As part of our special series on the U.S. presidential transition period, Sebastian Gorka breaks down the complexities of recent events in Syria, and what the incoming Trump administration’s foreign policy may look like when it comes to NATO, the Middle East, Russia, and China.

Gorka will serve as Trump’s deputy assistant and senior director for counterterrorism at the National Security Council.

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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Forty-five key figures in Hong Kong’s pro-democracy movement were recently sentenced to up to 10 years each. More than 1,900 political prisoners have been convicted and imprisoned in Hong Kong in the last five years. Thousands more are simply being held without bail for years on end. About 40 percent of Hong Kong’s entire prison population is being held without a conviction.

“They haven’t even taken the trouble to convict these people in a kangaroo court,” says Mark Clifford, president of the Committee for Freedom in Hong Kong Foundation.

Clifford has lived in Asia since the late 1980s and witnessed Hong Kong’s transformation from a largely free society in 1997, to an increasingly repressive one. He previously served as editor-in-chief of the Hong Kong-based South China Morning Post and executive director of the Hong Kong-based Asia Business Council.

He’s the author of multiple books, including “Today Hong Kong, Tomorrow the World” and most recently “The Troublemaker: How Jimmy Lai Became a Billionaire, Hong Kong’s Greatest Dissident, and China’s Most Feared Critic.”

Hong Kong, once celebrated for its economic freedom and rule of law, has now become a key node for authoritarian regimes to evade sanctions, Clifford says. According to a report by Samuel Bickett, Hong Kong has become an indispensable location for the transfer of money, military technology, and prohibited products to Russia, Iran, and North Korea.

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

“Despite decades of a US Department of Education, we’re not doing any better in educating our students. If anything, we’re now doing worse ... I think the question is how the American people can best be served. The goal shouldn’t be to preserve jobs of bureaucrats. The goal shouldn’t be to preserve the status quo. We should ask, how can we best serve students and their families?”

As part of our special series on the U.S. presidential transition period, I’m sitting down with Kenneth L. Marcus, former assistant secretary of education for civil rights and the founder and chairman of the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law.

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

Universities today are increasingly plagued by ideological nihilism, bloated costs, and the growing infantilization of students with “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings,” says Ralston College President Stephen Blackwood.

And far too many students are being funneled into universities as the default step after high school, he says. “We’re trying to make universities the kind of catch-all for job training, and universities have historically not played that role,” Blackwood says.

Ralston College is an attempt to restore a rich and transformative humanities education, one that ponders the deepest questions of life and that seeks out what is true and what is beautiful.

“We thought it was necessary, at this time in Western civilization, to revive the conditions for human flourishing, to reinvent and revive the university and the fundamental role that communities of learning have played throughout the entire trajectory irreducibly in Western civilization,” Blackwood 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.

There is an unprecedented child trafficking crisis in America today. Large numbers of unaccompanied migrant children are being released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to sponsors that are not thoroughly vetted, including individuals associated with dangerous criminal organizations like MS-13 and the 18th Street gang, whistleblowers say.

Many migrant children now work backbreaking shifts in slaughterhouses, restaurants, or factories. Others are being sold for sex.

From 2019 to 2023, immigration authorities transferred more than 448,000 unaccompanied minors from the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to the HHS. A recent watchdog report found that ICE is unable to account for more than 32,000 unaccompanied children who failed to appear for court hearings. Another 291,000 unaccompanied children simply did not receive notices at all.

So how many children in America have fallen victim to trafficking? To what extent are international actors facilitating this? What can the incoming administration do to stem child trafficking? What will be the greatest challenges they must tackle?

Join me for this special live crossover episode with NTD’s International Roundtable program, hosted by Cindy Drukier. The two of us will be sitting down with three key individuals who have been at the forefront of exposing child trafficking and demanding policy change.

Guests:

Tara Rodas, HHS whistleblower and 20-year public servant, primarily working in the federal inspector general community

Aaron Stevenson, DHS whistleblower and former intelligence research specialist for U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services

Mary Flynn O’Neill, executive director of the America’s Future nonprofit

Drew Pinsky, popularly known as Dr. Drew, is an addiction medicine specialist and host of the TV series “Ask Dr. Drew.” For decades, he has been studying public health and drug addiction in America, exposing its ongoing challenges in nationally syndicated television and radio programs. He saw early on during the COVID-19 pandemic that the response from the authorities would cause unnecessary harm and suffering.

“A member of the school board came in and said, ‘We’re going to lock the schools down.’ And I said, ‘Why? Why are you doing that? Who did you consult with? Did an infectious disease doctor come in and say you’ve got to do this?’ ‘No, it’s just the right thing to do.’ ... I knew then that was big, big, big trouble,” says Pinsky.

He says that how authorities reacted to the pandemic followed a similar playbook to how they responded to the opioid crisis. And in both cases, he argues, the physician-patient relationship has degraded.

“The physician-patient unit is so badly encumbered and so badly adulterated right now that it’s hard for it to function,” says Pinsky. “There are some of us that can’t get over COVID—not the virus—the way our country dealt with the COVID, just mind-boggling.”

Pinsky is particularly concerned about the centralization and algorithmizing of medicine.

“The young folks are being taught to look at the computer and just fill out forms, do an algorithm, look things up if you don’t know—I mean, I don’t know how you develop judgment. I don’t know how you think about a risk-reward if all you’re doing is following an algorithm on your electronic medical record. It’s really disturbing,” 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.

“You can literally make all the components of all these drugs in China, you can ship them in a barrel to some plant in New Jersey, mix it, compound it, package and label it, and say ‘made in the USA,’ and then sell it to the Department of Defense. Now, that’s the number one thing I would ask a Congress and the president—to fix that loophole through legislation immediately. They can fix that in the NDAA a week from now, if they were really serious about it.”

As part of our special series on the U.S. presidential transition period, I’m sitting down with Victor Suarez, a retired U.S. Army colonel who served for 27 years and saw, firsthand, serious problems with America’s medical supply chains.

In this episode, he breaks down key steps America can take to secure its vital medicines.

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

Following the Oct. 7, 2023, massacre in Israel, universities throughout America experienced a sharp rise in hostility toward Jews.

“I have lost every single non-Jewish friend I had at Harvard—every single one,” said student activist Shabbos Kestenbaum.

A proud Orthodox Jew and a former self-described “die-hard liberal,” Kestenbaum endorsed Donald Trump and voted Republican for the first time in his life, believing that the Democratic Party had systematically abandoned Jewish Americans.

“As an Orthodox Jew, I grew up with the ideals of: You are an American and proudly so, and you’re Jewish and proudly so. The two were never contradictory. They were quite complimentary. ... They very much influenced each other. As I said in my speech at the Republican Convention, Jewish values are American values. American values are Jewish values,” says Kestenbaum.

Harvard University came under particular scrutiny for its failure to combat anti-Semitism on campus, ultimately leading to the forced resignation of its president, Claudine Gay. Today, Kestenbaum is suing his alma mater, alleging federal violations of the Civil Rights Act, under which, due to Trump’s 2019 executive order concerning Title VI, Jewish students are now protected.

“When we filed our lawsuit in mid-January, Harvard’s response was not to apologize. It was not to acknowledge the reality of anti-Semitism. It was not to tell us what they were going to do. They filed a motion to dismiss with prejudice, meaning they were asking a judge not only to toss out our lawsuit but to make it so that no other Jewish student in the future would be able to hold them accountable for anti-Semitism,” says Kestenbaum. “To this day, they have not articulated a single policy that would prevent what happened to me from ever happening again to any student, Jew or not.”

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

As part of our special series on alternative models of education, I’m sitting down with Michael Fitzgerald, principal of Northern Schoolhouse, an upstate New York private school focused on classical literature and art, immersion in nature, and nurturing strong moral character based on time-tested virtues.

“This is the trend in education: ‘It doesn’t matter what you’re reading, as long as you’re reading.’ And I actually disagree with that. I think it’s very important what you’re reading,” Fitzgerald says.

“In the end, we want them becoming autonomous people who know how to move themselves well through the world, as truly good people who recognize beauty,” he says.

“If you recognize beauty, you can recognize what’s good. And those are highly correlated in the classical world, especially in the Socratic sense. They talk a lot about truth, beauty, and goodness.”

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’re launching a special “American Thought Leaders” series during this post-election transition period in which I will be interviewing topic matter experts and former and potential future Trump administration officials to understand what the incoming American administration’s policies in 2025 may look like—for America, Canada, and the world.

Today, I’m sitting down with David M. Friedman, former U.S. Ambassador to Israel under the Trump administration, one of the main architects of the Abraham Accords, and the author of “One Jewish State: The Last, Best Hope to Resolve the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.”

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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Greg Scarlatoiu is the new president of the Committee for Human Rights in North Korea and a longtime expert on the Korean peninsula.

In this episode, he breaks down why North Korea has sent troops to fight in Ukraine, North Korea’s long history of involvement in foreign conflicts, what the current situation in this communist nation looks like, and what America’s long-term North Korea strategy should be.

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