This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsAmericans tend to think of Canadians, when we think of them at all, as mild-mannered, agreeable, and nicer versions of ourselves. But over the last several years we have seen Canada’s Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau, crack down harshly on his fellow citizens. In January 2022, Trudeau froze bank accounts of people who had donated money to protesting truckers, who he compared to Nazis. A Canadian military-funded think tank accused critics of the war in Ukraine of spreading “Russian disinformation.” And now Trudeau’s Liberal Party is pushing legislation that would give the government greater power over social media companies.Because Canada has fewer people than California, and is hardly a player on the world stage, it’s tempting to ignore what is happening there. But we should pay attention because what’s happening in Canada is part of a broader crackdown in the West against free speech, and it may be a testing ground for policies likely to be implemented in the U.S. Indeed, just last week we saw California embrace the creation of blacklists of people accused of “hate incidents.” Nobody has done a better job of covering Canada’s descent into Woke totalitarianism than Rupa Subramanya, a correspondent for Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, who we interviewed for this week’s podcast. Subramanya was the first reporter to debunk at length Trudeau’s unconscionable smear of Canadian truckers as Nazis. She wrote about Trudeau’s attack on freedom of expression online. And last week The Free Press published a shocking report by Subramanya on how Canada is reducing sentences for convicted criminals simply because of the color of their skin, even when the criminals themselves say racism had nothing to do with their crimes.Canada thus raises the question of how kindness, agreeableness, and liberalism become their opposite.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsBy Alex GutentagDuring the Dark Ages, Irish monks copied down all the books they could find. As libraries disappeared across Europe, Ireland’s monasteries preserved Western knowledge and literature. These monks eventually brought their transcribed manuscripts back to the rest of Europe and saved civilization from a period of decline that might have been fatal. Irish journalist Ben Scallan from Gript Media says this history is part of why Ireland is a “jewel of Western civilization.” It is also why the country’s new “hate speech” bill is of enormous symbolic significance for the world. Ireland was once one of the most traditional and religious countries in Europe, but it is now a guinea pig for woke totalitarian policies. “If they do things like this here, they can really do it anywhere,” Scallan says. Ireland’s “hate speech” bill would make mere possession of “hateful” material a crime punishable by up to five years in prison, and people tried under this law will be presumed guilty. It is essentially a law against thought crimes that will encourage silence and self-censorship.The government received over 3,000 responses when it asked the public for input about the bill. Scallan went through every single one of these submissions and found that 73% of them were against the measure. He confronted the Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar about this, but Varadkar claimed the responses were hijacked and do not really reflect public opinion. I recorded a podcast with Scallan after he broke this story. Despite international outcry, the bill is still expected to be passed by the Irish Senate. So what is the driving force behind it? 

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsIt’s now clear that heads of state around the world, from the U.S. and Canada to Britain and New Zealand, are working together to censor their political opponents, lie to the public, and crack down on free speech — all in the name of fighting “disinformation,” “extremism,” and “hate.”A former Army intelligence officer named Jacob Siegel wrote the best overview of this creeping totalitarianism for Tablet Magazine, and the two of us recorded a podcast with him earlier this week to discuss his magnum opus called “A Guide to Understanding the Hoax of the Century,” which he has been working on for over three years.https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/news/articles/guide-understanding-hoax-century-thirteen-ways-looking-disinformationThe revelations from the Twitter Files, the Facebook Files, and Siegel’s piece should permanently change how we think about government propaganda and censorship. We are far from the crude forms of government thought control pioneered during World War II. The Internet has, once again, proven to be revolutionary. We hope you will listen to the podcast and get as much out of the conversation as we did.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsWhen Michael testified before Congress two weeks ago with Matt Taibbi, many of his insights into the Censorship Industrial Complex were thanks to the exhaustive research of Mike Benz. Benz, a former State Department official, heads up the Foundation for Freedom Online. He’s a bona fide expert on the global digital censorship regime that has emerged in r…

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsAt the height of the #MeToo movement and the online fever that accompanied it, then-novelist Stephen Elliott was shocked to find his name on a public Google spreadsheet in which anonymous accusations of sexual misconduct were being made of men who worked in the media industry. Next to his name was the career-ending word, “rape.”The “Shitty Media Men” li…

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsWelcome to our debut episode of Public’s new podcast. We can’t imagine a better first guest than Martin Gurri, author of Revolt of the Public, the book that inspired this publication’s name. We talk to Gurri about wokeness, totalitarianism, Cuba, and other subjects.