This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsRikki Schlott was 14 years old when she and other students were herded into racial affinity groups to celebrate Martin Luther King Day. “That was my first moment of kind of doubting the environment around me,” she recalled.By the time she got to NYU, she was hiding books by Thomas Sowell, Jordan Peterson, and other authors. “It's been so ideologically oppressive for as long as I can really remember being even vaguely a mature thinker that it's just sort of all I knew. And it wasn't until I started reading for myself, like classical liberal texts and John Stuart Mill, that I realized that there's an alternative … that I could fight for,” Schlott explained.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsIn the field of anthropology, it’s difficult to avoid talking about sex. For physical anthropologists, much of the field’s focus is on skeletal remains where body size, bone mineral density, and other sex differences are of utmost importance. For forensic anthropologists, determining the sex of remains is a crucial element of identifying crime victims. Archaeologists, too, glean valuable insights into social structures by studying "grave goods" interred alongside individuals of each sex.Thus, the distinction between males and females is crucial in the study of human beings and their cultures. So when a group of anthropologists organized a panel titled, ‘Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology,’ for the 2023 American Anthropological Association (AAA)/Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) conference, the only reasonable question that should arise is why this seemingly evident truth even needs stating at all.However, we are not living in reasonable times. Despite having their panel approved by both the AAA and CASCA in July, a little over a month before the event, the panelists received notice that their session had been removed from the conference program. The rationale behind this decision was that the ideas to be discussed would "cause harm to members represented by the Trans and LGBTQI of the anthropological community as well as the community at large."

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsYou no doubt saw the news that the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Trump cannot be on the ballot because he attempted insurrection on January 6. You might have paid little attention to it because you heard that the US Supreme Court would overrule the decision, and the holidays were coming up.But we should all pay attention, no matter your feelings about Trump, because what is at stake is nothing less than our democracy itself.Before saying why I think that is, it’s important for you to know something:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsFew members of the Senate have ever been stronger defenders of the First Amendment than Senator Rand Paul.For that reason, I was excited to sit down with him in Washington, D.C., to learn more about his proposal to prohibit federal government employees from talking to social media companies.Paul’s proposal is controversial.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsIn 2020, The New York Times published an op-ed piece that put the lives of its black employees in danger, many of them said. Senator Tom Cotton had written the op-ed, and the New York Times gave it the headline, “Send In The Troops.” Cotton argued that President Donald Trump should deploy the National Guard to quell rioting. The next day, the New York Times published a news story about the resulting internal controversy. In the first sentence, the Times news story said that the Times op-ed had urged the use of “the military to suppress protests against police violence.”But that wasn’t what Cotton had urged. In fact, Cotton had argued that “A majority who seek to protest peacefully shouldn’t be confused with bands of miscreants” and explicitly condemned any “revolting moral equivalence of rioters and looters to peaceful, law-abiding protesters.”And no black New York Times employee was put in danger by the op-ed. Notes James Bennet, who was the newspaper opinion page editor at the time, “One of the ironies of this episode was that it was not any newsroom reporter but [fellow editor Adam] Rubenstein who wound up receiving death threats because of the Cotton op-ed, and it was the newsroom that put him in harm’s way.”

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsFor more than one year now, we and others have been releasing internal emails and messages between social media employees and current and former government officials working for the White House, Defense Department, CIA, FBI, UK Ministry of Defense demanding and coordinating mass censorship of disfavored political and cultural views.We have released so much information that we need to take a breath sometimes and assess what it all means.That’s what my colleague Alex Gutentag and I did last Friday. Our colleague Leighton Woodhouse recorded it for the forthcoming “Censorship Files” documentary. We thought our readers would find the whole conversation interesting, and so we are publishing it above.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsOver the last year, we and others have documented the leadership and participation of US military, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies in demanding greater censorship of legal speech online by social media platforms. Over the last two weeks, we have traced the creation of a mass, public-private censorship effort called Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL) to two separate US Department of Defense organizations. Adding to this large and growing body of evidence is the fact that there appears to be a limited number of interpretive frameworks used by the US government, NATO, and their allies for characterizing their populist enemies. From the Russia hoax to the Covid lab leak to the recent riots in Ireland, the news media, governments, and leading NGOs have framed populists as foreign, crazy, harmful, and undemocratic. It might seem unextraordinary that one side of the political spectrum would frame its opponents around those four negatives. After all, people involved in political life, whether politicians, activists, or journalists, frequently simplify and focus their attacks to significant effect.But this limited number of “frames” displays, I believe, a level of message discipline that is uncharacteristic of genuinely grassroots political movements. Having worked on various activist political causes for 35 years, one defining characteristic is their lack of message discipline. Activists and NGOs struggle to work together in coalitions because they all want to emphasize different messages. That’s not the case in these counterpopulist movements. Across seven years, every major counterpopulism effort used one of those four interpretative frames when they could have drawn on many alternatives, including framing populism as economically inefficient, which was the dominant counterpopulist frame before 2016. Why is that? And do those counterpopulist frames retain their power? Or are they diminishing in strength?Four Counterpopulist Frames, 2016 - 2023

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsOur military, police, and intelligence officials exist to protect us from domestic and international danger, we were all raised to believe. Military, intelligence, and law enforcement professionals are not there to decide what we should think or how we should think. They are there to protect us from those who would try to take away those freedoms. Public’s reporting shows that top military and intelligence officials and contractors became the enemy of the people. They violated our Constitution by turning sophisticated censorship tools and psychological operations against the American people. The war on terrorism, it’s now clear, became the war on populism after 2016. Some responded to our reporting by saying that what we reported wasn’t shocking and that we all already knew the government was doing this.But we didn’t. Neither the Twitter Files nor the Facebook files showed such a direct connection between the US and UK militaries, and censorship and disinformation campaigns targeting the American people.

It sounds like a "Black Mirror" episode: a small country announces a crackdown on hate speech to seize control over the entire Internet. Except it's not a "Black Mirror" episode. It's real life. And it's happening right now in Ireland. The so-called "Hate Speech" bill isn't what it seems. It's not a bill about protecting the Irish people from hate crimes. It's a Trojan Horse designed to control the world's Big Tech companies — X, Facebook, Google, and YouTube. This is a free speech emergency. We thought the legislation was dead. But the Irish government is using recent riots as an excuse to ram the legislation through before Christmas. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. THIS IS NOT ABOUT IRELAND. THIS IS A TOTALITARIAN EFFORT BY GLOBAL ELITES TO CENSOR ALL OF US. It's right there in black and white: "One of the key features of the Bill," write two attorneys with a leading Irish law firm, "is the provision for offences by corporate bodies."How can Big Tech companies avoid censorship? You guessed it: by agreeing to regulation of their content by the Irish government. "The current iteration of the Bill,” the attorneys write, “provides a defence for the corporate body to show that it took all reasonable steps and exercised due diligence to avoid the commission of the particular offence. Therefore, to establish and maintain such a defence, companies will need to have the appropriate processes and procedures in place." The Irish government is almost certainly not acting alone. As my colleagues and I have reported, the demand for censorship is coming directly from the militaries, intelligence agencies, and their front groups in the US, UK, and around the world.There's no time to mince words. What governments are doing is against the law. They are violating the constitutions of the nations that the people elected them to uphold. Because of the high level of secrecy they are using, we can't say whether or not these are "rogue" elements within governments or whether these orders are coming from heads of state. But we do know that demands for censorship have come both directly from the US military and from heads of state of Western nations around the world. What's happening should terrify all freedom-loving people. We must fight back. We will fight back. That starts with recognizing what's going on. Please share this post and tell friends and family what's going on. Finally, please consider getting involved directly. We have created and personally contributed to an Emergency Free Speech Fund to get the word out.This isn't about "hate speech." This is about out-of-control elites within the intelligence, military, and security agencies around the world who are grotesquely abusing their power in a mad bid to take control of the Internet. If we don't stop them now, in Ireland, this terrifying "Black Mirror" episode will become real life. This is a public episode. If you’d like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.public.news/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsAt United Nations climate change talks in Dubai, the Biden Administration’s Special Envoy for Climate Change, John Kerry, called for a halt to new coal plants worldwide. “There shouldn't be any more coal-fired power plants permitted anywhere in the world,” he said. “That's how you can do something for health. And the reality is that we're not doing it.”But the main alternative to burning coal is burning wood and dung, which is far worse for human health. Where coal is burned inside of large power plants, wood and dung are burned inside of homes, creating indoor air pollution, which is far more concentrated and deadly than outdoor air pollution.In 2016, I interviewed people living around an old and dirty coal power plant in India. The plant provided them with free electricity but also sometimes emitted toxic ash, which they said irritated and burned their skin. However much they hated the pollution, none said they would give up the free, dirty electricity for cleaner electricity at a cost.And coal burning has become dramatically cleaner over the last 200 years. A simple technical fix added to coal plants in developed nations after 1950 reduced dangerous particulate matter by 99%. High-temperature coal plants are nearly as clean as natural gas plants, save for their higher carbon emissions.As we stop using wood for fuel, we allow grasslands and forests to grow back and wildlife to return. In the late 1700s, the use of wood as fuel for cooking and heating was a leading cause of deforestation in Britain. In the United States, per capita consumption of wood for fuel peaked in the 1840s. It was used at a per capita rate that was fourteen times higher than today.Fossil fuels were thus key to saving forests in the United States and Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Wood went from being 80% of all primary energy in the United States in the 1860s to 20% in 1900, before reaching 7.5% in 1920.The environmental and economic benefits of fossil fuels are that they are more energy-dense and abundant. A kilogram of coal has almost twice as much energy as a kilogram of wood, while a kilogram of liquefied petroleum gas has three times the energy as the rice husk biomass she cooked with back on the farm.While the energy density of coal is twice as high as the energy density of wood, the power density of coal mines is up to twenty-five thousand times greater than forests. Even eighteenth-century coal mines were four thousand times more power-dense than English forests and sixteen thousand times more power-dense than crop residues, like the kind families in places like Indonesia use for cooking fuel.None of this is to say that burning coal is “good,” only that it is, on most human and environmental measures, better than burning wood. People burn wood, not coal, and coal, not natural gas, when those fuels are all they can afford, not because those are the fuels they would prefer.It’s fair to wonder if poor villagers in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa could use natural gas, solar panels, and batteries instead of burning wood or coal. The answer is that many already use solar panels — when the sun is shining. As for batteries, they remain very expensive, and are quickly depleted. In Uganda, Helen and I stayed at an eco-lodge equipped with solar panels and batteries. But after a single day of cloudy weather, we quickly drained the lodge’s batteries charging our laptops, cameras, cell phones, and other devices. When we told the lodge manager that we needed more electricity, he did what small businesses across sub-Saharan Africa do, and fired up a diesel generator.And other people use natural gas and liquified petroleum gas (LPG) made from oil, and would like to use more, if only it were more abundant and cheaperAnd yet Kerry has been putting pressure on banks and other financial institutions for the last three years to reduce investments in oil and gas. Public records show that Kery flew in his wife’s private jet 48 times during the first 18 months that Biden was in office. Other than being hypocritical, there’s something else that’s odd about Kerry’s position.