This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsLast month, Hunter Biden struck a deal with federal prosecutors. He’ll plead guilty to two tax misdemeanors and avoid jail time. The crime? Writing off escorts and a sex club membership as “business expenses.“New documents suggest Hunter — and his dad, “the big guy” — got off easy.Senator Chuck Grassley on Thursday released the infamous “FD-1023” form. In it, an FBI whistleblower alleges the founder of Burisma, the Ukrainian natural gas company, paid a $5 million bribe both to then-Vice President Biden and his son Hunter, so that the former would fire a Ukrainian prosecutor who was pursuing Burisma.Nothing is proven at this point. In 2018, then-Vice President Biden admitted to pressuring Ukraine's President to fire the prosecutor. But that decision was, according to Biden, based on a US assessment that the prosecutor was corrupt. Of course, both things could be true. It could be that all sides were corrupt, and that Joe Biden used his inside knowledge to get his family a piece of the action. According to the FBI whistleblower, Burisma's CEO said, "It cost 5 (million) to pay one Biden, and 5 (million) to another Biden," to fire the prosecutor investigating his company. "Don't worry Hunter will take care of all of those issues through his dad." Although Hunter "was stupid, and his dog was smarter."According to two IRS whistleblowers — different individuals from the FBI whistleblower — the government’s investigation into the Bidens was plagued by medding, obstruction and special treatment. The result is not just losing a “slam dunk” felony case against a wayward First Son, but the sidelining of crucial evidence in a broader Biden Family influence-peddling case. 

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsDr. Jay Bhattacharya is a professor of medicine, economics, and health research policy at Stanford University. He is also one of the plaintiffs in the Missouri v. Biden case and is suing the federal government for coordinating with social media services to censor users. Yesterday, Public published a story containing previously unreleased emails and Slack messages from the authors of “The Proximal Origin of SARS-CoV-2,” the pivotal paper in Nature Medicine that established a “scientific consensus” around natural origin. On their Slack channel, the authors of the paper were still considering the possibility of a lab leak a full month after their paper ruled out any “laboratory-based scenario.” While proponents of the lab leak hypothesis were censored and derided as “conspiracy theorists,” the architects of the natural origin narrative were privately sharing suspicions and concerns, and working to actively mislead the public and the national media. Bhattacharya’s story reveals another example of the kind of censorship and disinformation campaigns we saw from the public health establishment during Covid. Over the past three and a half years, Bhattacharya has emerged as an anti-Fauci figure: a public health expert who vigorously defends open debate, listens to scientists he disagrees with, and considers the impact of policies on every member of society. I spoke with Bhattacharya after a federal judge granted an injunction in the Missouri v. Biden lawsuit, preventing government agencies from meeting with tech companies to request removal of protected speech. (After this interview, a 5th circuit appeals court placed a stay on the injunction.) In its appeal, the Biden administration claimed that the public would be endangered if government agencies could not compel social media companies to censor content. “The courts need to reject that idea out of hand,” Bhattacharya said. “It's absolute nonsense. If the federal government needs the right to violate the First Amendment in order to keep the public safe, then there's something wrong with the administration.”In October 2020, Bhattacharya wrote the Great Barrington Declaration with Suentra Gupta of Oxford University and Martin Kulldorf of Harvard University. The declaration called for a focused protection model instead of harsh lockdowns. Since then, he has experienced repeated censorship on social media platforms. YouTube, for instance, removed a video of Bhattacharya explaining why children should not be mandated to wear masks. And in 2021, Twitter placed Bhattacharya on a trends blacklist to limit the reach of his Tweets. Bhattacharya would later discover that top government officials were also targeting him. In an email obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request, Francis Collins, then-Director of the National Institute of Health (NIH), called Bhattacharya, Gupta, and Kulldorf “fringe epidemiologists.” Writing to Dr. Anthony Fauci, then-head of the National Institute for Allergies and Infectious Diseases (NIAID), Collins called for “a quick and devastating takedown” of the Great Barrington Declaration. Fauci later sent Collins articles in Wired and The Nation that harshly criticized the declaration. Yet when Fauci was deposed in the Missouri v. Biden case he denied even knowing what the Great Barrington Declaration was. “I don't care to be personally maligned, but I think that's not the most important thing to me,” said Bhattacharya about Fauci’s “takedown” attempt and his subsequent denial. “The key thing is that this is a part of a pattern of his.” Fauci, Bhattacharya explained, “has this vast power over the reputations of scientists as the head of NIAID,” and he has repeatedly used his power to destroy the reputations of scientists who disagree with him. “It's an abuse of power more than anything else.”Please subscribe now to support our ground-breaking investigations into the government’s abuse of power

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsIn 1973, Dr. Stephen Levine, a clinical professor of psychiatry at Case Western Reserve University, was introduced to the world of gender medicine when his supervisor sent him a patient who wished to become a woman. The patient told Dr. Levine that he had been sitting under an oak tree with a gun in his mouth, and he had decided that either he was going…

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsby Michael ShellenbergerOne of the most worrisome trends of our time is the devaluing of young men. We have filled their heads with dumb superhero fantasies and undermined their quest for authenticity and individuality. We have not required enough of them and thus deprived them of the adversity they need. And we have demonized masculinity; the adjective…

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsThis morning, Matt Taibbi asked a question that we’ve long been struggling with ourselves here at Public: Where have all the liberals gone?The old-school leftists who protested Tipper Gore’s parental advisory warnings on records and CDs in the 1980s, the ones that were outraged by the efforts of the late Senator Jesse Helms and then-Congressman Al D’Amato in 1989 to pull funding for the artist who created “Piss Christ,” those that stood with the Dixie Chicks when they became the prototypical victims of cancel culture for their opposition to the Iraq War: Where are all these people now as the government forms an unholy cabal with the social media platforms to censor regular Americans’ views on everything from public health to the war in Ukraine?Ruy Teixeira, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and a contributor at The Liberal Patriot, has an answer to this question. The Democratic Party, he argues, has abandoned its traditional working-class base and become a party of college-educated elites. For decades, the party has been hemorrhaging white working-class voters. But in recent election cycles, it has suffered big losses among Latinos without a college education, and has started to slide with non-college-educated Asian and even black Americans as well. The Republicans have capitalized on that loss by embracing these exiled voters, creating an inverted political dynamic that has left those of us old enough to remember the traditional pro-worker, anti-war left with our heads spinning.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsIn March, I told members of Congress that in addition to defunding and dismantling the Censorship Industrial Complex, they should mandate that government officials and Big Tech social media platforms be transparent about all censorship (“content moderation”) requests and actions relating to social and political issues.I now believe that such steps may be too weak and that Congress, the Executive Branch, and the Courts should consider tougher measures to protect the Constitution. Part of my concern stems from a decision by YouTube last month to declare a video interview between psychologist Jordan Peterson and Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. “vaccine misinformation” and remove it.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsby Michael ShellenbergerJust a few weeks ago, I was lamenting the absence of any new nonfiction book that I really wanted to read. Many new books of late should have been long articles and were joyless to read.Then I read, in a single sitting, British author Brendan O’Neill’s new collection of essays, A Heretic’s Manifesto: Essays On The Unsayable. It offers one of the most important defenses of liberal democratic civilization and truth ever written.People accused me of hyperbole when I called Matt Taibbi the greatest living American heir to George Orwell. But it’s true, he is. I strive for truthful, specific compliments, and that’s what it was.Now, A Heretic’s Manifesto establishes O’Neill as the greatest living British heir to Orwell. For that reason, I was thrilled to interview him for this podcast and to publish two chapters from it, “I’m Afraid We Have To Talk About Her Penis” and “The Infantilism Of Totalitarianism.”I hasten to add that neither reading those two essays nor listening to this podcast is a substitute for reading A Heretic’s Manifesto. I beseech you: stop whatever you’re doing right now and buy his book. As with Orwell, the topic O'Neill is addressing, incipient totalitarianism, is urgent.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsThe July 4 ruling that the federal government must not demand censorship by social media companies is a major setback in the war on disinformation, reports the New York Times yesterday. The reason, says The Times, is that the Trump-appointed judge and other Republicans have fallen prey to a conspiracy theory that a Censorship Industrial Complex exists.Most dangerously, reports the Times, “The judge’s preliminary injunction is already having an impact. A previously scheduled meeting on threat identification on Thursday between State Department officials and social media executives was abruptly canceled…”In other words, there’s no Censorship Industrial Complex — no conspiracy by the US government and social media companies to censor disfavored speech. At the same time, it’s a tragedy that the US government isn’t able to meet secretly with Facebook to censor disfavored speech. Got that?In London, on stage with Russell Brand and me, Matt Taibbi described this kind of pretzeling as “doublethink,” which comes from George Orwell’s “1984.” Taibbi gives the example of how the US government insisted for months that the Russians blew up their own natural gas pipeline, Nord Stream, and then abruptly blamed our allies, the Ukranians, without ever bothering to explain the switcheroo.At least in that case, a few months had passed before the narrative shifted. In the case of the New York Times yesterday, the doublethink is occurring within the same article.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsOver the last few weeks, we have documented the global crackdown on freedom around the world. Members of the UK parliament want to read your text messages without a warrant. The Irish government wants to be able to enter homes and read phones and computers without a warrant. The European Union is seeking to impose sweeping censorship restrictions and unprecedented invasions of privacy.And so it came as wonderful news yesterday when a federal judge blocked government agencies from communicating with social media companies to censor protected speech. The judge granted a partial injunction in a First Amendment lawsuit brought by the attorneys general of Louisiana and Missouri."If the allegations made by Plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States’ history,” wrote Judge Terry A. Doughty in his decision.Experts close to the decision told Public that the judge was making a statement by releasing his ruling on July 4. Federal holidays are not normally when judges issue opinions.Public’s Michael Shellenberger spoke with Missouri’s former attorney general, now U.S. Senator Eric Schmitt, who was thrilled with this tactical victory of the lawsuit he instigated. “The Twitter Files were critical because they were a behind-the-scenes view,” he said. “It's shocking. The level of coordination between senior government officials and senior social media executives is astounding. There were direct text messages from the surgeon general of the United States to senior Facebook officials saying, ‘Take this down.’ It's just un-American.”Schmitt called on the Department of Homeland Security’s Director of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, Jennifer Easterly, to resign, and agreed that the US Congress should mandate transparency by Big Tech companies.“Jennifer Easterly ought to resign,” he said, “no doubt about that. And I think that the people getting swept up in this now, who were engaged in it, they ought to be exposed, and there ought to be consequences.”Before Judge Doughty issued his ruling, we also spoke to Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, a plaintiff in the case. Kheriaty is the former director of medical ethics at the University of California Irvine but was fired after he challenged the university’s vaccine mandate in court. “You learn who your real friends are when you go through something like that,” he said. “The whole experience was a bit surreal.”

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsOver the past several years, Canada’s drug crisis has spiraled out of control with no signs of slowing. From January 2020 to June 2021, nearly 10,000 Canadians died from opioid overdoses – fentanyl detected in an overwhelming majority. This is familiar to us in the U.S., but the Trudeau administration’s approach to combating the crisis is usually a few steps ahead when it comes to “harm reduction” approaches – including “Safer Supply,” supervised consumption sites, and decriminalized hard drugs. They offer a preview of what we can expect if we continue on our current trajectory, especially in West Coast cities adhering to harm reduction orthodoxy. Yesterday, we learned the tragic news that a Vancouver man widely known as a drug legalization and safe supply advocate had died – reportedly of a suspected fentanyl overdose. Jerry Martin garnered international media attention in May when he opened a downtown Vancouver kiosk offering a “safe supply” of illicit street drugs to the public. He was evidently testing a grey area under Canada’s recently relaxed decriminalization laws and aiming to provoke a debate over legalization. His death begs questions about the limitations of Canada’s approach to addiction.To better understand the debate, we spoke to Adam Zivo, a columnist for the National Post based in Toronto and Ukraine. In a recent series of deeply reported articles, he blew the lid off Canada’s Safer Supply program – uncovering how weak, faulty data is used to prop up an ideologically driven program. It is another astonishing example of how “the science,” including experimental and novel treatments, can be politicized and enforced through relentless propaganda and the stifling of dissent.