American Thought Leaders

Maryanne Demasi is an independent investigative journalist based in Australia and a former medical scientist with a PhD in rheumatology from the University of Adelaide.

For many years, she worked for the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and gained wide attention for reporting on controversial medical topics, particularly the efficacy and safety of statins and psychiatric drugs.

Demasi was eventually suspended from her position at ABC in 2016 following controversies over her comprehensive and critical examination of statin drugs and other health risks. After leaving ABC, she continued her career as an independent investigative medical journalist.

In this interview, we discuss how science can be weaponized and drug data manipulated or suppressed, even for many common drugs prescribed to millions of Americans.

“Psychiatry is a classic example of where pharmaceutical companies have been sponsoring their own trials and burying data and then putting a spin on the medical journal, saying that the drug is safe and effective when the fact is, it’s not,” she says.

“This is not an exception. This happens commonly. Throughout history, pharmaceutical companies have been sued for designing trials [and] hiding, burying data.”

Demasi said she has been censored during her career as a journalist and understands the censorship and the pressures faced by journalists and medical professionals who challenge the data and narratives of the powerful pharmaceutical industry.

“COVID was the unmasking of how all of this censorship came about,” she said. “It really was an event that woke people up to just how corrupt the system is at every level, from the media to the academia to the agencies that are meant to protect us to the medical journals.”

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 exclusive interview with FBI Director Kash Patel, we dive into the agency’s crackdown on crime and foreign espionage, his trip to China, the “burn bags,” and recent criticisms.

What exactly is the “764 network,” and how is the FBI working to target these actors? Why did President Donald Trump label Antifa a domestic terror organization, and how does this alter the playing field?

Does the FBI director’s recent visit to China signify a pivot in the agency’s priorities? Given Beijing’s record of broken promises, can we really expect the regime to honor its side of the fentanyl deal?

The criminal case against former FBI Director James Comey was dismissed—what’s next? What are the FBI “burn bags,” and what was really discovered in those Trump investigation documents?

Patel also reacts to recent headlines and controversies regarding his use of an FBI aircraft, the security detail for his partner, Alexis Wilkins, and rumors that Trump planned to replace him as FBI director.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

For many Americans, the COVID-19 era revealed profound ruptures in American society. While some are eager to move on from that period and simply return to “normal,” there are others who wonder: Is it really that simple?

How can we move forward without truly reconciling with the profound brokenness that was revealed in the last five years? How can we simply ignore or forget those who were censored, deplatformed, surveilled, fired, socially exiled, or irrevocably injured? And if a new virus were to spread in America, can we really say that the same things wouldn’t happen all over again?

At the center of the people asking these questions is the Brownstone Institute, founded by Jeffrey Tucker, senior economics columnist at The Epoch Times. Brownstone has become a safe haven for free thinkers to deliberate on some of the most profound questions of our time.

“We’re really at this precipice. We don’t know which way we’re going to go,” Tucker says.

In this episode, he breaks down nine key foundational institutions of American life that he believes are in desperate need of reform.

“We need a different system, a renewed and refreshed system of ideas production and teaching production in this country, with new independent institutions that are willing to stand up and do the right thing, [that] embrace classical forms of teaching and have a broad-minded approach to academia,” Tucker 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.

In a few years, America may not need to buy critical minerals from China anymore, says synthetic chemist and nanotechnologist James Tour.

Why? Because of a method called flash Joule heating that he and his team have been studying at Rice University.

China currently has a near-monopoly on global processing capacity for critical minerals, including rare earths. These are essential to much of our modern economy, from electronics to defense to medical devices.

The United States has access to plenty of rare-earth reserves, but minimal capacity to process and refine them. Rebuilding these incredibly complex supply chains independent of China is a major uphill battle.

But Tour and his team have pioneered a process that allows for the quick extraction of rare earths from something we have in abundance: electronic and industrial waste.

“We realized that we could take certain materials, say industrial waste like fly ash … flash it, and get rare-earth elements to come out,” Tour says.

The same method can be used to extract rare earths from mine tailings—the leftover, toxic material from old mines that were once too expensive to process.

“So there’s huge availability of this. And if you recycle it—metals are infinitely recyclable,” Tour says.

Tour is a professor of chemistry, materials science, and nanoengineering at Rice University. You can find him on X and other platforms: @drjamestour

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Most Americans have little understanding of the vast amount of private data harvested from their smartphones by third parties, said Joe Weil, a former Apple product manager and the founder of Unplugged.

Where you go, who you associate with, what you like, is all easily discoverable, Weil said.

“It’s publicly available. It’s purchasable.”

What’s even worse is that the Fourth Amendment does not protect this advertising data, he said. The U.S. government, for example, does not require a warrant to access it.

Data brokers sell this data freely, and by applying just a few filters, anyone—foreign governments, intelligence services, criminal cartels—can easily triangulate it to surveil and target individual people or groups, Weil said.

“We can’t do [surveillance] in China. They can do it here, and it’s a huge vulnerability. They can easily find the people they want to take off the board—it’s mapped out from our phones,” he said.

Weil worked for 10 years at Apple in product strategy before founding Unplugged, a tech company that has built a smartphone designed to block tracking, data harvesting, and behavioral profiling at the system level.​

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Modern medicine is veering away from the traditional Hippocratic Oath that required physicians to do no harm and use their knowledge and skills solely for the purpose of healing the patient, says psychiatrist and bioethics expert Dr. Aaron Kheriaty.

Now, physicians are euthanizing patients, removing healthy organs in certain transgender-related surgeries, and injecting drugs for late-term abortions even when the mother’s life is not threatened.

Hippocratic principles are being superseded by utilitarian ethics that prioritize the “greater good” over the well-being and rights of individual patients, Kheriaty says. That’s fueling, for instance, the push to expand the dead-donor eligibility criteria for organ donations.

It’s also manifesting in the push to adopt technological advancements like germ-line gene editing that could be used to create “designer babies” or in vitro gametogenesis (IVG), a process that uses stem cells, such as those derived from skin cells, to create human eggs and sperm in a lab.

Earlier this year, an op-ed in the MIT Technology Review argued for the creation of “spare” human bodies called “bodyoids.” These would essentially be human bodies created in laboratories from human stem cells, but without brains or consciousness. Proponents say they would revolutionize medical research and drug testing and create an unlimited supply of organs.

It sounds like the stuff of science fiction. What are the true ethical implications? Is this really where we want medicine to go?

Kheriaty is the director of the bioethics and American democracy program at the Ethics and Public Policy Center and former director of the medical ethics program at UCI Health.

His latest book is titled “Making the Cut: How to Heal Modern Medicine.”

“The biggest advance [that] medicine needs to make is to accept the limits of medicine,” 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.

Declan Ganley’s company, Rivada Networks, is developing a technology that may revolutionize global connectivity and security—and it appears that the Chinese communist regime is desperately seeking to gain control of it.

As much as 99 percent of global internet traffic today relies on a series of subsea fiber-optic cables around the world that are vulnerable to natural disasters and attacks. Chinese cable-cutting incidents have shown how easily they can be sabotaged.

Ganley is working on something called the Outernet, a constellation of 600 Low Earth Orbit (LEO) satellites that would make up the world’s first self-contained communications network.

Unlike traditional satellite networks that route data back to Earth repeatedly, the satellites are interlinked by high-speed lasers and advanced onboard routers, making it possible for data to travel directly through space, touching the Earth only at the start and the final destination.

But progress has been slow. Why? Ganley refused to partner with Chinese companies on the project.

“They decided to launch a torrent, a tsunami of lawsuits that were baseless, that were unwinnable, that were almost cartoonish in their flakiness—but in the full knowledge that we would have to spend money to defend against these insane lawsuits,” he says.

So far, he and his company have already had to spend $36 million to defend against a flurry of lawsuits across multiple jurisdictions.

Nonetheless, he believes it’s a battle worth fighting.

“I know what the Outernet can do. I would rather burn it down than have the Communist Party of China have the Outernet. Our way of life could depend on them not having the Outernet,” Ganley said.

Ganley was one of the very early voices warning about the dangers of Chinese technology in Western telecommunications networks: “I know how dumb governments are. I saw them implement policies and regulations that allowed Huawei and China to dominate the global wireless industry and literally deploy 5G networks in Western democracies.”

“We have absolutely handed them data network dominance on a plate, and now they want this Outernet. Why do they want it? Because they want the fastest network in the world, the lowest latency network in the world, the most secure network in the world,” Ganley added.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Filmmaker Natalya Murakhver has recently released her new documentary “15 Days: The Real Story of America’s Pandemic School Closures.”

It shows the devastating effects that remote learning had on children and families. What was the true impact of the school closures on a generation of children? How can we begin to measure it?

“Viewers will bear witness to the stories of the people who experienced the closures directly. The film was shot almost immediately following the closures. We started in 2022, so the pain was still extremely raw,” Murakhver says.

“I felt [that] we better get those stories in now, because people won’t want to talk about them in a couple of years. ... As we show the film, I see people’s body language, and they shudder. It takes them back to a very dark time.”

Murakhver co-founded parent advocacy organization Restore Childhood in 2021 and played a leading role in mobilizing New York City parents to reopen public schools during the pandemic.

In the spring of 2021, she filed a lawsuit against New York City and its Department of Education, seeking a judicial order to fully reopen public schools for five days a week of in-person learning.

“People watch the film … and they realize how important it is to know the history,” she 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.

Why did Patrick Girondi, a successful singer and songwriter, become the founder and CEO of a pharmaceutical company?

Originally from the South Side of Chicago, Girondi dropped out of high school and became a musician and also, quite by accident, a highly successful commodities trader.

In the early 1990s, his young son Rocco was diagnosed with thalassemia, a rare blood disorder caused by a defect in the globin genes.

Girondi was told by doctors that his son would not live to be a teenager.

So Girondi set out to find a cure. His company has been working on developing gene therapies and treatments for rare blood disorders such as thalassemia and sickle cell disease.

He’s now recruiting for clinical trials, and his son will be among the first to receive his new treatment for thalassemia in the coming months.

When I sat down with Girondi to hear his life’s story, he told me: “San Rocco Therapeutics … has become involved in so many different rare diseases, because people would reach out to us. Parents, in desperation, would read about me, find my story, find me. Sometimes through friends. … Sometimes they would come to me after concerts.”

There are 6,000 rare diseases in the world, also called “orphan diseases,” he says, because nobody wanted to invest in expensive research to find a cure.

Girondi has released seven albums to support rare disease awareness, and he is the author of “Flight of the Rondone: High School Dropout VS Big Pharma: The Fight to Save My Son’s Life.”

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

Recently, Bill Gates very publicly pivoted on climate change, rejecting “doomsday” predictions and calling for a more pragmatic, human-centered approach.

Is that a sign that the era of climate alarmism is coming to a close?

That’s what I wanted to find out when I sat down with Michael Shellenberger, author of “Apocalypse Never” and founder of Public.news and the nonprofit Environmental Progress.

From rising sea levels to surging forest fires to dying polar bears to disappearing coral reefs, much of what we’ve been told about climate change is not true, he says.

The rising sea level narrative, for example, rests entirely on computer models that were manipulated to produce the desired outcome, Shellenberger says.

“It’s clear that the activist scientists were manipulating models to show an acceleration in sea level rise when the only long-term, reliable source of data, which is called tide gauge data ... shows no acceleration from the 1850s on,” he says.

How is data cherry-picked or skewed to create misleading narratives when it comes to climate change? What’s behind the sudden embrace of nuclear energy—after it had been demonized for decades? How might it be related to the global AI race?

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.