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.
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsLast April, a squad of armed police officers in Brussels, Belgium, marched into a National Conservatism Conference with the intent of shutting it down. The alleged crime? Hate speech. When the police saw the TV cameras, they turned tail, exited the building, and blocked people from entering. The next day, a judge ruled that the conference could go forward. But the damage was done: the local political authorities had branded national conservatives a menace to public order. It would soon become clear that the police action was just one of a series of dirty tricks by European leaders to demonize their opponents as “far right” fascists and “Putin sympathizers.”Today, the media are once again cranking out fearful headlines. “The French election risks torpedoing the global order.” “The UK election has already failed.” “Macron’s election gambit puts democracy on the table.” The threat? “National conservatism.” What is national conservatism, and why do good Europeans fear it? Why did national conservatives achieve such significant gains in the recent European elections? What do national conservatives want, and how is it different from other flavors of conservatism?To answer those questions, I sat down with James Orr, leader of the National Conservatism movement in the UK. As an associate professor of philosophy and theology at Cambridge University, Orr belies the image of the fire-breathing “far right” nationalists the news media has sold us.
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsOne of the most famous moments in American journalism occurred in 1971 when The New York Times and The Washington Post published excerpts of what would be known as “The Pentagon Papers.” Daniel Ellsberg, a Defense Department analyst working for the RAND Corporation, had given the two newspapers top-secret documents. They showed not only that the US was losing the war in Vietnam but that the Pentagon had known the US couldn’t win the war for many years and kept fighting it anyway. The Pentagon had tried to prevent the publication of the documents, but the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment protected newspapers' right to publish them, even though Ellsberg had broken the law by leaking them. Thanks to the Twitter Files, we learned that individuals with links to US military and intelligence organizations have tried for years to convince reporters that they should no longer follow the Pentagon Papers principle, ostensibly since doing so could help foreign adversaries. They used this argument at the same moment that they were attempting to “pre-bunk” the Hunter Biden laptop, months before The New York Post published articles about its existence. Now, a judge in Tennesse may violate the Supreme Court’s famous Pentagon Papers ruling and order a reporter in Nashville named Michael Patrick Leahy to reveal the source of documents leaked to him. The leaked documents in question came from a trans-identified woman named Audrey Hale, who killed six people at a Christian school last year.Today, June 17, Leahy, the editor of The Tennessee Star, will appear in court for what is known as a "show cause hearing." The judge will consider his arguments for why Leahy should not be held in contempt of court for having published excerpts from Hale’s writings. The FBI had blocked the release of the documents, ostensibly fearing copycat killings by a "segment of the population more vulnerable or open to conspiracy theories." Someone leaked them to Leahy anyway, and he published articles that quoted from them.The case is important for anyone who cares about free speech, a free press, and the Pentagon Papers principle. Leahy’s attorney filed an emergency motion last week, arguing that the Judge’s order would violate the First Amendment and Tennesee state law.
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsVaclav Klaus is an economist who served as president of the Czech Republic from 2003 to 2013. He is a famously outspoken critic of anti-human environmentalism, the European Union, and Wokeism. We interviewed him last Thursday at his institute in Prague to get his thoughts on the recent European elections, the Ukraine war, and threats to Western civilization. I think you will enjoy this conversation as much as we did. We edited the interview for clarity and length.Shellenberger: What is your view of the recent European elections?Klaus: They are not real elections because the European Parliament is not a real parliament. It’s not an authentic parliament. There can't be serious elections in Europe because Europe is not an entity that has a people and a similar topic for someone from Finland, Ireland, Cyprus, and Czech Republic.On the other hand, at least in our country, it is a big opinion poll on what is relevant for the future of the European continent. Our government, which is crazy—five political parties in a non-homogeneous coalition—is not unified and practically lost the elections. If we recalculate the European elections into the Czech dimensions, into the Czech parliament, the governing coalition suffered a dramatic decline, which suggests some hope as regards the potential change of the Czech political domestic situation.Nothing will happen in Europe. Europe is a post-democratic entity, and the quasi-elections have practically no role. The European Union will go on, regardless of the election results. Madame von der Leyen will be reappointed as the boss of the European Union, and all the crazy projects that started with the Green Deal will continue.I think the ruling Eurocrats’ main message is, to use the American phrase, “Some extremists try to spoil our important work of the last couple of years, but we shall overcome.” That’s how they will continue. They will try to suppress all the critical voices. So it’s a mixed blessing, and I have mixed feelings about it.Shellenberger: Do you believe that Europe is dying?Klaus: Those are strong terms. For someone like me, there is a strict difference between Europe and the European Union. To mix these two terms together is missing the pointIt was me, as Prime Minister, with all my criticisms, who sent the letter asking for EU membership. My signature is there. But we had no other choice as an ex-Communist country. We didn't have the luxury of being Switzerland, sovereign and independent, for centuries.We were greeted all over Europe as members of the European Union. “Welcome to Europe!” they said. And I always protested: “You should say, ‘Welcome to the European Union.’ We have always been in Europe, even in the darkest Communist days. Don’t push us.”Europe, as a continent, will not die. The question is how efficiently will European society function? To say it is dying is an overstatement.Shellenberger: How would you evaluate the efforts of right-wing populists in France and Germany to moderate their public image and agendas?Klaus: “Populist” is an unacceptable term in this room, building, and institution. “Populist” has no meaning and no substance. This is just a political label — a wrong, crazy, and dangerous political label. To call the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the Le Pen party in France as “populist” is a progressivist attack on rational thinking and political freedom. To use that term is to accept the von der Leyen terminology.Shellenberger: Okay. So, how would you evaluate the efforts by right-wing parties in France and Germany to expand their appeal?Klaus: Those are normal, or practically normal, political parties. They just don't shout “Viva Europe!”The AfD is probably more on the right than Le Pen’s party; it is not quite clear. As an academic social scientist, I would use different terminology than they use. To call them populists is wrong.Mr. Macron is not my cup of tea. I am always afraid of his policies. That’s one issue. There is a very complicated political structure in France. “Left” and “Right” have always been confused in France. This confusion is more visible in other countries in Europe, but it is always special in France. Shellenberger: We interviewed some of the political leaders of AfD in Germany and were surprised that they wanted to re-migrate even legal immigrants who had arrived in Germany legally. Do you think that's too extreme?Klaus: Extreme is one thing. My interest is whether it's pragmatically possible. In this respect, my answer would probably be no. It can't be done.And I am a fundamental critic of the migration process. I have been a hundred times all over the world, traveling, giving speeches, having state visits. Maybe one thousand times. But I will never migrate. I have never lived abroad. I think that migration is a non-normal state of affairs.When we discuss migration, I immediately try to interrupt the debate. Do you speak about individual migration or mass migration? The difference is crucial. No one would protest against individual migration, which has happened permanently throughout human history. Mass migration is a different phenomenon.In Europe and the United States, mass migration is based on the totally wrong idea of multiculturalism.Shellenberger: Why have European leaders allowed so much migration so quickly?Klaus: I don't want to say that they are stupid.Shellenberger: You don't want to say it because you think it's true? Klaus: On the one hand, they wrongly believe in the idea of multiculturalism. On the other hand, they always find a picture of a two-year-old [migrant] child sitting on a boat.Shellenberger: So it's a kind of pathological altruism?Klaus: It is pathological. I am very much in favor of a multicultural world and monocultural nation-states. The difference is fundamental. It’s multiculturalism. It's just the other way around. They want to introduce multiculturalism to individual countries.Shellenberger: Before the European elections, there were many accusations that Russia was giving money to journalists and political leaders through Voice of Europe. What was behind those accusations? Is there any truth to them?Klaus: No. It is a political game. I don't take it seriously.Shellenberger: But it's striking to us that the Czech, Polish, and German intelligence agencies claimed that they had information that Voice of Europe was bribing politicians. Have you ever seen that sort of thing?Klaus: You should add another important entity, the U.S. secret services [intelligence agencies]. I don't know.Shellenberger: Have you ever seen that before? Or is it new for intelligence agencies to make accusations before an election?
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsJean Twenge is a psychologist and author of a series of important and influential books, including Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents―and What They Mean for America's Future (2023); iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy--and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood--and What That Means for the Rest of Us (2018); and The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement (2009).Twenge is also sometimes a coauthor to Jonathan Haidt, whose new bestselling book The Anxious Generation argues that society must significantly restrict social media use among children and adolescents. Social media is creating anxiety and depression, reducing resiliency and risk-taking, and contributing to the coddling and closing of the American mind, Haidt, Twenge, and many other psychologists believe.I spoke to Twenge recently to ask her about how entitlement, a key characteristic of narcissism, appears to be a key element in the rising demand for censorship. She agreed that it was. But Twenge also pointed out that “in most times and places in world history free speech has not really been a thing.”
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsAnybody who has been canceled for holding disfavored views knows how lonely and depressing the experience can be. It often means watching trusted people in positions of authority turn into bullies and, worse, watching friends and colleagues turn into cowards.That dark reality makes it all the more important to understand those people who do the right thing and stand up for what’s right. One of them is James Esses, a British attorney in his early thirties who was kicked out of a training school for therapists for raising concerns about the medical mistreatment of children confused about their gender.As far as cancelations go, Esses’s wasn’t particularly dramatic or noteworthy. He wasn’t a famous actor, musician, or writer. He was just someone who, early in his career, decided he didn’t want to be a lawyer anymore and instead wanted to help people with mental health problems.Given that protecting the institutions of civilization requires more ordinary people, without the resources of famous artists and authors, to stand up against bullies, we should seek to understand why they do it so that we might encourage more of it.Esses’ journey began in 2020 when he was in his third and final year of getting his therapist’s degree from Metanoia Institute and volunteering for a charity to staff a mental health hotline.“I was on the cusp of setting up my own private practice,” he says. “I had children coming through on this helpline saying they were trapped in the wrong bodies and that they wanted to use breast binders and take puberty blockers. They were younger and younger.”The charity told Esses “to kind of just affirm” the pseudoscientific and dehumanizing idea that some children are born into the wrong bodies.“Many had come across this stuff online,” he said. “Many of them were being taught it in school. Children have been taught from a very young age that it's possible to be born in the wrong body and that you can essentially change your sex.”Esses started reading about children being medicalized and given drugs and surgeries. “I couldn't believe what I was reading. We were damaging, irreparably, children in the name of an ideology that isn't founded in evidence or fact. I couldn't believe it."“The message from the training institutions and our regulatory bodies as therapists was, essentially, affirm,” Esses explained. “Don't explore. Don't challenge. Affirm transitioning, no matter what. And to me, that flew in the face of proper therapeutic ethics and the Hippocratic oath. So I couldn't simply abide by that. I felt compelled to start speaking out about it.”Esses cofounded with some colleagues a new group, Thoughtful Therapists. “I wrote a petition to the UK government,” he said. “I started engaging on social media for the first time about this, doing some interviews, and writing some articles. And then, out of the blue, one day in May, I received an email from my institution telling me that they were expelling me with immediate effect.”Esses says the experience was humiliating. “It was a two-paragraph email that simply said that there had been some complaints about my writing and my advocacy and that I had brought them into disrepute, and so they were expelling me with immediate effect.“They blocked my email and my access to the university Intranet portal,” he said. “And they had, on Twitter, publicized the fact that they had expelled me.”Esses was shattered. “I was in an awful state. In a single email, my entire future life plans went up in smoke. I hadn't done anything wrong. All I had done was raise concerns essentially about child safeguarding.”Esses had done the right thing and was now paying a heavy price. “For the first for the first couple of days, I didn't want to get out of bed. You know, I was really that low.”
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsA few weeks after the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel, the Director of the FBI said, “Our most immediate concern is that violent extremists—individuals or small groups—will draw inspiration from the events in the Middle East to carry out attacks against Americans going about their daily lives. That includes not just homegrown violent extremists inspired by a foreign terrorist organization but also domestic violent extremists targeting Jewish or Muslim communities.”And indeed, in the three months after October 7, the Anti-Defamation League recorded 3,291 anti-Jewish incidents, which was a 361-percent increase compared to the same period one year prior.But the terrorist attacks the FBI Director warned about never arrived, and all but 56 of those 3,291 incidents were nonviolent, consisting of hate speech, vandalism, and rallies. And ADL has inflated its recorded number of nonviolent incidents by counting certain political speech as hate speech.We should, of course, condemn those 56 violent incidents, all forms of hateful rhetoric, and all genuine expressions of support for terrorism. And we must remain vigilant against terrorist attacks like the kind committed on September 11 and in the 2019 terrorist attacks on two Muslim mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.But fighting terrorism is different from hyping it. What led to the 9/11 terrorist attack was the failure of the US intelligence agencies to communicate with each other, not any downplaying of terrorism, according to the bipartisan 9/11 Commission.The fact of the matter is that terrorism is incredibly rare and on the decline. Most of it is in the Middle East and South Asia, with tiny amounts in North America and countries like New Zealand.In truth, most forms of violence have been declining in Western nations for centuries, even millennia.To the extent governments and NGOs are recording more so-called “hate speech,” it’s because people today are far more likely to label speech “hateful” than were people just a few decades ago. By almost every measure, our tolerance of racial, sexual, and religious minorities is at an all-time high.And we should also be very wary of governments hyping terrorism since it leads to abuses of power. After 9/11, the hyping of terrorism fears allowed the US to invade a country we never should have invaded, occupy a country we shouldn’t have occupied, use kidnapping and torture as standard operating procedures, and violate fundamental civil liberties.Now, it appears that the US and other governments around the world are hyping hate in order to weaponize the government against their political enemies.
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsMany journalists, university professors, and Democrats say we must change how we think about the First Amendment for the Internet age. Maybe the government had no role in regulating speech before there existed social media platforms like X and Facebook, where “peer-to-peer misinformation” thrives. But now, given the threat such misinformation poses to democracy, we need the government to restrict what can be said on the Internet, claim Stanford researchers, the New York Times, and the Biden administration.All of that is dangerous nonsense, according to Jeff Kosseff, a cybersecurity law professor at the U.S. Naval Academy and author of a new book, Liar In A Crowded Theater. “Starting about a century ago,” he told me in a new podcast, “the Supreme Court gradually developed robust [free speech] protections for all but a handful of exceptions…. And I think that, for the Internet, it needs to be the same, where we start off with the premise that this speech is not subject to regulation.”
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsEuropeans are free to speak their mind as they wish, most of them believe. They can express their views on controversial political and social issues on social media platforms from Facebook to X.But all of that may soon change. Europe is implementing the Digital Services Act, which is using the exact same censorship system we exposed as part of the Twitter Files, notes Michigan State University legal scholar Adam Candeub.The EU is saying, “‘You must get trusted flaggers,’” Candeub said in a podcast with me this morning. “‘You must tag and flag all harmful information, which is illegal under any EU state.’ That includes hate speech, incitement, misinformation and disinformation… The EU bureaucrats have already made threatening noises toward Elon [Musk].”You might think you shouldn’t worry about this because it’s happening in Europe. European nations have a long history of censoring their citizens far more than the US.But Candeub says that the EU may end up censoring the whole world.“What's disturbing is that now the platforms will have two choices,” he explained. “They'll be able to have one EU-compliant platform worldwide. Or they'll have an EU and American Facebook. It seems like the cheaper version is the former version.”
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsGoogle CEO Sundar Pichai today addressed the public upset with its AI chatbot, Gemini, for its political bias. “I want to address the recent issues with problematic text and image responses in the Gemini app (formerly Bard),” he wrote. I know that some of its responses have offended our users and shown bias—to be clear, that’s completely unacceptable, and we got it wrong.”But Google’s bias has been on public display since August 2017, when Pichai fired a Google employee named James Damore for writing a ten-page memo criticizing the company's diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies, particularly its “Bias-Busting” training.And the partisan bias of Google was expressed a few days after voters elected Donald Trump as president during an “all hands” employee meeting. “It’s been an extraordinarily stressful time for many of you,” Pichai said to Google employees. “I certainly find this election deeply offensive,” said Google cofounder Sergey Brin, “and I know many of you do too.” One Google executive nearly started crying when recounting that Trump won. “It was this massive kick in the gut that we were gonna lose,” she said. “And it was really painful.”Pichai struck a more neutral political tone in comparison to his colleagues. “We are in a democratic system,” he said. “I think part of the reason the outcome ended up the way it is is [because] people don't feel heard across both sides.”But after a Google employee suggested that Trump won due to “misinformation” and “fake news coming from fake news websites being shared by millions of low-information voters on social media,” Pichai specifically pointed to the use of artificial intelligence to achieve the aim of countering “misinformation.”“I think our investments in machine learning and AI is a big opportunity here,” he said. Machine learning is a form of AI.Pichai then suggested that Google was already manipulating search results.
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsLast year, Google CEO Sundar Pinchai went on a media offensive to reassure the public and policymakers that he was being responsible with Artificial Intelligence, or AI. “You will see us be bold and ship things,” he told the New York Times in March, “but we are going to be very responsible in how we do it.”But the AI product Google shipped, Gemini, turned out to have a strong racial bias. When asked to depict the Pope, Vikings, and America’s founding fathers, Gemini refused to depict them as white. Gemini responded with misinformation when asked about this misrepresentation, claiming that it “aimed to provide a more accurate and inclusive representation of the historical context.” To its credit, Google took the image creation feature of Gemini offline, saying it was not “working as intended.” And, to be fair, tech firms often ship new products aware that there are programming bugs.But Gemini remains up and running and is a source of misinformation and, arguably, “hate speech.”
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsPoliticians and activists alike have warned of a looming climate catastrophe for decades. “Biden urged to declare climate change a national emergency,” reported NBC last year. “Climate Changes Threatens Every Facet of U.S. Society, Federal Report Warns,” announced Scientific American.Cambridge University climate scientist Mike Hulme disagrees. “Declaring a climate emergency has a chilling effect on politics,” he tells Public. “It suggests there isn’t time for normal, necessary democratic process.”Climate activists may dismiss Hulme as a “climate denier,” but he agrees the planet is warming due to human activities and specifically says we should prepare for more heat waves. Moreover, Hulme’s credentials are undeniably impressive. He is a Professor at the University of Cambridge and founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. Hulme has advised everyone from the United Nations to the UK Government and earned a personalized certificate from the Nobel Peace Prize committee for his work with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).Now, in his new book, Climate Change Isn’t Everything, Hulme strongly denounces “climatism,” which he describes as the “unyielding belief that stopping climate change is the pre-eminent yardstick against which all policies must be measured.”