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.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsIf you’re a paid subscriber and are not getting our full podcast episodes on your podcast player, go to https://public.substack.com/account and follow the instructions to set up a private feed.Despite living and practicing in the very blue state of Oregon, Stephanie Winn, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, realized something didn’t feel quite right about immediately affirming gender dysphoric kids.“As soon as I began learning about detransitioners I realized that our field was responsible for great harm by buying into this idea that affirming a person's gender identity rather than exploring how they came to that conclusion about themselves—that we were actually doing irrevocable harm to people. So that inspired me to reach out to the detransitioner community and start learning everything I could,” said Winn.Winn is the host of the “You Must Be Some Kind of Therapist” podcast and associate producer of the new documentary “No Way Back: The Reality of Gender Affirming Care,” which premieres in select AMC Theaters for one day only on Wednesday, June 21st.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsAs more pieces of the UFO puzzle emerge, the picture doesn’t get clearer, just bigger and more complex.The idea of UFOs may make some roll their eyes, but simply put, these aerial craft are unattributed to a known source. Many cases of UFOs can certainly be connected to foreign technology or even classified research that even those within the same government are unfamiliar with. However, new whistleblowers like David Grusch have helped push ideas like reverse engineering non-human spacecraft into the mainstream. For veteran researchers like John Greenewald, these sorts of claims never seem to be surprising. “There's nothing new here,” he states. Greenewald, the Founder of the Black Vault— an organization dedicated to uncovering various top-secret projects through Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests made available to the public— has been researching UFOs since he was 15 years old. He doesn’t make bold claims regarding alien life or secret plots, but rather reasonably demands transparency on any UFO-related research. Strangely, the National Security Agency (NSA) has increasingly denied FOIA requests on the subject without substantial explanation. In this interview, he describes the story of how he came across a 4-page document detailing an unidentified flying object (UFO) case from 1976 in Iran. Fascinated but skeptical of its authenticity, he submitted a FOIA request and got ahold of the document for himself. “There's really no viable explanation for it. And I was hooked after that.”Greenewald notes there are a handful of cases where evidence is still inconclusive. A CIA-sponsored scientific analysis has even confirmed in the 1970s that the origin of certain physical materials retrieved in relation to a UFO case cannot be explained. “We know that there's a small percentage of cases that they still can't identify,” Greenwalde said.Although just a small percentage of cases are unexplained, Greenewald argues they are still relevant. He has made a habit of filing appeals and fighting for evidence over the years, but the NSA is clamping down harder than ever before, in a way he “[has] yet to see in 27 years of doing this [research].” Greenewald explains The Office of the Secretary of Defense is denying any and all requests pertaining to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) under exemption B7. “The nutshell explanation is stuff that is related to a law enforcement investigation. Key being law enforcement investigation,” Greenewald said. He is seeking to understand if AARO is a law enforcement agency.  “If that's true, as long as AARO exists, they can now deny 100% of anything connected to that office when we file Freedom of Information Act requests, and that is new.”“Secrecy is tightening,” Greenewald emphasizes. “If we are in a new level of transparency that some UFO believers want us to believe we are in, then why is that the case?”  “You can’t necessarily discount the alien theory,” he states, “it's still on the table.”

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsIf you’re a paid subscriber and are not getting our full podcast episodes on your podcast player, go to https://public.substack.com/account and follow the instructions to set up a private feed.On February 17, 2020, The New York Times and the Washington Post suggested that the lab leak hypothesis was a “fringe theory” that had been “debunked.” In April of 2020, MSNBC’s Nicole Wallace called the lab leak hypothesis “one of Trumpworld’s most favorite conspiracy theories.” A few days later, Joy Reid said it was “debunked bunkum.” Some journalists and scientists even claimed that the hypothesis was xenophobic and “racist.”As the mainstream press largely failed to ask questions about the origins of SARS-CoV-2 (with some notable exceptions), the crucial task of investigating the virus’ origins fell to independent researchers, many of whom worked tirelessly to examine the evidence. Two of those researchers are Alina Chan, a postdoctoral fellow in molecular biology at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, and Matt Ridley, a British biologist and science writer. In their book Viral: The Search for the Origin of COVID-19, they detail the history of coronavirus research at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, as well as the cover-up that followed the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan. In our conversation with them, Chan and Ridley explained the professional risks they took to pursue this line of inquiry. “For Alina, this took huge courage,” Ridley said. “She's at the start of a brilliant scientific career at a brilliant institution, and she had to be really tough. It's a remarkable story of human courage.”As the lab leak theory becomes more widely discussed and accepted, much of Chan and Ridley’s work has been vindicated. In February 2023, FBI Director Chris Wray told Fox News, “The FBI has for quite some time now assessed that the origins of the pandemic are most likely a potential lab incident.” The Energy Department released a low-confidence report with a similar conclusion, and just last week, the head of China’s CDC said that a lab leak should not be ruled out. So how did the media and the scientific community get the COVID origins debate so wrong?

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsSome time in the mid-2010s, a strange idea exploded into public consciousness. It was the idea that some men are women, and some women are men. Caught off-guard, many people, failing to see the harm, went along with it, thinking it was meant in a metaphorical sense.Helen Joyce, author of Trans: Gender Identity and the New Battle for Women's Rights, was one of those people. In our discussion, she says the moment she was drawn to the issue was when she realized people actually believed some men can be women. “I knew that there was something up and also the sheer illogicality of it, like at the center of it is this claim, trans women are women. That's a circular definition. That's saying that a woman is anyone who says they're a woman, which doesn't tell you anything about what a woman is. So I knew there was something wrong, but I just thought I was missing something.”But Joyce, who has a PhD in mathematics and is a former editor of The Economist, had never had any ambitions to write a book. That all changed one day in Manchester in 2019 when she met her first detransitioners, who were all lesbian women, “kids who had been misled in their teens into thinking that their discomfort with their sexed bodies meant that they were trans.” No adults had told them how tough the teenage years can be, particularly for those just discovering a homosexual orientation. Instead, “they were misled to the extent for some of them of having their sexual organs removed.”“That night I thought, right, I've got to write a book about this. I hadn't been worried about getting attacked about it, I'd been worried that I just wasn't the right person. I was the finance editor of The Economist by this point, so it was a bit of a stretch. But I thought, well, I can wait for someone else to do it, or I can do it myself. So that's the way I got into this.”Throughout our conversation, Joyce applies her mathematical mind to the illogicality of modern gender identity ideology, explaining how it is not possible to protect biological sex and gender identity in law both at the same time, and how introducing a falsehood like “trans women are women” into society results in chaos.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsIn March, Public published my essay, “Why Are We Sterilizing Children?” It argued that the sudden explosion of adolescent girls identifying as transgender in recent years is a “social contagion,” much like anorexia before it. Scientific support for that hypothesis comes from a 2018 study by Brown University’s Lisa Littman. She found that girls suffering from gender dysphoria, or confusion about whether they were male or female, tended to have one or more peers who identified as transgender, and suffered from preexisting mental health issues. The study was hugely controversial. Trans activists attacked Littman and demanded the paper be retracted. Under pressure from the journal, Littman revised her paper, but it was little matter: Brown University, under intense pressure, severed its relationship with Littman.But in March of this year, new scientific support for Littman’s hypothesis emerged in the form of a new study published by the Archives of Sexual Behaviour: “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria: Parent Reports on 1655 Possible Cases,” by Dr. Michael Bailey and Suzanna Diaz. 

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsNationalism is synonymous with fascism, racism, and anti-Semitism in many people’s minds. The ideology brought us World War II, Saddam Hussein, and Vladamir Putin.But nationalism isn’t necessarily any of those things, argues historian Michael Lind. “Almost all of the states in the United Nations General Assembly are nation-states,” he notes in a new podcast he recorded with Public last week (above). “I think of nationalism as a nation-statism, as distinguished from, you know, dynastic empires like the Romanoffs and the Hapsburg or city-states like Athens and Sparta. It’s a neutral term.”Without a doubt, nationalism goes wrong when it becomes evangelical, as it did in Europe in the mid-20th Century. Nations wrongly seek to impose their national culture on others by becoming imperialism. But nationalism is not the same as imperialism. Indeed, in the U.S., it has often been isolationist, not imperialist. For Lind, the reason we need to revive economic nationalism is because globalism is tearing America apart. Nations exist in a world system where they compete, and failing to recognize this competition can lead to bad outcomes, such as the United States losing much of its manufacturing base to China. “For people, who can’t get over economic nationalism,” Lind says, “another term is developmentalism or developmental capitalism. The difference between developmentalism and 19th-century economic laissez-faire liberalism is that in liberalism, the state is a neutral umpire. It doesn’t take sides between industries. It doesn’t take sides between firms. It doesn’t even take sides with its own nation’s firms versus foreign firms. It’s just an umpire or referee. “In developmentalism, the state is the coach of a team, and the team includes industrialists, capitalists, universities, researchers, and workers. Or at least it should include workers.”And it is American workers who are the subject of Lind’s new book, Hell To Pay: How the Suppression of Wages is Destroying America. In it, Lind describes how the bipartisan neoliberal economic consensus from the 1970s to the 2010s undermined the power of American workers to bargain for better wages, thereby contributing to a range of social ills, from political polarization to America’s declining birth rate.On Marriage and Families

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsFor a year and three months, we’ve been told there’s only one correct position on the war in Ukraine. In a sense, that’s true: Russia’s invasion of the country is morally indefensible. It’s hard to imagine even the most cynical pretext for cheering Moscow on. Fortunately, nobody is doing that. Not even Oliver Stone.But one need not side with Putin to wo…