This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsBy Maddie RowleyOn January 6th, 2021, the day that Congress was set to certify and confirm Joe Biden as the 46th President of the United States, thousands of Trump supporters swarmed the Capitol and took part in what mainstream media journalists and Democrats say was an insurrection and attempted coup. Just after 2 PM, the insurrectionists broke into the Capitol building through shattered windows and streamed towards the Speaker’s Lobby, yelling, “Stop the steal!” while pushing their way past Capitol police. They claimed that the election was stolen and sought to overturn the results to keep former President Trump in power. Rioters planned and premeditated these actions, Democrats claim. The riot, they say, was a profound attack on the seat of American democracy, and Trump’s incitement of these actions was a seditious attempt to provoke a violent coup.But January 6 wasn’t an insurrection or a coup. Since that day, more evidence has come to light about what happened, and all signs point to a series of decisions made by federal agency higher-ups and politicians that allowed January 6 to play out exactly as it did. Public has previously reported that there were dozens of undercover informants from many different law enforcement agencies present at the Capitol that day, including confidential human sources (CHSs) from the FBI. This complicates claims of an “insurrection,” given the FBI's long history of entrapment. In addition, former Capitol Police Chief Steven Sund recounted in an interview with Tucker Carlson that he was denied backup from the National Guard by House and Senate security officials and that the FBI and other federal agencies failed to inform him when information about an organized protest became known to the FBI’s Washington D.C. field office on January 5.It’s true that the events of January 6 and Trump’s refusal to concede the election violated the democratic norm of a peaceful transfer of power. It’s also true that extremist groups were involved in organizing the riot and that some rioters were violent, vandalizing the Capitol and lashing out at Capitol police. Trump encouraged the rioters with his claims of widespread election fraud. He added fuel to the fire with his famously-deleted Tweets about election integrity while telling Republicans to “Get smart and FIGHT!” And when Trump told rioters, “If you don't fight like hell, you're not going to have a country anymore,” he was irresponsible, at best.Yet none of this amounts to the claims of a “coup,” which would have involved a heavily armed effort to take control of the military, the media, and other major institutions. The evidence of FBI infiltration and security failures at the Capitol suggest that many of the rioters were not, in fact, planning to overthrow the democratically-elected government. And Trump denying and attempting to contest the election results were different in degree, but not kind, from what Democrats have done in several instances. So why do Democrats insist that January 6 was a violent insurrection, and why do they continue to demand heavy penalties for the rioters two and a half years later?Julie Kelly, political commentator, journalist, mom, and author of January 6: How Democrats Use the Capitol Protest to Launch a War on Terror Against the Political Right, has spent the last three years unraveling the events of January 6 and is still closely following court cases and conducting research as the litigation and prosecutions continue. She writes about her January 6 findings on her Substack, Declassified with Julie Kelly, as well as for various news outlets.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsJulian Assange is such a threat to America’s national security that he should die in prison, according to the United States government. Joe Biden, when he was vice president, called Assange a “high-tech terrorist.” Secretary of State under President Donald J. Trump, Mike Pompeo, likened Assange’s Wikileaks organization to a “non-state hostile intelligence service.”According to U.S. government investigators and prosecutors, Assange conspired to steal classified documents and, by publishing them, put the lives of innocent American allies in danger. U.S. Secretary of State Anthony Blinken, who denounced Assange again recently, pointed out the US government is charging him with “very serious criminal conduct.” If Britain extradites Assange to the U.S., he will likely be tried, found guilty, and could be sentenced to 175 years in prison. And yet there is no evidence that what Assange did resulted in any deaths or compromising of the national security of the United States or its allies. The U.S. admitted in court in 2013 and in 2020 that it can not tie a single death or instance of harm to the Wikileaks disclosure of confidential human sources. In 2010, the day before Biden called Assage a “high-tech terrorist,” Biden said, “I don’t think there’s any substantive damage.”Pompeo’s view of Assange is not universally held among Trump supporters, many of whom lobbied Trump to pardon Assange and were disappointed when he didn’t. Meanwhile, independent observers agree Assange’s actions hurt no one. "Mr. Assange is not a criminal convict and poses no threat to anyone,” said the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Meltzer in his 2020 appeal to British Authorities, “so his prolonged solitary confinement in a high-security prison is neither necessary nor proportionate and clearly lacks any legal basis.”Assange rose to international prominence in 2010 when he published a series of leaks, which exposed the reality of the U.S. government’s war crimes, its habit of spying on friends – and the rampant corruption that fuels global politics. In all, Wikileaks published hundreds of thousands of classified diplomatic and military documents – including the “Iraq War Logs,” the “Afghan War Diaries,” and the “Embassy Cables,” leaked by U.S. Army Intelligence Analyst Chelsea Manning. The leaks enraged the government, but the Obama Administration stopped short of extraditing and prosecuting Assange. Now, under an indictment issued by the Trump Administration and updated by Biden’s Department of Justice, Assange stands accused of doing what is essentially the mandate of national security journalists everywhere: to acquire and publish government secrets.The US government’s allegation that Assange unsuccessfully conspired to help a US soldier crack a password to access files is also problematic. The evidence shows the soldier didn’t need Assange’s help because she had Top Secret security clearance and legitimate access to the files in question. As such, Assange stands accused of conspiring to help his source conceal their identity – a core tenet of good journalism. Journalists are obliged to employ measures to limit their source’s risk of exposure and retaliation – things like using a pseudonym to protect someone’s identity, communicating over encrypted messaging platforms, or redacting sensitive documents before publication.We at Public agree that revealing confidential human sources or other sensitive information is wrong in most instances. Assange should have redacted the information he released to protect people. Any journalist or publisher should consider the impact of their behavior on a wide variety of other people. But Assange’s missteps do not warrant the punishment of death in prison. There is a good reason that “No harm, no foul” remains the standard in many criminal cases. And whatever harm Assange may have caused, he has more than repaid it in the punishment of being either on the run or incarcerated for 12 years.Moreover, what Assange and Wikileaks exposed — serious war crimes and U.S. government spying on its allies — is of great importance. Assange played the same constitutionally protected role of journalist-publisher that the New York Times and Washington Post did when they published a classified history of the Vietnam War. These documents, stolen by Defense Department analyst Daniel Ellsberg in 1969, came to be known as the “Pentagon Papers.” In 1971, the Supreme Court ruled that the Nixon Administration could not prevent publication, offering a deep precedent and robust defense of the First Amendment that arguably protects Assange, too.The indictment criminalizes practices that are routine to good journalism and essential to the ethical framework that makes it possible. Even the New York Times acknowledges that news organizations received exactly the same archive of documents from Wikileaks without government permission. President Biden can’t champion values like due process, free speech, and the right to asylum only when it’s convenient. Given that, why is the Biden administration still threatening Assange with 175 years in prison?To answer that question, we sat down with a woman who is a member of Assange’s legal team and the mother of his children, Stella Assange. What she told us is of great importance, not just for a single person but also for the future of free speech and journalism.The War On Journalism

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsby Mia AshtonIf your child comes to you out of the blue and tells you he or she is the opposite sex, you should affirm them, say experts in gender medicine. All of the major American medical associations say that if your child says he or she was born in the wrong body, you must agree with them, or you may cause them to commit suicide.But a group of parents is pushing back. They say that affirming a child’s gender confusion is actually harmful. How do they know? Because it happened to their own children.“Code names. Secret messages passed in the dark. Covert operations. Hiding from the authorities,” one mother wrote about the experience of working with other parents opposed to trying to change the sex of their children. “Are we talking about 1944 in Europe? Sadly, no: we’re talking about the present day, and our secret resistance is taking place all over the world.”The parents feel the need to hide behind pseudonyms because their attempts to protect their children trigger trans activists to accuse them of child abuse. The picture of parents cowering in fear of trans activists is very different from the picture promoted in the media of parents who affirm that their children were born into the wrong body.The parents investigated the evidence base for “gender affirmation,” puberty blockers, and cross-sex hormones for minors who identify as transgender. They discovered that it was weak.They call themselves Parents with Inconvenient Truths about Trans (PITT) who write on their Substack about their experiences. This week, their new book, Tales From the Home Front in the Fight to Save Our Children, reached number one on Amazon in LGBT books. Three of them, Josie, Erin, and Emily, hide their last names out of fear of harassment from trans activists and are the guests on today’s Public podcast.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsFor most people, the struggle for gay and transgender rights are one and the same. It's the LGBT movement, not the ‘gay rights movement’. But it wasn’t always this way. Until the 1990s, the two communities were largely separate, and it wasn’t until the 2010s that they officially joined forces. At the time, many liberals readily embraced this alliance as a logical evolution. After all, the fight for gay rights was drawing to a close, and after same-sex marriage was secured, it seemed natural that the spotlight would shift towards another marginalized group. The term LGBT now symbolizes a united front of oppressed minorities gladly standing shoulder-to-shoulder in the fight for a more equal world.But, early on, certain members of the LGB community felt there was a harmful idea at the core of the modern trans rights movement: the idea that we all possess a gender identity, separate from our biological sex, which defines whether we are men or women. Stemming from this was the belief that heterosexual males who claim to possess a “female gender” are lesbians. Many of these biological males accused the lesbians who rejected this idea of “transphobia”. In the eyes of these lesbians, they were once again being persecuted by the opposite sex after having largely won a decades-long struggle for the same rights as heterosexuals.Then, the very same organizations that had fought for gay rights embraced what would become known as “gender ideology.” These groups repeated the idea that transwomen/biological males were the same as women and thus that males could be lesbians and that females could be gay men. Eventually, these groups promoted the idea that children could be born in the wrong body and require drugs and surgeries to be their authentic selves. To top it all off, that there was to be “No debate!”Then, two lesbian activists disagreed. Their names were Bev Jackson and Kate Harris. Both had a long history of political activism. Jackson was a founding member of the Gay Liberation Front in 1970, and Harris was a champion of women’s liberation. The two simply could not sit back and allow this new attack on their community to continue.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsProgressivism appears to be about progress — it’s right there in the name. Progressives, liberals, and the Left more generally say they are advocating for social, racial, and economic progress. And yet when you point out how much progress we have already achieved, many progressives deny it. Point out how much police brutality has declined and many progressives will accuse you of racial insensitivity. Point out how much carbon emissions and pollution have declined and people on the Left will accuse you of climate denial. And point out that, in the US, people are freer than ever to choose their romantic partners, and progressive people will insist that you are ignoring a “trans genocide.” Certainly, some on the Left recognize the progress we’ve made, when it suits them. Presidents Joe Biden, Barack Obama, and other Democrats routinely point to the achievements of the civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights movements. But activists, students, professors and journalists emphasize that racism, sexism, and homophobia are as bad as ever, and perhaps worse, because they are more insidious. Why is that?Part of the answer, as usual, is money. NGOs and journalists need to raise the alarm to raise money and sell subscriptions. But much of progress denialism comes from people who don’t have an immediate financial interest in hyping societal or environmental problems. Why do they do it?

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsThe bewildering number of news organizations has inspired entrepreneurs to create ways to rank them. The most prominent of them is NewsGuard. It ranks media organizations based on their trustworthiness and then provides these rankings to large corporate advertisers. NewsGuard’s co-CEOs are Steven Brill and Gordon Crovitz. Before starting NewsGuard, Brill had created CourtTV, and Crovitz was the publisher of The Wall Street Journal. I interviewed them in March.I have two specific concerns with NewsGuard. First, it has taken money from the Pentagon. How could NewsGuard be objective in evaluating news media coverage of the Defense Department if the Defense Department funds it? Second, NewsGuard wrongly labeled the idea that Covid-19 escaped from a Chinese lab as a “conspiracy theory.” And given that NewsGuard spread misinformation about covid’s origins, what right does it have to criticize others for spreading misinformation?To NewsGuard’s credit, it publicly acknowledges that it took money from the Pentagon and got covid origins wrong. On its website, NewsGuard writes, “NewsGuard either mischaracterized the sites’ claims about the lab leak theory, referred to the lab leak as a ‘conspiracy theory,’ or wrongly grouped together unproven claims about the lab leak with the separate, false claim that the COVID-19 virus was man-made without explaining that one claim was unsubstantiated, and the other was false. NewsGuard apologizes for these errors.”But NewsGuard still claims on its website as “THE TRUTH,” that “Scientific evidence points to the virus originating in bats. A study published in the journal Nature in February 2020 found the new virus’s genome is “96 percent identical” to a bat coronavirus. A March 2020 study published in the journal Nature Medicine concluded that the virus “is not a laboratory construct or a purposefully manipulated virus.”In fact, as Public and others have shown, the scientific evidence does not point to the virus originating in bats. In fact, in their emails and internal messages, the authors of the March 2020 Nature Medicine paper expressed serious doubts that pangolins were the intermediary host from bats to humans. As late as April 2020, the authors of “Proximal Origin” expressed doubt about the bat theory of covid. Indeed, it now appears that Anthony Fauci oversaw an effort to spread disinformation about covid’s origins, including by instigating the “Proximal Origin” paper.Conflicts Of InterestAs for NewsGuard’s Pentagon funding, I felt Brill and Crovitz were slippery about what is obviously a conflict of interest.

Rates of mental illness are surging, especially among young people. Writer Gurwinder Bhogal explores why liberals are more likely than conservatives to report psychological problems. Leftism downplays human agency and magnifies environmental influences. The podcast also discusses pluralistic ignorance, disillusionment with the left, tribalism, long COVID, and the impact of social media on mental health.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsOver the last three years, reading scores for 13-year-olds in the United States have fallen fourteen points, while math scores fell nine points. Reading scores are now the lowest they’ve been since 2004, and math scores are back where they were around 1990.But instead of finding ways to address this crisis in American education, public school systems are shifting their focus away from math, science, and reading and are instead adopting curriculum materials and books that are designed to turn children into little social justice activists.Bethany Mandel leads the charge in exposing how schools are failing children. Mandel is a writer and editor whose work you’ll often see in Deseret News and the New York Post. She’s a passionate, homeschooling mom to six kids, and she’s also co-author of Stolen Youth: How Radicals are Erasing Innocence and Indoctrinating a Generation with her good friend Karol Markowicz.Stolen Youth describes America’s woke indoctrination within every level of society: education, healthcare, politics, and in the private sector. It’s an easy yet impactful read that outlines what’s happening in American culture today — and honestly, it’s pretty disturbing.We interviewed Mandel and covered it all: Covid and how it negatively affected kids, how school curriculums are incorporating gender ideology at early ages, the dismal national test scores, and how public school board officials ironically send their kids to private schools. According to Mandel and Markowicz, the ideological indoctrination of children now begins as early as toddlerhood. Libraries, bookstores, and daycares now keep books like “ABC Pride” and “The Pronoun Book” on shelves. Schools are also now beginning sex education classes at an earlier age.“The health programs are much more sexually explicit than people realize…,” Mandel says. “They teach second and third graders how to pleasure themselves…this is how the ideology starts.”

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsWhen Asra Nomani, an advocate for children and a self-described “Muslim feminist,” came to my house to record our podcast episode, she brought with her two piles of books. Many of those books are a part of the new literary curriculum in Montgomery County, Maryland. The stack included toddler board books like “Pride Puppy,” “Bye Bye, Binary,” and “The Gay B Cs.” There were other titles aimed at elementary and middle school students, like “Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness,” and the soft-core porn graphic novel “Gender Queer.”“This is part of a culture of indoctrination,” said Nomani.Last month, Muslim parents, Ethiopian Christians, and Peruvian Catholics gathered to protest outside of a Montgomery County Public School Board meeting. They carried signs saying “Restore Opt-Out Now!” and “Family Rights.” Nomani stood with them.Nomani is from such a family herself. As a child, she immigrated to the United States from India with her parents. She was raised in a traditional Muslim household. Now, at 58, after navigating the hardships of single parenthood, working as a journalist at the Wall Street Journal, and writing her latest book, Woke Army: The Red-Green Alliance That is Destroying America’s Freedom, she’s fighting alongside observant Muslim families in Montgomery County for the right to opt their children out of a new LGBTQ+ literary curriculum. Nomani had me flip through several of the books she brought while recording the podcast.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsby Michael ShellenbergerFor most of the post-war period, liberalism in the United States was defined around freedom of speech, the needs of the working class, and the fight against racism and sexism. It was liberals who defended the right to burn the American flag, and of neo-Nazis to march through a neighborhood of Holocaust survivors. It was liberals who fought against corporate power and for the rights of working people. And it was liberals who fought to end racial segregation and to protect girls and women, including in sports. All of that has changed. Today, it is conservatives who are fighting the racial re-segregation of classrooms and workforces by Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) administrators in thrall to Critical Race Theory (CRT). It is conservatives who are defending the right to freedom of expression online from progressives demanding greater censorship by Big Tech and the government. And it is conservatives who are defending the rights of girls and women to female-only spaces and sports from natal males.The reversal of liberal and conservative positions is not total. More liberals than conservatives favor the right of same-sex couples to wed and the federal right to abortion. More liberals than conservatives favor labor unions and the minimum wage. And more liberals than conservatives favor entitlements like Social Security and Medicare.But the importance of those issues has declined. Republicans have largely given up trying to end same-sex marriage, and abortion policy is now up to the states. Just 10% of Americans are in a union, and the percentage has steadily declined, through both Democratic and Republican administrations, for decades. And there has been no significant effort by Republicans to modify Social Security and Medicare ever since Donald Trump pledged to support both. As a result, conservatives find themselves in the paradoxical position of defending traditional liberal values like free speech and racial equality from progressives. Indeed, the person described by the Left and Right alike as “the most effective conservative activist in America,” Chris Rufo, has done more to roll back CRT-DEI-motivated racial segregation, over the last three years, than any progressive. And over the last year and a half, Rufo, a Senior Fellow at the center-Right Manhattan Institute, has turned his formidable investigative powers to fighting gender ideology. Why is that? Why did a conservative, rather than a liberal, do more than any other individual in America to defend traditional liberal policies and values? To answer that question, I interviewed Rufo last week about his new book, America’s Cultural Revolution: How the Radical Left Conquered Everything, and his policy advocacy, which includes advising Republican presidential candidate, and Florida Governor, Ron DeSantis.