to be taking a closer look at it in early February, says Lou Reese, co-CEO of United Biomedical and co-founder of Cana Life. 🔴 WATCH FULL: https://ept.ms/3NtjvCJ

Has the massive rollout of psychiatric drugs over recent decades actually led to better outcomes for patients? The evidence says no. Even former NIMH Director Thomas Insel admitted that despite overseeing ~$20 billion in neuroscience and genetics research during his 13-year tenure, clinical outcomes for patients did not improve. Recovery rates didn’t increase and hospitalization and suicide rates didn’t decrease. Yet instead of rethinking the approach, the field doubles down, says David Cohen, Professor for Social Welfare at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs. 🔴 WATCH FULL: https://ept.ms/49Sdwif

We’re approaching mental health all wrong, argues professor David Cohen. We’re told mental illness is “a disease like any other.” Yet no stethoscope, no physical exam, no bloodwork, no scans. Diagnosis is just a questionnaire — and the solution is almost always a prescription. But if it’s a disease, why don’t we treat it like one? A real medical workup would start by ruling out infection, metabolic disorders, autoimmune issues, brain tumors — and if none are found, we shouldn’t leap to “it’s all in the brain.” “Don't keep saying it's a physical disease, and we need medicine for it,” says Cohen, professor of social welfare and associate dean at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs. https://rumble.com/v74m6oe-the-wrong-approach-to-mental-health-david-cohen.html

One in six American adults today are taking some form of psychiatric meditation. Yet it seems mental health outcomes across America have seen no noticeable improvement—despite the promises of the psychopharmacology revolution. If anything, mental health in America seems to be getting worse. “The needle has not moved,” says David Cohen, professor of social welfare and associate dean at UCLA’s Luskin School of Public Affairs. And that’s because many of the core assumptions of modern psychiatry are flawed, he argues. 🔴 PREMIERE 9PM ET on @EpochTV: https://www.theepochtimes.com/epochtv/the-failures-of-the-mental-health-drug-revolution-david-cohen-5973742?utm_source=telegram&utm_medium=SocialM&utm_content=AmericanThoughtLeaders&utm_term=DavidCohen

Dr. Mehmet Oz exposes “beehive of corruption” and healthcare fraud they found in Minnesota: “We spoke to a bunch of whistleblowers, and we discovered that there has been, for years, a cover up ... Culturally, you were dissuaded, intimidated from speaking up about the fact that you thought there was fraud happening.” But Minnesota, he warns, is just the “tip of the iceberg.” “It is dwarfed by what I saw in California…the magnitude of fraud there, we believe, is approximating $4 billion just in hospice and home health care,” he says. 🔴WATCH FULL: https://youtu.be/fbn0sONnd_E

“What’s happened in California is a tolerance and acceptance of fraud,” Dr. Mehmet Oz told me in a recent interview, describing widespread hospice scams that have proliferated in California, especially in LA County. He estimates there’s as much as $4 billion in hospice and home-healthcare fraud in California, fueled by providers billing Medicare for services never delivered and patients who should never have been enrolled. According to Oz, it’s a system built on perverse incentives: clinics—many created overnight—bill Medicare for terminal care, and doctors are paid to sign people onto hospice, even when they are not terminal. “Hospice is designed for the last six months of your life. It means you’re going to die. But people are being put on hospice who don’t know it, they don’t realize it — and now they don’t have access to regular Medicare anymore. So people are dying because they can't get care because they were falsely tricked into being on hospice.” https://rumble.com/v74h4tg-dr.-mehmet-oz-breaks-down-stunning-healthcare-fraud-in-california.html

“What we're seeing in Minnesota—which is billions of dollars of fraud that hurts our most vulnerable people…is dwarfed by what I saw in California, which is whole-scale cultural malfeasance around health care,” says CMS administrator Dr. Mehmet Oz. Dr. Oz estimates it’s as much as $4 billion in fraud in hospice and home healthcare in California alone. In this episode, he breaks down what they’ve uncovered and learned from whistleblowers. 🔴 PREMIERE 5PM ET on @EpochTV: https://ept.ms/4qXYnme

What looks like medical consensus can actually be manufactured. That’s what’s happened in gender medicine, argues Leor Sapir, a Manhattan Institute senior fellow. Medical groups like the AAP & Endocrine Society often cite each other’s guidelines as “evidence,” creating a loop of circular citations that gives the appearance of scientific rigor. Internal communications show WPATH strategizing about getting major associations to endorse its guidelines to give them credibility, Sapir was. Not a single group agreed to endorse them, Sapir says. But none criticized them either. Many organizations actively suppressed dissent from within their own ranks. 🔴 WATCH FULL: https://ept.ms/45WeRmN

"There is no credible evidence that puberty blockers... address anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation," Leor Sapir tells us. In a recent interview, Sapir, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and co-author of the 2025 HHS review of pediatric gender medicine, detailed a systemic lack of rigor and transparency within the field. 🔴 PREMIERE 9PM ET on @EpochTV: https://ept.ms/45WeRmN

“‘Gender-affirming care’ is a euphemism and it is essentially a marketing term,” Leor Sapir told us. And that’s why, in the new HHS report reviewing current pediatric gender medicine practices, he and the other authors use the term ‘pediatric medical transition’ while the Trump administration has adopted the expression ‘sex-rejecting procedures.’ Leor Sapir, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, is one of the main outside co-authors of the report. He was tasked to assemble the team for producing the review, the result of one of Trump’s first executive orders after taking office in 2024: “Protecting Children from Chemical and Surgical Mutilation.” In our in-depth interview, Sapir provides a detailed overview of the findings and conclusions of the review. “We tried to be as factual and defensible as we possibly could,” he said. 🔴 PREMIERE 9PM ET on @EpochTV: https://ept.ms/45WeRmN

Will individuals be held accountable for the events of the Russiagate scandal? Here’s what former House Intelligence Chairman Devin Nunes told me: “The answer is: we don't know that, because there's a lot of things at play here between corrupt courts, corrupt judges, corrupt states, blue states, jury pools, the statute of limitations,” Nunes says. “From my perspective, as a non-lawyer, what I'd be looking at is a grand conspiracy case that goes from 2015, 2016 all the way through at least to the raid at Mar-a-Lago…They raided Mar-a-Lago to get our document, the House Republican Intelligence Committee document…It's corruption at the highest level,” he says. 🔴 WATCH THE FULL EPISODE: https://ept.ms/4qdwyGx

“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,” says Mark Joseph, producer of “Reagan.” On Rotten Tomatoes, 98% of the audience gave the film a positive rating but only 18% of critics reviews did the same. 🔴 WATCH FULL: https://ept.ms/4aYDQt9

In 1978, nine years before his speech at the Brandenburg Gate, Ronald Reagan stood before the Berlin Wall for the first time. He turned to his aides and said: "We’ve got to find a way to bring this down,” recounted Reagan aide Richard Allen to producer Mark Joseph. To the political establishment, it sounded like a delusion. Joseph said: “They and we all at the time thought…it's not going to happen in our lifetime, but he believed it. The rest of us all thought maybe he was a crazy old man, but I think he really believed that it could be achieved.” That belief faced fierce internal resistance. Secretary of State George Shultz reportedly pleaded with Reagan to delete the iconic line, fearing it would sabotage diplomacy. Reagan refused, with the support of younger aides who sensed the power of these words. The impact was more than diplomatic—it was psychological. Joseph recounts a story of a drunk Russian general who admitted: "Reagan was the first person who told us what we already knew about ourselves, that we were an evil empire." I sat down with Mark Joseph to discuss the 20-year journey to bring the “Reagan” biopic to the big screen. “All the diplomatic niceties would keep people from being honest, and Reagan calling them the evil empire, was a psychological blow to their psyches,” Joseph said. https://rumble.com/v74ag0o-behind-reagans-famous-lines-tear-down-this-wall-mark-joseph.html

History remembers Ronald Reagan’s iconic 1987 speech at the Brandenburg Gate, but Reagan actually decided the Berlin Wall needed to go years earlier. During his first visit to the barrier in 1978, Reagan turned to his aides and said: "We’ve got to find a way to bring this down.” At that time during the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet bloc was viewed by the establishment as a geopolitical impossibility. What we now record as almost a historical inevitability was, at the time, an extraordinary defiance of the status quo. We sat down with “Reagan” producer Mark Joseph to discuss the nearly 20-year journey to bring this story to the screen—a production that faced incredible hurdles along the way. 🔴 PREMIERE 9PM ET on @EpochTV: https://ept.ms/4aYDQt9

“You can have all the technology you want, all the AI, all the data centers, but there's a problem: There's not enough power.” Devin Nunes, CEO of Truth Media & Technology Group (TMTG), believes that they've found the answer to America’s energy needs: Nuclear fusion. That’s why TMTG’s newly announced merger with TAE Technologies may not be as surprising as it seems. Nunes has championed nuclear energy since his days in Congress. He used to think fusion was still decades away from reality. Now, he calls TAE’s progress “Manhattan Project 2.0.” Nuclear fusion would be much cleaner than existing nuclear fission technology, which produces a lot of long-lasting radioactive waste. 🔴 WATCH FULL: https://ept.ms/4qdwyGx

“It’s the biggest scandal in US history, by a long way.” It’s been almost a decade since Devin Nunes launched his investigation into the scandal that became known as Russiagate. Now, he’s chair of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, 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. Some Americans feel there has been little to no accountability for Russiagate. Will there be more arrests and prosecutions? “There's a lot of things at play here between corrupt courts, corrupt judges, corrupt states, blue states, jury pools, statute of limitations,” Nunes says. “From my perspective as a non-lawyer, what I'd be looking at is a grand conspiracy case that goes from 2015, 2016 all the way through, at least to the raid at Mar-a-Lago,” he says. 🔴 PREMIERE 5PM ET on @EpochTV: https://ept.ms/4qdwyGx

Debanking is real, and the Trump administration is tackling it head-on, says SBA chief Kelly Loeffler. She has sent over 5,000 letters to lenders ordering an end to politicized debanking practices and directing them to reinstate qualified customers who were denied services. The practice began during the Obama administration under Operation Choke Point and escalated during the Biden administration, she says. Serving politically disfavored groups became a regulatory liability: “The OCC or the Fed might downgrade you and require more capital, putting real costs into the banking system and discouraging customers from being banked,” she says. 🔴 WATCH FULL: https://ept.ms/4qJJ54n

SBA chief Kelly Loeffler reveals her agency uncovered thousands of COVID-era loans that had been flagged for potential fraud but were not fully investigated under the previous administration, she says. Instead the cases were closed, and many of those loans were actually forgiven. She says her agency found 8,000 suspected fraudulent loans in Minnesota, totaling some $400 million, prompting the SBA to suspend nearly 7000 borrowers. The agency is now going state by state investigating abuses of pandemic era PPP and EIDL loans and handing cases to federal law enforcement. https://rumble.com/v742gaq-after-minnesota-sba-will-investigate-fraud-state-by-state-administrator-kel.html

After uncovering $400 million in suspected COVID-era pandemic loan fraud in Minnesota alone, the SBA is now investigating other states for abuse of the PPP and EIDL programs, SBA administrator Kelly Loeffler tells me in our recent interview. “We worked through the holidays—from Thanksgiving up to New Year's—on about 20,000 different files, found about 8000 instances of fraudulent loans,” Loeffler says. The SBA has suspended nearly 7,000 borrowers. In this episode, I’m sitting down with SBA head Kelly Loeffler to understand how she’s cracking down on fraud, bolstering domestic manufacturing, cutting regulations, and ending politically-motivated debanking. 🔴 PREMIERE 9PM ET on @EpochTV: https://ept.ms/4qJJ54n

What just happened in Venezuela wasn’t just about Maduro. It was a major strategic blow to communist China, says security analyst J. Michael Waller. Just days before Maduro was removed, Beijing declared it would not give up an inch of its gains in Latin America. Then Trump went and took away one of the CCP’s most critical assets. Venezuela wasn’t just an ally for the CCP—it was a “linchpin” in the CCP’s global military strategy, he says. From Caracas, Beijing envisioned projecting naval power across both oceans. https://rumble.com/v73z372-why-maduros-capture-is-a-major-blow-for-beijing-j.-michael-waller.html