Public

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsFrance is one of the world’s oldest democracies, dating back to the French Revolution of 1789. It was reaffirmed as the Fifth Republic in 1958 under President Charles de Gaulle. Since then, France has held regular, competitive elections for both the presidency and the National Assembly. The world has regarded France as a liberal democratic nation with free speech, an independent judiciary, and regular elections.That reputation is now at grave risk. A French court’s decision today to prevent presidential front-runner Marine Le Pen from competing in the next presidential elections is an extraordinary attack on democracy, says journalist Pascal Clérotte, with whom I recorded a podcast this morning.French ruling elites are “just desperate,” he said. “They're scared because they know it's over for them, so they're trying to cling to power for as long as they can.” President Emmanuel Macron currently has a 31% approval rating.The ruling comes two weeks after the Romanian government prevented the presidential front-runner from competing in elections, and at a moment when the Brazilian courts appear poised to incarcerate former president Jair Bolsonaro, who is also a presidential candidate. And, over the last four years, Democrats attempted to incarcerate and otherwise prevent President Donald Trump from running for reelection.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsNo country did more than Britain to establish the values of free speech and equal justice under the law. In 1215, King John issued the Magna Carta, which established that even the king was subject to equal justice under the law, and in 1644, John Milton published his famous defense of free speech.That tradition is now at grave risk of being destroyed, says UK journalist and professor Matt Goodwin. He says that the arrest by six police officers of a father who complained on WhatsApp about the local school “is merely the latest symbol of a much broader assault on free speech and free expression.” And it comes at a time when the government’s Sentencing Council is recommending that judges give preference to non-white criminal defendants, undermining the principle of equal justice under the law.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsSince taking office, President Donald Trump has pulled the US out of the United Nations Paris agreement on climate change, unleashed fossil fuel production, cut climate subsidies that were part of the Inflation Reduction Act, and chosen as his Secretary of Energy an oilman who helped create the fracking revolution. Given that Democrats have spent the last 20 years describing climate change as an “existential threat” and making climate policy their highest priority under Biden, one would expect there to be significant protests and other actions by progressives.And yet we’ve seen no significant climate change protests since Trump took office two months ago. No Greta Thunberg marches — she’s moved on to Palestine. No drumbeat from the news media. No Extinction Rebellion activists blocking traffic in DC. “Climate emergency” was not among the words chosen by Democrats in Congress to put on the little placards they held up during Trump’s address to Congress earlier this month. In fact, to the extent there have been protests by Democrats, they have been against the world’s most pioneering electric car manufacturer, Tesla, and have nothing to do with climate change.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsSince World War II, elites across the Western world have promoted the opening up of nations to globalization through the weakening of national cultural traditions. According to Rusty Reno, author of a little-known 2019 book about nationalism, Return of the Strong Gods, this “Open Society Consensus” made sense following the catastrophe of World War II, which was driven in part by nationalist passions. But in recent decades, the costs of this system in the form of war, deindustrialization, and the alienation of the elites from the rest of society began to outweigh the benefits, at least for most citizens.Then, in 2016, voters in Britain and the US rejected this globalist vision and voted instead for nationalism. The British voted to leave the European Union, and Americans elected Donald Trump. The election of Joe Biden in 2020 created the perception among elites that Brexit and Trump were anomalies. But Trump's reelection last year and the growing power of other populist and nationalist parties around the world strongly suggest that the entire world is reverting to nationalism.Trump’s election continues to stump elites in the West. They blame the weak candidacy of Kamala Harris, the lack of a Left-wing Joe Rogan, and the age of Joe Biden. None can see — or want to see — that voters chose a return to nationalism over more globalism.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsFor many decades after World War II, fears of nuclear war eclipsed all other fears, including overpopulation, climate change, and asteroids. Thousands of Hollywood movies, documentaries, and books raised the alarm. Images of devastation from Hiroshima and Nagasaki and deathly images of mushroom clouds from thermonuclear tests in the South Pacific and the Western United States made nuclear apocalypse seem like a probable outcome of continuing human progress.And yet the nuclear apocalypse never arrived. The United States and Russia have reduced their nuclear arsenals. The number of nuclear-armed nations grew only to nine, which is a fraction of the dozens of nations President John F. Kennedy and others in the foreign policy establishment had feared in the early 1960s. “The atomic bomb was designed to bomb the world to peace,” said Marco Visscher, the author of a dazzling new book, The Power of Nuclear. “Not to pieces, but to peace. Deterrence seems to have worked fairly well. We should be honest that this nuclear war that many people expected in the 1960s didn't come about.”

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsGreat Britain seems like a free nation. In recent years, there have been mass protests against everything from Israel’s war with Hamas to fossil fuels. Newspaper editorialists denounce the government in strong terms daily. The nation draws upon hundreds of years of demands for free speech from intellectual giants, including John Milton, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Paine, and George Orwell.But today, Britain appears to be descending into tyranny. In 2023, Britain’s parliament passed the Public Order Act and Online Safety Act to crack down on protests and online content and then failed to pass the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act that same year. Then, last summer, the Keir Starmer Labor government appears to have deliberately spread disinformation about the high-profile killings of three little girls to justify censorship and repression of anti-mass migration protesters and rioters.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsHi Friends,Please enjoy my talk from the recent Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London!MichaelI love AI. I use chat GPT every day, and I encourage my students to do the same. I'm particularly excited about AI's potential to help doctors diagnose diseases before we could otherwise. At the same time, I have to wonder: Is the cause of our problems a lack of intelligence? Will more AI help to solve them? Well, before we look at some of those big problems, I want to tell the story of Sam Bankman-Fried. Sam Bankman-Fried is serving a 25-year sentence for extraordinary, groundbreaking fraud. Towards the end, he tried to pin it on his ex-girlfriend. Does anybody doubt that Sam Bankman Freed was intelligent? My mother's father would say he was probably too smart for his own good. What about the German censorship police, who were just profiled a couple of days ago on 60 Minutes? Is the problem a lack of intelligence? I think we can imagine we've already seen the use of AI for mass censorship over the last several years. Now, the Germans are invading people's homes to look for Disfavored memes and speech that would be legal in all other parts of the world. Does the malady that afflicts the Germans have anything to do with intelligence? (My favorite part of this photo, by the way, is the apparent shame on their faces.)

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsPresident Donald Trump’s cuts to USAID were cruel, said Democrats and the media. Indeed, they argue, the underlying cause of most of society’s problems is lack of empathy. If only we were kinder and gentler with each other, they say, we would finally be able to end poverty, inequality, homelessness, war, and oppression generally.But societies have become vastly kinder and gentler over time. Levels of poverty have declined dramatically in part because we redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor. And racial and sexual minorities experience less oppression and greater freedom today than at any point in recorded history.Of course, more should still be done to enable all humans to flourish. For example, the United States is in the midst of a severe crisis of homelessness, untreated mental illness, and drug addiction.But those problems do not result from a lack of empathy or care. California, for example, has spent $24 billion on homelessness since 2019; it grew 40% in that time period.In fact, the increase in homelessness, addiction, and untreated mental illness is more the result of enabling and even subsidizing them than cracking down on them. That’s because being arrested and being mandated rehab or psychiatric care is often the only way that addicts and mentally ill people are able to escape life on the streets.A similar story can be told about many other social problems. Psychologists, including Jonathan Haidt, have found that coddling children results in them being discouraged more easily when they encounter problems. Their challenges continue in schools when teachers allow children to pass classes despite not being able to read.In fact, argues author and publisher Jonathan Keeperman, who I interviewed recently for this podcast, there has been a “remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior. Many from left, right, and center have made note of this shift. In 2010, Hanna Rosin announced ‘The End of Men.’ Hillary Clinton made it a slogan of her 2016 campaign: ‘The future is female.’ She was correct.”In a viral 2023 essay in First Things, “What is the Longhouse,” Keeperman used the metaphor of the indigenous Longhouse to describe female-dominated and overly feminized institutions.“The most important feature of the Longhouse, and why it makes such a resonant (and controversial) symbol of our current circumstances, is the ubiquitous rule of the Den Mother,” he writes. “As of 2022, women held 52 percent of professional-managerial roles in the U.S.… And because they are overrepresented in professions, such as human resource management (73 percent) and compliance officers (57 percent), that determine workplace behavioral norms, they have an outsized influence on professional culture, which itself has an outsized influence on American culture more generally.”The increase of women in our institutions is not the only reason for the rising power of feminine values in society. Other factors play a key role. One of them is likely the success of civilization itself in reducing violence and obviating the need for traditionally masculine norms. Another factor is the well-intended turn toward values of openness and inclusion after the horrors of the First and Second World Wars.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsFor many, the Executive Order issued last month by President Donald Trump to declassify and release the remaining records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is not that interesting or important. There’s little evidence to support the conspiracy theories that anyone other than Lee Harvey Oswald killed former President John F. Kennedy, say journalists and historians. Oswald was a Left-wing extremist who had strong rifle skills from his time in the military. He could have shot Kennedy from the book depository behind the former president. Neither the investigation of the murder by Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren nor any other in the 60 years since has produced evidence that can’t be explained.In truth, there are significant problems with the conventional explanation of Kennedy’s assassination, and understanding what happened is essential to protecting America’s democratic system, which assassinations, particularly ones that may have involved US government officials and agencies, undermine. There is evidence that Oswald didn’t hate and rather admired Kennedy, particularly for what he had done for civil rights. And if Oswald had been motivated by politics to kill Kennedy, why would he have denied it when caught, claiming to be a “patsy,” a person set up to take the blame for a crime they didn’t commit? If no other shooters were involved, then why does the famous Zapruder film of the assassination show Kennedy being shot in the front of the head at an angle Oswald did not have? And why did a man tied to the criminal underworld kill Oswald two days after the Kennedy assassination?

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsBen Schreckinger is an old-fashioned investigative journalist with Politico who wrote the best book on Joe Biden. Schreckinger’s book is called, simply, The Bidens. Hachette published the book in 2021. “It got a fair amount of attention in the conservative press,” he told me recently, “but in terms of mainstream media attention, it was pretty muted. It was inconvenient for a lot of media outlets to have a more unvarnished look at these business dealings. It was the first mainstream book to say that the [Hunter Biden] laptop was largely genuine.”In truth, the book shows that Joe Biden has been involved in shady influence-peddling his entire career. While intense focus has rightly been paid to the Biden family’s influence peddling with America’s foreign adversaries, the evidence assembled by Schreckinger suggests that Biden owes his political career to election interference by the mafia.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsThe mainstream story about Joe Biden has long been that he would bring “adult supervision or gravitas” to political life, notes investigative journalist Peter Schweizer. As someone who had served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden ostensibly offered a “greater understanding of politics…. Joe Biden has made a career off that. When he ran against Donald Trump in 2020, he tried to make the case that the adults are back in town.”In truth, says Schweizer in a new interview with Public, Biden was a pioneer in “offshoring his corruption.” As soon as he became Vice President, Biden’s son Hunter and his brother James “started doing deals, not in Tokyo, not in London, but in Ukraine, Russia and China.Haven’t other political leaders made money by having family members sell access to them? Sure, say Schweizer. The difference with Biden was both the scale of the influence peddling, and that it happened with so many enemies of the United States.“The Biden family has taken in tens of millions of dollars. The people who send him millions of dollars with nothing discernible being given in return are directly tied to the spy apparatus of China. All the people involved had ties to Chinese intelligence. And there's no discernible evidence that Hunter Biden brought anything of value to the table other than his name and his connections to his father and his father's political power.”And the millions from China appear to have changed Biden’s behavior.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsTwo people are dead, and 80,000 have been forced to evacuate neighborhoods in Los Angeles thanks to fires raging out of control. According to the media and some scientists, climate change is causing the fires. “Researchers believe that a warming world is increasing the conditions that are conducive to wildland fire, including low relative humidity,” reported the BBC.But one of the country’s top fire experts disagrees. “I don't think these fires are the result of climate change,” Jon Keeley, a US Geological Survey scientist, told Public. “You certainly could get these events without climate change.”Keeley has researched the topic for 40 years. In 2017, Keeley and a team of scientists modeled thirty-seven different regions across the United States and found that “humans may not only influence fire regimes but their presence can actually override, or swamp out, the effects of climate.”Keeley’s team found that the only statistically significant factors for the frequency and severity of fires on an annual basis were population and proximity to development. “We’ve looked at the history of climate and fire throughout the whole state,” said Keeley, “and through much of the state, particularly the western half of the state, we don’t see any relationship between past climates and the amount of area burned in any given year.”What about scientists who claim that the dry conditions are unusual? “If you look at the past 100 years of climates in Southern California,” said Keeley, “you will find there have been Januaries that have been very dry. And there's been autumns that have been very dry. There have been Santa Ana winds in January. So these sorts of conditions are what contribute to a fire being particularly destructive at this time of the year. But it's not the result of climate change.”

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsIn mid-September, NBC Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels told the Hollywood Reporter that neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump would be on the show because doing so would be illegal. “You can’t bring the actual people who are running on because of election laws and the equal time provisions,” he told The Hollywood Reporter. “You can’t have the main candidates without having all the candidates, and there are lots of minor candidates that are only on the ballot in, like, three states and that becomes really complicated.”But last night, Michaels broke his promise and put Harris on air in a cameo with actress Maya Rudolph. “This is a clear and blatant effort to evade the FCC's Equal Time rule,” said Federal Communications Commissioner Brenand Carr, “The purpose of the rule is to avoid exactly this type of biased and partisan conduct - a licensed broadcaster using the public airwaves to exert its influence for one candidate on the eve of an election.”In a podcast interview with me this morning on X, (listen above) Carr added, “There's no question that NBC, SNL both know this law and know exactly what they did.”

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsFor as long as most of us can remember, the news media has reflected reality. Even many of us who felt the media was biased or deferential to the government and big corporations still believed that basic facts about what was happening in the world were getting out.Social media, the exodus of investigative journalists from mainstream news media, and Elon Musk's takeover of X have shattered that picture into a thousand pieces. People don’t trust the media because, since 2016, it has acted as a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party.This is not just our opinion but also that of Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post. “In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation,” he wrote yesterday, “journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.”

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsAll of us rely on the federal government to protect us from industries selling poison. That’s why we have thousands of regulations and people working to enforce them.And yet, according to former CBS News investigative reporter, Sharyl Attkison, one industry is not only getting away with poisoning the American people, it’s doing so with gigantic taxpayer subsidies: Big Pharma.We should, of course, be grateful for the remarkable drugs available to us and our loved ones. They save millions of lives every year.However, the evidence is overwhelming that the pharmaceutical industry is abusing its power. Its role in creating America’s opioid addiction crisis is just the tip of the iceberg. Over the decades, the government has allowed pharmaceutical companies to sell products that either don’t work better than a placebo or cause serious harm and death.Now, Attkisson is out with a new book, Follow The Science, that documents the pharmaceutical industry’s corruption of government and medical schools.Her book, already a bestseller, comes at a moment of growing alarm about the poor and declining health of the American people.”Chronic diseases have exploded in nature over the past couple of decades without our public health establishment and doctors seeming to notice,” Attkisson told me in a new Public podcast. “Or, if they notice, they're sure not doing anything about it other than throwing pills and treatments at it. We have to understand why the system exists in that way.”

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsThe conventional wisdom has long held that Democrats are the party that protects the little guy. Democrats are the party of working people while Republicans are the party of the rich, the thinking goes. Democrats are the party of anti-racists and people of color whereas Republicans are the party of whites and racists, people say, pointing to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s labeling of white supremacists as “very fine people” after a 2017 protest in Charlottesville, Virginia. Finally, Democrats say they are the party of women’s empowerment, gender equality, and the “Me Too” movement, whereas the Republicans are the party of sexism and sexual harassment, as demonstrated by Trump and Supreme Court Justices Bret Kavanagh and Clarence Thomas.Reality is more complicated. A recent poll finds that manual laborers in Pennsylvania favor Trump over Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris 56% to 36% while upper-middle-income voters ($100k–$200k/year) favor Harris. Harris recently promised loans to black Americans in violation of the Civil Rights Act, Trump never called neo-Nazis “very fine people,” and he “might well return to the White House by faring better among Black and Hispanic voters combined than any Republican presidential nominee since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act in 1964,” noted the New York Times last week.” Finally, there is no evidence to suggest that Republican politicians harass or sexually assault women at higher rates than Democrats. The accusations against Trump, Kavanagh, and Thomas were “he said, she said,” thus unprovable, and at least three women accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault or harassment.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsThe government needs to step up its efforts to fight health misinformation, say Bill Gates, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama, because it’s reducing public trust in the medical establishment. “People are dying because of misinformation,” said Obama in a 2022 Stanford speech to promote a sweeping government censorship agenda. In his new, heavily-promoted Netflix documentary, Gates called for AI-powered mass government censorship of people who raise questions about vaccines, citing the conspiracy theory that microchips were in Covid vaccines.But it’s the medical establishment itself, not misinformation, that causes public distrust, says Johns Hopkins physician Marty Makary in his outstanding new bestseller, Blind Spots, and in a fascinating two-hour conversation with me.“The biggest topic in our medical journals right now is mistrust in the medical establishment,” he said. “They’re scratching their heads. ‘People don’t trust us, and it must be because of those spreading misinformation.’... No, the reason they don’t trust the medical establishment is because it was lying to them for three years during the Covid pandemic.”America’s health and medical system does a lot of good, emphasizes Makary, who also holds a Master’s degree in Public Health (MPH) from the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Makary stresses that the overwhelming number of people in the health and medical establishment are well-intentioned and motivated by compassion for their patients and a desire to cure disease. “The rank and file doctor often thinks independently, is creative, and takes in multiple sources of information,” he says.But the health and medical system as a whole has failed, Makary argues. Proof of this can be found in the fact that “half of all federal spending is going to health care in its many hidden forms,” he says, and yet the American people are “getting sicker and sicker… Chronic diseases are on the rise. Cancers are on the rise. And we have the most medicated generation in human history.”Health is arguably the most important issue facing the country. It’s not just a life-and-death issue; it also centrally affects our quality of life. The American Academy of Pediatrics’ poor track record is so scandalous that we will publish a follow-up article on how it is still making recommendations based on ideology, not science. 

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsOver the last 25 years, a consensus view of drug addiction has taken hold among experts, the media, and much of the public. “You can’t make someone quit drugs; they have to want to quit.” “Addicts who break laws should be offered treatment, not arrested, which is cruel and counterproductive because drug use is rampant in prison.” “And the problem is not drug addiction per se but rather the problems that come with addiction.”In response to this consensus, federal and state governments reduced penalties for drug dealing, drug use, and many of the crimes addiction causes, including shoplifting.The results have been catastrophic. The number of Americans who die every year from illicit drugs skyrocketed from under 20,000 in the year 2000 to 108,000 last year. The places that liberalized drugs the most, like California, saw the largest increases in open-air drug use and drug deaths. Many of the people dying on the streets today would have, in the recent past, gone on to quit doing drugs after having been arrested and mandated drug treatment by the courts.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsThe biggest unsolved mystery of the 2024 presidential election is how Kamala Harris got the Democratic nomination. After all, she was so unpopular with Democratic voters in Iowa that she dropped out of the race in December 2019. Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and many other Democratic Party leaders all wanted Party delegates to vote for Biden’s replacement at the Democratic National Convention next month. It was flagrantly undemocratic for President Joe Biden to just declare Harris the Party’s presidential candidate. So why did he do it?

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsFor decades, universities, corporations, and nonprofit organizations have argued that they need diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs to create positive work and educational environments. The idea has been that training employees, students, and faculty to see structural racism and white supremacy everywhere will improve relationships.And yet, nothing that employers and universities have done in the last several decades has proven more toxic, divisive, and dispiriting than DEI. Dozens, if not hundreds of individuals have gone public to describe the cult-like mistreatment of people who refused to accept the DEI dogma that white supremacy is all-pervasive, that non-whites are inherently victims of oppression, and only whites and Asians, not blacks and Latinos, can be racist.