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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.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsIf 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 www.public.newsDid 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 www.public.newsImagine 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 www.public.newsThere 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 www.public.newsDonald 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 www.public.newsIt 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 www.public.newsBefore 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 month that “the…

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsWe 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 www.public.newsMost 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.