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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. 

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit public.substack.comLast 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 public.substack.comOne 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 public.substack.comVaclav 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 public.substack.comJean 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 public.substack.comAnybody 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 public.substack.comA 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 public.substack.comMany 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 public.substack.comEuropeans 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 public.substack.comGoogle 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 public.substack.comLast 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 public.substack.comPoliticians 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.”

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit public.substack.comOn Monday, Alex Gutentag and I reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is misrepresenting the location of the alleged bomb allegedly found at the Republican National Committee (RNC) headquarters on January 5, 2021, and that little about the alleged bomb scare makes any sense.Today, I sat down with Briahna Joy Gray and Robby Soave of “The Rising” to discuss the issue. They asked me hard questions, and I was glad to have the dialogue.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit public.substack.comIn 2020, progressives rode a wave of righteous anger toward what many believed would be decisive and lasting change. The pandemic ensured a captive audience; America could no longer look away.So why did a year that saw the largest combined protests in the history of this country fail to deliver substantive change, let alone the radical shift progressives were banking on?Essayist and author Freddie deBoer parses these disappointments in his 2023 book, “How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement.”  “People didn't appear to want to confront the fact that nothing of substance happened and were eager to just move on,” deBoer said of his motivations for writing the book. “I said it's really important we think about this… I wanted to force that conversation.”

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit public.substack.comRob Henderson is a writer and academic perhaps best known for popularizing the concept of “luxury beliefs.” Over the past several years, he's become an influential commentator, both in mainstream media and with his own Substack.Now, he has a much-anticipated book coming out from a major publisher. “Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family and Social Class,” recounts his tumultuous childhood and unlikely path to elite universities, and expands on ideas – about class, social psychology and culture – he developed while studying at Yale and Cambridge.His profile and social media following all but guarantee an audience. And yet, bookstores in progressive cities like San Francisco and New York won't host his book events.Don't worry about Rob, the book will do fine. But it's bizarre that liberals aren't more open to his ideas, especially since he spends a lot of time thinking about how social and cultural trends impact poor and working class people.Perhaps the reason Henderson is such an insightful critic is that he traverses boundaries that remain invisible to some, intractable to others. Moving through class divides, from the foster system, blue-collar America and the military to the most prestigious institutions, he is both outsider and insider. From this vantage point, he asks us to think deeply about the meaning of privilege.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit public.substack.comLast week, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused pro-Palestinian protesters who demonstrated outside her San Francisco home of being Russian stooges. She even urged the FBI to investigate them.Obviously, the FBI can't legally investigate an allegation for which there is zero evidence. And to be clear, Pelosi offered zero evidence.Is it possible that Russian interests have funded pro-Palestine activists? Sure, just like it's possible that Russian interests have funded Nancy Pelosi. But there's no evidence. And it's a dangerous abuse of power for a politician to call for the FBI to investigate her critics based on nothing but wild accusations.What was Pelosi thinking? You might say she just lost her cool. But it's noticeable that the Democrats made Russia the new bogeyman starting in 2016, during the election campaign of Donald Trump.Democrats made various accusations of Trump's collusion with Russia. All turned out to be false and misleading. They suggested a bank in Russia had wired money to the Trump campaign. They claimed Trump's campaign was working with the Russians on the release of embarrassing emails.But two Justice Department investigations, one by Robert Mueller and the other by John Durham, concluded that there was no illegal collusion. Durham believed the FBI should never have begun an investigation of Trump and Russia in the first place.After this, Democrats used Russia constantly to dismiss issues they didn't want to deal with. After the New York Post published its mid-October 2020 article about Hunter Biden's laptop, which revealed a massive influence-peddling scheme involving the whole family, dozens of former CIA and intelligence officials said it had “all the markings of a Russian information operation, which then-presidential candidate Joe Biden referred to in a debate with Trump in 2020.Attacking one's opponents as being backed by Putin and aligned with Russia dates back even to earlier in 2015 and 2016. Back then, opponents of the Brexit referendum in the UK claimed that supporters of Brexit were pro-Putin.Today, the accusation is everywhere. Government-funded think tanks in North America and Europe accuse critics of the West's support for Ukraine in its war against Russia of being Russian agents. And a few days ago, Correctiv, an influential “anti-disinformation” website in Germany, which both the German government and George Soros's foundation finance, falsely suggested that protesting German farmers are pro-Putin or supported by Putin.There is a good psychological reason for Democrats to focus on Russia.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit public.substack.comRope, not the wind industry, killed the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale found dead last Monday, claim scientific organizations, the US government, and the news media. “This case highlights the ongoing threat right whales and other whale species have been facing from fishing gear entanglements for decades,” said Amy Knowlton of the New England Aquarium, which is working with the North Atlantic Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to identify the cause of death.But neither Knowlton nor anyone else knows if the rope killed the three-year-old female whale, who is known only as “5120.” Whales can live long lives with a rope embedded in their bodies. Indeed, nearly 90 percent of right whales have been entangled in rope at least once, and others as often as nine times. This young whale was first observed to have rope around her tail in August 2022.It's true that, in the past, rope entanglements were the primary cause of death for North Atlantic right whales, and late today, NOAA reported that “The necropsy showed no evidence of blunt force trauma.”But NOAA did not address whether high-decibel sonar, measured at illegal levels last year, played a role. Nor did NOAA establish a cause of death. “Cause of death is pending further histological and diagnostic testing of collected samples, which can take weeks to complete.As such, it is inappropriate for the New England Aquarium, which is participating in NOAA's investigation of the cause of the whale's death, to suggest that rope entanglement killed the whale before NOAA has completed its investigation.And this is particularly inappropriate since the threats to the whales have increased as boat traffic related to offshore wind development increased.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit public.substack.comHave you ever heard of the “Five Eyes” nations? I confess that I hadn't until I started covering censorship and other governmental abuses of power last year.But it turns out to be something really important. The Five Eyes refers to intelligence agencies in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, which have collaborated on spying and intelligence sharing since World War II.Now it appears Canada spread disinformation to other Five Eyes nations after Canada's Justin Trudeau government used the same faked intelligence to illegally frame protesters as violent extremists.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit public.substack.comIn 2010, the family of Monica Harris's partner held a reunion in southeastern Montana. “She says, ‘Hey, babe, would you ever want to go?' And I don't know about you, but Montana was one of these places that had always been on my bucket list. It's Big Sky country, you know? So I said, ‘Sure, let's go. And we were there for a week, and it was just — I think it was life-changing.”Monica is a Harvard-educated entertainment lawyer, author of The Illusion of Division, and the new Executive Director of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR), which advocates for Martin Luther King's vision of a color-blind society. The organization, on whose advisory board I sit, is currently supporting a former DEI executive who says she was fired for questioning woke ideology. I interviewed Monica last week for this podcast.Instead of going back to L.A., Harris and her wife drove through Montana. “We're passing all these little towns, and I'm wondering, ‘What's that town like?' Population 2,000 — or 200. ‘What's that about?' We got off at one of them. They were holding a chili cook-off. I thought, ‘My God! A chili cook-off at Montana! What's that about?'“We're creeping through town. There are no black people to be found. Just white guys in pickup trucks with shotguns in the back and the big cowboy hats and boots and women looking like they're from 30 or 40 years ago. I wanted to check it out. But there's a part of me that was kind of afraid. You see a lot of white guys with guns in their trucks and you're thinking, ‘Was this the right move? Am I going to be a statistic? Is someone going to jump out at us as we're walking back to our car?'“We walk up to the woman who's selling the tickets to the cookoff and I'm bracing myself. She looks at us and she says, ‘Y'all here for the cookoff?' I'm like, ‘Yeah, we are.' ‘Well, get yourself a ticket. Settle on in. You're going to have lots of fun.' It was like something out of a movie. It was great. And we spent like a couple of hours there. Everything was fine. That was the first shift in my thinking. The first clue I got was that, ‘Huh. This isn't what I expected. I wonder what else isn't what I expect?

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit public.substack.com“People get fat because they eat too many calories.” “A calorie is a calorie.” “Saturated fats are bad.”America's leading dietary experts, the US government, and food manufacturers agreed on the above for decades. During that time, rates of overweight, obesity, and diabetes skyrocketed. Either the experts are wrong or people didn't follow the advice of experts. Two journalists, Gary Taubes and Nina Teicholz, say the experts are wrong. Saturated fats are good, not bad, and a calorie is not a calorie. The body doesn't process a 60-calorie serving of bacon the same way it does a 60-calorie slice of cake. Obesity and diabetes are a result of a hormone imbalance caused by eating more carbohydrates than the body can handle, they say. When we eat carbohydrates, they believe, the body works to keep the fat locked away in storage. The best diet is a high-fat, high-protein, and low-carb diet known as the keto diet.Naturally, many in the diet establishment, including at academic institutions like Berkeley and Harvard, have taken issue with the conclusions of Taubes and Teicholz. Mainstream experts argue that Taubes and Teicholz have misunderstood or misrepresented the science and downplayed the difficulty of sticking to the keto diet.Teicholz and Taubes have responded at length to their critics at their terrific Substack, Unsettled Science. And, now, Taubes is out with a response to his critics in the form of a major new book, Rethinking Diabetes: What Science Reveals About Diet, Insulin, and Successful Treatments. At 750 pages, Taubes clearly intended for this to be the best available review of the scientific evidence and history published to date. Any serious person who disagrees with Taubes' unorthodox views on diet and diabetes will need to contend with it. I interviewed Taubes about it for today's podcast. We talked about his critics and the challenge of sticking to keto, including for me. He told me that the book on diabetes flowed out of his 2016 book, The Case Against Sugar. “The liver has never evolved to see the doses of fructose that they get today… Biochemistry in the 60s and 70s demonstrated how fructose could cause this condition called ‘insulin resistance,' which is the fundamental disorder of type 2 diabetes.”

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit public.substack.comThe US Department of Justice has charged over 1,200 people with federal crimes related to the January 6, 2021 riot. In order to convict those individuals, the DOJ has relied heavily on 14,000 hours of surveillance video as well as cell phone data, some of which somebody leaked to the New York Times.“The data we were given showed what some in the tech industry might call a God-view vantage of that dark day,” wrote Charlie Warzel and Stuart A. Thompson in 2021 in the New York Times. “It included about 100,000 location pings for thousands of smartphones…While there were no names or phone numbers in the data, we were once again able to connect dozens of devices to their owners, tying anonymous locations back to names, home addresses, social networks and phone numbers of people in attendance.”The New York Times authors had less cell phone data than what the FBI had available to it. And yet, amazingly, the cell phone and video surveillance data of the suspect who committed the worst crime on January 6 are, according to the FBI, corrupted and/or missing.And what was the worst crime? The attempted assassination of Vice President-elect Kamala Harris while she was at the Democratic National Committee.In other words, while FBI had cell phone data for the January 6 protesters, none of whom tried to kill anyone, it doesn't have the cell phone data for the one person who did.And while FBI had 14,000 hours of high-quality surveillance video for the January 6 protesters, it somehow does not have any video of the suspect actually leaving the bomb. Nor does it have high-quality video, including from the best angles, of the suspect.That's an unbelievable coincidence.And it gets worse.Last year, the person who was in charge of the FBI investigation, the head of the Washington Field Office, admitted to Rep. Thomas Massie that the Vice President's life was never at risk.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit public.substack.comFor more than 30 years, progressives and conservatives have differed over how to think about mentally ill homeless people. Progressives have argued that the fundamental problem is the lack of funding for mental health services, while conservatives have argued that the problem is the unwillingness of progressives to mandate care.Now, a new book, Conservatorship: Inside California's System of Coercion and Care for Mental Illness, by New York University sociology professor Alex Barnard, who I interviewed for this week's podcast, argues that progressives and conservatives are both partly right and partly wrong. Progressives are right that America has far fewer psychiatric beds per capita than other developed nations. But conservatives are right that we also mandate psychiatric care less than many other developed nations.Barnard's insight is that if you improve mental health care, fewer people require hospitalization, which is the most expensive part of the system. Witness the decline of psychiatric beds in Europe in general and the Netherlands in particular. As such, Barnard's argument scrambles the older liberal-conservative divide on mentally ill homelessness. If we had a better care system, we wouldn't have to mandate care as much. But if it were easier to mandate care, people with mental illness would not become so sick or homeless at such a high rate.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit public.substack.comIf you watch the mainstream media, you might think that what happened on January 6th, 2021 was a coup attempt. But what if that's not at all what happened?The dictionary definition of a coup is a “violent overthrow or alteration of an existing government by a small group.”There's no doubt that the chaos on January 6 was a bad day for the United States. But it was a bad day that would have been prevented had Congressional leaders granted the request by the Capitol police for National Guard backupAnd, more importantly, the people who walked through the Capitol were protesting what they thought was a stolen election. They weren't planning to take over the government and run it from the Rotunda. Let's be real: an unarmed group of rioters in the most armed country in the history of the world could never take over the government. Coups require physically overpowering the existing government. That's why they almost always involve the military. Contrast what happened on Jan. 6 to what happened on September 11th. No, not September 11th here in the United States in 2001, but September 11, 1973, in the Latin American nation of Chile.On that day, a faction in the military launched a coup against the elected leader Salvador Allende, resulting in the installation of General Augusto Pinochet as president. Allende took his own life as his presidential palace was being bombed from the air. The toppling of his government ushered in nearly two decades of brutal military dictatorship.Or take what happened in Iran in 1953.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit public.substack.comDid you see what happened last Monday night after Donald Trump won a landslide victory in Iowa?Rachel Maddow announced that MSNBC would not be covering Trump's victory speech, and CNN cut away after just a few minutes of it. Why was that?

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit public.substack.comImagine for a moment that you wanted to seize control over the Internet and put in place a system of mass censorship worldwide. How would you do it? You wouldn't advertise your intentions. You'd hide them. You'd claim there was a rise in hate speech and misinformation and that it was hurting vulnerable people.You wouldn't take on powerful interests. You'd pick on individual citizens. You'd say that they were on the verge of committing real-world violence.And you wouldn't start in a big nation. You'd find some small country to start. You'd get their politicians to go out on a limb for your agenda.That's precisely what's happening. Politicians in Ireland are, at this moment, attempting to ram through legislation that would allow the police to invade the homes of ordinary citizens, search their phones and computers, and throw them in prison for “hate speech.”It's understandable that people find all of this hard to believe. I find it hard to believe. It sounds like a “Black Mirror” episode.But it's not a “Black Mirror” episode. It's real life. And it's unfolding in Ireland at this very moment.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit public.substack.comThere are a lot of scary charts and graphs out there. Like this one, which shows learning loss during covid lockdowns. Or this one, which shows the increase in illicit drug deaths over the last twenty years. Or this one, which shows the spike in illegal border crossings.But this chart is scarier than the others:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit public.substack.comDonald Trump cannot become president of the United States because he led an insurrection against the government on January 6, 2021, most experts and journalists agree. Republican primary voters and caucus-goers should choose a different candidate over Trump, they say. And if they don't, then the courts should either keep Trump off the ballot, they argue, or put him in prison so that he cannot become president.  Voters disagree. The latest polls show they have a more favorable view of Trump than Biden, and more would vote for Trump than Biden in six swing states. In Iowa, where Republicans will caucus to decide who to nominate as president, Trump remains over 30 points ahead of his rivals. Anti-Trump pollster Frank Luntz yesterday predicted that voters would elect Trump president in November, and top Democrats are leaking stories to the media of their growing alarm.A lot could happen between now and the November 7 presidential election that could prevent Trump from becoming president. Biden could still drop out and be replaced by a more popular Democrat. There could be a “black swan” event, such as a financial crisis, terrorist attack, or war, that changes the calculus of voters. Or a court may order the incarceration of Trump and prevent him from being elected.But the chances of Trump becoming America's next president are higher than not. If Biden had intended to drop out, he would have done so already. The concerns raised publicly by former President Barack Obama and his top political advisor, David Axelrod, appear to be the result of genuine panic. There's no guarantee that a black swan event would help rather than hurt Biden. And if a court ordered the incarceration of Trump, voters may respond by voting for Trump to reassert their authority.Even if voters don't elect Trump president, the establishment has undermined its legitimacy in its reaction to him. Instead of acknowledging that voters legitimately elected Trump in 2016, they insisted that he stole the election with the help of the Russians. Instead of admitting that America really does have an immigration crisis, the media, Democrats, and Republican elites labeled his advocacy for a border wall as racist. And instead of acknowledging that America needed to reassess its role as a policeman to the world, they accused Trump of leaving Europe vulnerable to Russian President Vladamir Putin and to fascism.The problem is that the truth comes out eventually, and reality bats last. Anyone who bothered to investigate learned that Russian interference in the 2016 election was too trivial to measure. Even progressive Democrats, like the mayor of Chicago, are today raising the alarm about uncontrolled immigration. Not only did Russia invade Ukraine under Biden, not Trump, but US support for Ukraine failed spectacularly, first to result in a peace treaty and now to a potential Russian victory. “Ukraine's military prospects are looking bleak,” The New York Times admitted this morning, “Ukraine's summer counteroffensive… is over, having failed to meet any of its objectives” [my emphasis].Much else that Trump did while in office looks better in retrospect. During the summer of 2018, the peak of US accusations that Trump was abandoning Europe to Putin, Trump went to Germany and said, in a public meeting, “Germany is totally controlled by Russia because they will be getting from 60 to 70 percent of their energy from Russia and a new [Nordstream] pipeline. And you tell me if that's appropriate, because I think it's not, and I think it's a very bad thing for NATO and I don't think it should have happened.”The response from the German government, the international news media, and the anti-Trump establishment in the US was of contempt and ridicule.The news media claimed that Trump had spread disinformation. The New York Times declared Trump's “claim that Germany is ‘captive' to Russia because of energy dependence… misleading." Politifact called Trump's statement “mostly false.” Viral video marketer Now This News tweeted the video saying, “President Trump began the NATO summit by insulting Germany, one of our closest allies, with lies.”But they weren't lies. Rather, Trump's statements had been more truthful than anything any Western politician or major media outlet had yet said about the Nordstream pipeline. If anything, Trump had understated Germany's dependence on Russia since he was warning against Nordstream II, whereas Nordstream I had already created the dependency. But the main reason Trump was raising his concern with the Germans is because he wanted Germany to import more American liquified natural gas (LNG), which is what Germany did after Russia invaded Ukraine and somebody, perhaps the U.S. with Poland and other allies, blew up Nordstream II.Biden, the media, and the anti-Trump establishment were all on the wrong side of the issue. Where Trump had imposed sanctions on Nordstream II in December 2019, President Biden lifted them in May 2021. While Biden and the establishment had been criticizing Trump as Putin's lap dog, it was Biden's presidential campaign, not Trump's, that had accepted funding from the Russian lobbyist for Nordstream II. The psychological projection involved in the case was perfect.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit public.substack.comIt sounds like a Hollywood movie. Government intelligence agencies, perhaps CIA and Mossad, use sex with dozens of teenage girls to blackmail some of the world's most powerful people, including Bill Gates, Prince Andrew, and Bill Clinton.But it's not a movie. It appears to be what New York investor Jeffrey Epstein did from the 1990s until 2018. One year later, he died in jail, either by suicide or murder.There's a lot of misinformation out there about this case. The truth is that we don't have the hard proof that the CIA, FBI, or Mossad were involved in Epstein's sex trafficking.But we do know that the U.S. Attorney for South Florida at the time, who arranged Epstein's lenient sentence, said, “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence' and to leave it alone.”And all of the top journalists who have looked into the Epstein case believe that intelligence agencies, including Mossad and CIA, were involved with Epstein and may have even controlled him.The reason any of this matters is because it's wrong for the people who are supposed to be protecting us to be involved in sex trafficking. That goes for both minors and adults.Government agencies asking their employees or contractors to be prostitutes is coercive, exploitative, and wrong.How did this happen?

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit public.substack.comBut it is. Before 2016, when the wind industry's increased boat traffic, sonar mapping, and construction began, eight humpback whales were found dead per year between Virginia and Maine. Since 2016, an average of 25 humpbacks were found dead annually. And last year, there were a record 83 whales found dead.And yet the Associated Press insisted last mont…

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit public.substack.comWe tend to think of censorship as a violation of the rights of the censored. And it is that, of course. But censorship creates other victims we give less consideration to: the millions who are denied the chance to hear the perspectives of those who are silenced.In totalitarian societies, censors deny the public the opportunity to hear opinions that diverge from state orthodoxy. Suppressing dissent allows the government to exercise its power without constraint. Persuasion is no longer necessary; public opinion is shaped through government decree. Obedience follows.Throughout the Covid-19 pandemic, Americans watched our political leaders stoop to these despotic measures. The Department of Homeland Security, the CDC, and the FBI pressured and colluded with the big tech platforms to cleanse social media of anyone who dared to object to the directives of the state. Questioning the efficacy of lockdowns, vaccine mandates and public masking rules was every bit as heretical as doubting dialectical materialism was in Soviet Russia.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit public.substack.comMost days, we get up and think everything's fine. We are alive, we are housed, and we are members of society we call a nation. Within the borders of that nation, we don't let foreigners poison our children.But we do let foreigners poison our children. Last year, foreigners, with the help of their American business partners, poisoned 112,000 of our children, relatives, and fellow citizens with fentanyl, meth, and other hard drugs. That's more people killed every year by drugs than the total killed by the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined.In November, Chinese President Xi visited San Francisco. We cleaned up the streets for him. What that meant was moving the homeless fentanyl addicts to where he wouldn't see them.In that same meeting, President Biden and Xi agreed that China would restrict its exports of the ingredients to make fentanyl. Biden said, "It's going to save lives.”But it didn't save lives.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit public.substack.comRight-wing activists are responsible for the resignation of Harvard's president, Claudine Gay, say mainstream news media organizations. “Harvard president's resignation highlights new conservative weapon against colleges: plagiarism,” read the Associated Press headline. Politico attributed Gay's resignation to a “conservative activist's crusade.” Both the New York Times and Washington Post published pieces suggesting that Gay resigned her position because of conservative pressure. And many other commentators suggested that racism played a role in Gay's departure.But there is clear evidence of plagiarism in eight of Gay's 17 published works, and the fact that conservatives rather than liberals first made the allegations likely made Harvard's famously liberal board of trustees less, not more, reluctant to take action. Moreover, the argument that Gay was treated differently than other university presidents is contradicted by the resignation of Stanford's president last summer after the student newspaper and a subsequent investigation by the university uncovered evidence of falsified data in his published work.It's true that other issues may have affected the decision by Gay to leave. Conservatives had criticized Gay and the presidents of MIT and the University of Pennsylvania after they testified to Congress about how they were handling anti-Israel student protests, and one of them, Penn's president, resigned. It was conservative journalists Chris Rufo, Christopher Brunet, and Aaron Sibarium who published the stories about Gay's plagiarism. And Brunet had first leveled some of the criticisms at Gay in April 2022, and they were largely ignored until her Congressional testimony in December of last year.But Gay had survived the controversy over her testimony to Congress, and it's far from clear that Gay would still be president had the plagiarism accusations been made by mainstream or progressive sources instead of conservative ones. “Our extensive deliberations affirm our confidence that President Gay is the right leader to help our community heal and to address the very serious societal issues we are facing,” the Harvard Corporation said in a statement a few days after her testimony. The bottom line is that Harvard's own code strictly prohibits plagiarism, which also violates the university's core mission to pursue the truth, and there was simply too much of it for Harvard to wave away.To the extent the episode revealed prejudice, it was in Harvard's selection of Gay in the first place. Her scholarly record is below-average compared both to past Harvard presidents and to current Harvard professors. Her career as an administrator consisted of trying to get Harvard faculty, staff, and students to embrace an Orwellian glossary of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) terms, which required embracing pseudoscientific, reductive, and dehumanizing views of race and racism. Those malign ideas include: race essentialism, the notion that racial stereotypes do or should determine one's life outcomes; race exaggeration, the view that racial prejudice is the most significant factor and that it's embedded in laws and institutions; and racial segregation, the idea that it's better to divide people by race in schools, in the workplace, and in politics, as Boston's mayor recently did.The underlying problem with DEI is its imposition of what can accurately be described as a totalitarian language, culture, and politics on universities. It is authoritarian in that if you run afoul of it, as Harvard economist Roland Fryer did, the DEI leaders of the institution will punish you, as Gay did. But in their demand to change how people speak and think, and by inserting themselves into every aspect of life, advocates of DEI slip into the totalizing, “whole of society” approach that characterized past totalitarian episodes.