Recent fires in Los Angeles have led to intense debate about their causes. One leading fire expert argues that these blazes aren't primarily driven by climate change. Instead, he highlights the significant roles of human activity and urban development. Historical dry conditions and Santa Ana winds have a long-standing impact on fire dynamics. The conversation challenges popular narratives, focusing on how land use and population density significantly influence fire frequency and severity.

Brendan Carr, a Federal Communications Commissioner, dives into the controversy surrounding NBC and Saturday Night Live's breach of the Equal Time rule. He argues that SNL's recent inclusion of Kamala Harris undermines fair broadcasting practices, and claims NBC is fully aware of the legal implications. Carr emphasizes the importance of impartiality in political programming, especially ahead of elections, and raises concerns about potential biases on public airwaves. His insights shed light on the complex intersection of comedy and electoral law.

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.