Rob Henderson grew up in poverty in Los Angeles moving from foster home to foster home, seeing addiction, instability, and family breakdown all around him. He joined the U.S. Air Force at 17, entered Yale University at 25 with help from the GI Bill, and completed his PhD at the University of Cambridge. He climbed “every rung on the American class ladder,” as he describes it.

But at Yale and other elite universities, he saw the spread of radical ideas—abolish the police, empty prisons, dismantle marriage, decriminalize all drugs—ideas that he understood would be devastating to the communities he grew up in.

And that’s how he came to develop his now famous concept of luxury beliefs: “Luxury beliefs are ideas and opinions that confer status on the affluent … while inflicting costs on the less fortunate members of society,” he says.

How is it that these ideas came to be so pervasive? And what are their true consequences for society?

Henderson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, contributing editor of City Journal, and bestselling author of “Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.”

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

China’s new ethnic unity law has taken effect, and it’s going to be used to justify and expand transnational repression overseas in combination with existing laws on promoting “separatism,” said Guermantes Lailari, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel and longtime China researcher.

“In this new ethnic law, they encourage people to report on other Chinese who are not promoting ‘unity.’” Lailari said.

“So if you’re a Chinese person in the United States promoting Taiwan, they can prosecute you in absentia, and the court will have a ruling. And they can put out a red notice or Interpol notice on that person who’s overseas, and if that person ever travels to a country that China has bilateral extradition laws with, that person can be detained and transferred to China,” Lailari added.

Lailari moved to Taiwan a few years ago to study the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) up close.

“This place,” he said, “is being attacked every day, whether it’s cyber, cognitive warfare, media warfare, economic warfare, diplomatic warfare.”

In our interview, he argues that the CCP poses the most serious long-term threat to Western civilization—not just militarily, but through a combination of legal, economic, psychological, and intelligence operations.

In this episode, we dive into why the CCP is fixated on taking Taiwan, and what the global fallout of such a takeover would look like.

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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There are few people who understand America’s history—both political and artistic—better than Matthew Mehan.

Mehan is an associate dean and associate professor of government for Hillsdale College’s Van Andel Graduate School of Government in Washington, as well as a best-selling author of children’s literature.

His recent book, “The American Book of Fables,” is a beautiful collection of fables celebrating the landscapes, virtues, and enduring principles that have shaped the American story.

In honor of the 250th anniversary of America’s founding, we discuss some of these timeless lessons on freedom, friendship, and the development of moral character.

On the importance of stories, he said, “American educators from the colonial period forward spent a great deal of effort to try to help people to have these virtues of civility, politeness, civic life, independence, rule of law, justice, truth telling, candor. In one sense, you can have a kind of ‘dark age’ version of these morals, but you have to have a much more adept, technologically advanced moral vocabulary and moral praxis, and that’s what fables and stories can do.”

Through adept storytelling, Mehan tackles important questions such as: What is true patriotism, and why is it a virtue? How ought we practice the art of civic friendship when there is so much to divide us? What was the Founders’ vision of American republicanism, and what practices ought we implement in our daily lives to foster love of country?

As Mehan argues, there is no better time than America’s semiquincentennial to reflect on the laws, the beauty, the places, the people, and the principles that gave rise to this great nation.

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