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.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsFor a moment last week, the war in Ukraine appeared to have arrived at an almost inconceivable turning point. The Wagner Group, a brutal mercenary army the Kremlin deploys to conduct off-book military operations around the world, from Mali to Syria, did an about-face from its position in Ukraine and invaded the motherland. In the course of their rebellion, Wagner troops shot down five Russian helicopters and a valuable command plane. Rostov-on-Don, a Russian city of a million people near the Ukrainian border that serves as the hub of Russia’s military operations in Ukraine, fell to Wagner without a shot being fired. Then the mercenary army began moving north toward Moscow.A world-historical event seemed to be underway — possibly a coup d’etat. “Russia Slides Into Civil War,” a headline to a story by Anne Applebaum in The Atlantic screamed. “Is Putin facing his Czar Nicholas II moment?” read Applebaum’s subheadline, referring to the last monarch of Russia, who was executed in the Russian Revolution.But then the storm subsided almost as quickly as it began. Within 24 hours, a settlement had been reached. Wagner forces stood down, and Putin absolved them of any criminal charges for their act of treason. Yevgeny Prigozhin, the head of Wagner and the leader of the insurrection, took refuge in Belarus, where he was promised the same amnesty.The fraught and bizarre series of events reflected the madness of the war in Ukraine.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsYesterday, Public reported on the new House Judiciary Commiteee report on how the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has been engaged in an effort with big tech companies to censor American citizens. The headline finding was that the people involved knew that what they were doing was wrong. “It’s only a matter of time,” wrote Suzanne Spaulding, a former assistant general counsel for the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in an email to a colleague, “before someone realizes we exist and starts asking about our work.” And, noted the report, CISA scrubbed from its web site any mention of its focus on domestic “misinformation,” after being exposed.One person who knew that what CISA, an agency within the US Department of Homeland Security, was doing was wrong, before almost everybody else in the world, was investigative journalist Lee Fang, who broke the first big story of US government censorship on October 31, 2022 for The Intercept. Some of what was in the House report had been covered before, including by Fang, which the report noted. But much of it was new, including the Spaulding email. Fang’s ground-breaking reporting makes him one of the best investigative journalists working in the U.S. right now. Fang discovers scoops others overlook, including the fact that the Biden administration tried to block the release of evidence showing its censorship, that MSNBC’s Mehdi Hasan plagarized a column on spanking, and that the FBI helps the Ukranian government censor information it doesn’t like on Facebook. Be sure to subscribe to his Substack to get his stories as soon as they are published.Now, in an interview with Public’s Phoebe Smith, Fang warns that the government is seeking new excuses to censor Americans. “Even as the threat of Islamic terrorism from Al-Qaeda or ISIS has radically waned,” he explains, the military “needs to justify its existence. So it's searching for new threats and new fears to tap into.”A few hours before Fang’s conversation with Smith, he published another scoop, this time exposing the ties between the late pedophile and sex trafficker, Jeffrey Epstein, and Rep. Stacey Plasket, the member of Congress who disparaged Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger as “so-called journalists.”

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsFor decades, Union Rescue Mission President and CEO Andy Bales has lived the values he preaches, caring for the most vulnerable among us and inspiring hope in the darkest places. He has also been a relentless gadfly in L.A.’s homelessness debate, a lone voice advocating recovery and community-based services amid the din of harm-reduction mantras and corrupt development rackets. After 20 years leading URM, the next six months will be his last among the people of Skid Row. Next year, he will return to his home state of Iowa to be closer to his family.The reverend’s lifelong mission began, in a way, with a sandwich: A Des Moines school teacher moonlighting as a weekend parking attendant, Bales remembered the night a homeless man rapped on his window and asked for his supper. Bales thought about the long hours ahead and said, “I’m sorry, sir, but I need my sandwich. I looked and his face drooped with disappointment, and he disappeared into the cold darkness. And it was like a hammer hit me.”He had been preaching to his classes that feeding a hungry person is like feeding God. Embarrassed “because of how badly I’d failed,” Bales prayed for a second chance. A few weeks later, he found the man on the street and fed him dinner. A few weeks after that, someone suggested he apply for a job at a nearby rescue mission.