This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsOn 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 www.public.newsIn 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 www.public.newsRob 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 www.public.newsLast 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 www.public.newsRope, 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 www.public.newsHave 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 www.public.newsIn 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 www.public.news“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 www.public.newsThe 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 www.public.newsFor 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.