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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsRikki Schlott was 14 years old when she and other students were herded into racial affinity groups to celebrate Martin Luther King Day. “That was my first moment of kind of doubting the environment around me,” she recalled.By the time she got to NYU, she was hiding books by Thomas Sowell, Jordan Peterson, and other authors. “It's been so ideologically oppressive for as long as I can really remember being even vaguely a mature thinker that it's just sort of all I knew. And it wasn't until I started reading for myself, like classical liberal texts and John Stuart Mill, that I realized that there's an alternative … that I could fight for,” Schlott explained.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsIn the field of anthropology, it’s difficult to avoid talking about sex. For physical anthropologists, much of the field’s focus is on skeletal remains where body size, bone mineral density, and other sex differences are of utmost importance. For forensic anthropologists, determining the sex of remains is a crucial element of identifying crime victims. Archaeologists, too, glean valuable insights into social structures by studying "grave goods" interred alongside individuals of each sex.Thus, the distinction between males and females is crucial in the study of human beings and their cultures. So when a group of anthropologists organized a panel titled, ‘Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby: Why biological sex remains a necessary analytic category in anthropology,’ for the 2023 American Anthropological Association (AAA)/Canadian Anthropology Society (CASCA) conference, the only reasonable question that should arise is why this seemingly evident truth even needs stating at all.However, we are not living in reasonable times. Despite having their panel approved by both the AAA and CASCA in July, a little over a month before the event, the panelists received notice that their session had been removed from the conference program. The rationale behind this decision was that the ideas to be discussed would "cause harm to members represented by the Trans and LGBTQI of the anthropological community as well as the community at large."

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsYou no doubt saw the news that the Colorado Supreme Court ruled that Trump cannot be on the ballot because he attempted insurrection on January 6. You might have paid little attention to it because you heard that the US Supreme Court would overrule the decision, and the holidays were coming up.But we should all pay attention, no matter your feelings about Trump, because what is at stake is nothing less than our democracy itself.Before saying why I think that is, it’s important for you to know something:

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsFew members of the Senate have ever been stronger defenders of the First Amendment than Senator Rand Paul.For that reason, I was excited to sit down with him in Washington, D.C., to learn more about his proposal to prohibit federal government employees from talking to social media companies.Paul’s proposal is controversial.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsIn 2020, The New York Times published an op-ed piece that put the lives of its black employees in danger, many of them said. Senator Tom Cotton had written the op-ed, and the New York Times gave it the headline, “Send In The Troops.” Cotton argued that President Donald Trump should deploy the National Guard to quell rioting. The next day, the New York Times published a news story about the resulting internal controversy. In the first sentence, the Times news story said that the Times op-ed had urged the use of “the military to suppress protests against police violence.”But that wasn’t what Cotton had urged. In fact, Cotton had argued that “A majority who seek to protest peacefully shouldn’t be confused with bands of miscreants” and explicitly condemned any “revolting moral equivalence of rioters and looters to peaceful, law-abiding protesters.”And no black New York Times employee was put in danger by the op-ed. Notes James Bennet, who was the newspaper opinion page editor at the time, “One of the ironies of this episode was that it was not any newsroom reporter but [fellow editor Adam] Rubenstein who wound up receiving death threats because of the Cotton op-ed, and it was the newsroom that put him in harm’s way.”

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsFor more than one year now, we and others have been releasing internal emails and messages between social media employees and current and former government officials working for the White House, Defense Department, CIA, FBI, UK Ministry of Defense demanding and coordinating mass censorship of disfavored political and cultural views.We have released so much information that we need to take a breath sometimes and assess what it all means.That’s what my colleague Alex Gutentag and I did last Friday. Our colleague Leighton Woodhouse recorded it for the forthcoming “Censorship Files” documentary. We thought our readers would find the whole conversation interesting, and so we are publishing it above.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsOver the last year, we and others have documented the leadership and participation of US military, intelligence, and law enforcement agencies in demanding greater censorship of legal speech online by social media platforms. Over the last two weeks, we have traced the creation of a mass, public-private censorship effort called Cyber Threat Intelligence League (CTIL) to two separate US Department of Defense organizations. Adding to this large and growing body of evidence is the fact that there appears to be a limited number of interpretive frameworks used by the US government, NATO, and their allies for characterizing their populist enemies. From the Russia hoax to the Covid lab leak to the recent riots in Ireland, the news media, governments, and leading NGOs have framed populists as foreign, crazy, harmful, and undemocratic. It might seem unextraordinary that one side of the political spectrum would frame its opponents around those four negatives. After all, people involved in political life, whether politicians, activists, or journalists, frequently simplify and focus their attacks to significant effect.But this limited number of “frames” displays, I believe, a level of message discipline that is uncharacteristic of genuinely grassroots political movements. Having worked on various activist political causes for 35 years, one defining characteristic is their lack of message discipline. Activists and NGOs struggle to work together in coalitions because they all want to emphasize different messages. That’s not the case in these counterpopulist movements. Across seven years, every major counterpopulism effort used one of those four interpretative frames when they could have drawn on many alternatives, including framing populism as economically inefficient, which was the dominant counterpopulist frame before 2016. Why is that? And do those counterpopulist frames retain their power? Or are they diminishing in strength?Four Counterpopulist Frames, 2016 - 2023

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsOur military, police, and intelligence officials exist to protect us from domestic and international danger, we were all raised to believe. Military, intelligence, and law enforcement professionals are not there to decide what we should think or how we should think. They are there to protect us from those who would try to take away those freedoms. Public’s reporting shows that top military and intelligence officials and contractors became the enemy of the people. They violated our Constitution by turning sophisticated censorship tools and psychological operations against the American people. The war on terrorism, it’s now clear, became the war on populism after 2016. Some responded to our reporting by saying that what we reported wasn’t shocking and that we all already knew the government was doing this.But we didn’t. Neither the Twitter Files nor the Facebook files showed such a direct connection between the US and UK militaries, and censorship and disinformation campaigns targeting the American people.

It sounds like a "Black Mirror" episode: a small country announces a crackdown on hate speech to seize control over the entire Internet. Except it's not a "Black Mirror" episode. It's real life. And it's happening right now in Ireland. The so-called "Hate Speech" bill isn't what it seems. It's not a bill about protecting the Irish people from hate crimes. It's a Trojan Horse designed to control the world's Big Tech companies — X, Facebook, Google, and YouTube. This is a free speech emergency. We thought the legislation was dead. But the Irish government is using recent riots as an excuse to ram the legislation through before Christmas. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. THIS IS NOT ABOUT IRELAND. THIS IS A TOTALITARIAN EFFORT BY GLOBAL ELITES TO CENSOR ALL OF US. It's right there in black and white: "One of the key features of the Bill," write two attorneys with a leading Irish law firm, "is the provision for offences by corporate bodies."How can Big Tech companies avoid censorship? You guessed it: by agreeing to regulation of their content by the Irish government. "The current iteration of the Bill,” the attorneys write, “provides a defence for the corporate body to show that it took all reasonable steps and exercised due diligence to avoid the commission of the particular offence. Therefore, to establish and maintain such a defence, companies will need to have the appropriate processes and procedures in place." The Irish government is almost certainly not acting alone. As my colleagues and I have reported, the demand for censorship is coming directly from the militaries, intelligence agencies, and their front groups in the US, UK, and around the world.There's no time to mince words. What governments are doing is against the law. They are violating the constitutions of the nations that the people elected them to uphold. Because of the high level of secrecy they are using, we can't say whether or not these are "rogue" elements within governments or whether these orders are coming from heads of state. But we do know that demands for censorship have come both directly from the US military and from heads of state of Western nations around the world. What's happening should terrify all freedom-loving people. We must fight back. We will fight back. That starts with recognizing what's going on. Please share this post and tell friends and family what's going on. Finally, please consider getting involved directly. We have created and personally contributed to an Emergency Free Speech Fund to get the word out.This isn't about "hate speech." This is about out-of-control elites within the intelligence, military, and security agencies around the world who are grotesquely abusing their power in a mad bid to take control of the Internet. If we don't stop them now, in Ireland, this terrifying "Black Mirror" episode will become real life. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.public.news/subscribe

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsAt United Nations climate change talks in Dubai, the Biden Administration’s Special Envoy for Climate Change, John Kerry, called for a halt to new coal plants worldwide. “There shouldn't be any more coal-fired power plants permitted anywhere in the world,” he said. “That's how you can do something for health. And the reality is that we're not doing it.”But the main alternative to burning coal is burning wood and dung, which is far worse for human health. Where coal is burned inside of large power plants, wood and dung are burned inside of homes, creating indoor air pollution, which is far more concentrated and deadly than outdoor air pollution.In 2016, I interviewed people living around an old and dirty coal power plant in India. The plant provided them with free electricity but also sometimes emitted toxic ash, which they said irritated and burned their skin. However much they hated the pollution, none said they would give up the free, dirty electricity for cleaner electricity at a cost.And coal burning has become dramatically cleaner over the last 200 years. A simple technical fix added to coal plants in developed nations after 1950 reduced dangerous particulate matter by 99%. High-temperature coal plants are nearly as clean as natural gas plants, save for their higher carbon emissions.As we stop using wood for fuel, we allow grasslands and forests to grow back and wildlife to return. In the late 1700s, the use of wood as fuel for cooking and heating was a leading cause of deforestation in Britain. In the United States, per capita consumption of wood for fuel peaked in the 1840s. It was used at a per capita rate that was fourteen times higher than today.Fossil fuels were thus key to saving forests in the United States and Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Wood went from being 80% of all primary energy in the United States in the 1860s to 20% in 1900, before reaching 7.5% in 1920.The environmental and economic benefits of fossil fuels are that they are more energy-dense and abundant. A kilogram of coal has almost twice as much energy as a kilogram of wood, while a kilogram of liquefied petroleum gas has three times the energy as the rice husk biomass she cooked with back on the farm.While the energy density of coal is twice as high as the energy density of wood, the power density of coal mines is up to twenty-five thousand times greater than forests. Even eighteenth-century coal mines were four thousand times more power-dense than English forests and sixteen thousand times more power-dense than crop residues, like the kind families in places like Indonesia use for cooking fuel.None of this is to say that burning coal is “good,” only that it is, on most human and environmental measures, better than burning wood. People burn wood, not coal, and coal, not natural gas, when those fuels are all they can afford, not because those are the fuels they would prefer.It’s fair to wonder if poor villagers in South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa could use natural gas, solar panels, and batteries instead of burning wood or coal. The answer is that many already use solar panels — when the sun is shining. As for batteries, they remain very expensive, and are quickly depleted. In Uganda, Helen and I stayed at an eco-lodge equipped with solar panels and batteries. But after a single day of cloudy weather, we quickly drained the lodge’s batteries charging our laptops, cameras, cell phones, and other devices. When we told the lodge manager that we needed more electricity, he did what small businesses across sub-Saharan Africa do, and fired up a diesel generator.And other people use natural gas and liquified petroleum gas (LPG) made from oil, and would like to use more, if only it were more abundant and cheaperAnd yet Kerry has been putting pressure on banks and other financial institutions for the last three years to reduce investments in oil and gas. Public records show that Kery flew in his wife’s private jet 48 times during the first 18 months that Biden was in office. Other than being hypocritical, there’s something else that’s odd about Kerry’s position.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsAt last Thursday's Congressional hearing, the lead witness for the Democrats, Olivia Troye, denied that she had called the evidence of government censorship a "conspiracy theory." Rep. Dan Bishop had asked her if she knew about the Missouri v. Biden censorship lawsuit headed to the U.S. Supreme Court. And, if she was aware of it, “does it affect your view that all of this is a figment of our imagination?”Responded Troye, “I am aware of the decision. I also want to clarify I have never said that this was a conspiracy. You’ve not heard that comment from me.”At the time, I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Had I misremembered what Troye had said in her testimony? I reached over for a written version of her testimony. I hadn’t been mistaken. It was right there in black and white. Wrote Troye,Instead of continuing to spread conspiracy theories about government censorship, this Committee should instead focus on the very real and dangerous threat posed by the leading Republican candidate.While I didn’t want to make a scene, I couldn’t help but poke Matt Taibbi, sitting to my right. I pointed to the damning sentence on the page. Writes Matt, “Troye said the verbatim quote like eight seconds before denying it. I didn’t laugh, but when I looked over at the impressive deadpan on Shellenberger’s stone face — Michael can be really funny at times — I almost lost it.”On its own, Troye’s mistake wasn’t a big deal. All of us can forget things we’ve said. As my wife, children, and coworkers can attest, I sometimes forget things I’ve said. And, though I try hard not to, I like everyone, misspeak, make mistakes with numbers, and say things I regret. Our policy at Public is to correct the mistakes we make publicly and apologize.So far, Troye hasn’t done that. And that’s fine — that’s her decision. But it’s notable that when Matt misspoke on MSNBC about a trivial detail relating to the Twitter Files, the Ranking Member on the committee that we testified before last Thursday, Rep. Stacey Plasket, wrote a letter to Matt, suggesting he may have broken the law.

Nine months ago, I testified and provided evidence to Congress about the existence of a Censorship Industrial Complex, a network of government agencies, including the Department of Homeland Security, government contractors, and Big Tech media platforms that conspired to censor ordinary Americans and elected officials alike for holding disfavored views.I regret to inform the Subcommittee that the scope, power, and law-breaking of the Censorship Industrial Complex are even worse than we had realized back in March.Two days ago, my colleagues and I published the first batch of internal files from “The Cyber Threat Intelligence League,” which show US and UK military contractors working in 2019 and 2020 to both censor and turn sophisticated psychological operations and disinformation tactics, developed abroad, against the American people.Many insist that all we identified in the Twitter Files, the Facebook Files, and the CTIL Files were legal activities by social media platforms to take down content that violated their terms of service. Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), and other Big Tech companies are privately owned and free to censor content. And government officials are free to point out wrong information, they argue.But the First Amendment prohibits the government from abridging freedom of speech, the Supreme Court has ruled that the government “may not induce, encourage or promote private persons to accomplish what it is constitutionally forbidden to accomplish,” and there is now a large body of evidence proving that the government did precisely that.What’s more, the whistleblower who delivered the CTIL Files to us says that its leader, a “former” British intelligence analyst, was “in the room” at the Obama White House in 2017 when she received the instructions to create a counter-disinformation project to stop a "repeat of 2016."The US Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Information Security Agency (CISA) has been the center of gravity for much of the censorship, with the National Science Foundation financing the development of censorship and disinformation tools and other federal government agencies playing a supportive role.Emails from CISA’s NGO and social media partners show that CISA created the Election Integrity Partnership (EIP) in 2020, which involved the Stanford Internet Observatory (SIO) and other US government contractors. EIP and its successor, the Virality Project (VP), urged Twitter, Facebook, and other platforms to censor social media posts by ordinary citizens and elected officials alike.In 2020, the Department of Homeland Security’s CISA violated the First Amendment and interfered in the election, while in 2021, CISA and the White House violated the First Amendment and undermined America’s response to the Covid pandemic by demanding that Facebook and Twitter censor content that Facebook said was “often-true,” including about vaccine side effects.But the abuses of power my colleagues and I have documented go well beyond censorship. They also include what appears to be an effort by government officials and contractors, including the FBI, to frame certain individuals as posing a threat of domestic terrorism for their political beliefs. All of this is profoundly unAmerica. One’s commitment to free speech means nothing if it does not extend to your political enemies.In his essential new book, Liar in a Crowded Theater: Freedom of Speech in a World of Misinformation, Jeff Kosseff, a law professor at the United States Naval Academy, shows that the widespread view that the government can censor false speech and/or speech that “causes harm” is mostly wrong. The Supreme Court has allowed very few constraints on speech. For example, the test of incitement to violence remains its immediacy.In the face of human fallibility, and the complexity of reality, America’s founders and others worldwide long ago decided that it was best to let people speak their minds almost all the time, particularly about controversial social and political issues.I encourage Congress to defund and dismantle the governmental organizations involved in censorship. That includes phasing out funding for the National Science Foundation’s Track F, “Trust & Authenticity in Communication Systems,” and its “Secure and Trustworthy Cyberspace (SaTC)” track. I would also encourage Congress to abolish CISA in DHS. Short of taking those steps, I would encourage significant guard rails and oversight to prevent such censorship from happening again.Finally, I would encourage Congress to consider making Section 230 liability protections contingent upon social media platforms, known in the law as “interactive computer services,” to allow adult users to moderate their own legal content, through filters they choose, and whose algorithms are transparent to users.I would also encourage Congress to prohibit government officials from asking the platforms from removing content, which the Supreme Court may or may not rule unconsitutional

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsDuring the summer of riots that followed the death of George Floyd, a particular political belief among anti-police activists became a religious dictate among liberals: that the only possible explanation for racial disparities among the victims of police violence was racism.If you lived in a big metropolitan area in the United States, any other explanation was regarded as heresy. It wasn’t safe to ask whether the reason that so many more suspects killed by the police were black may be that so many more criminals themselves were black. It wasn’t prudent to wonder whether there were aspects of black culture that were driving criminality among black Americans — factors that may be distantly connected to America’s long history of racism, but that were not racism itself.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsToddlers unsnapping their onesies or pulling barrettes out of their hair are sending gender messages and could be transgender, says one expert in the field of gender medicine. Likewise, an adolescent with a long history of mental illness who suddenly announces a transgender identity is to be believed and immediately affirmed, according to the prevailing wisdom in gender clinics.Reflecting these beliefs, in 2018, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) 2018 produced a policy statement on gender-affirming care for minors that recommended affirming young people in their opposite-sex identities, stated that adolescents should have access to puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and bilateral mastectomies as a remedy for their gender distress, and called the traditional approach of watchful waiting “outdated” and unsupported by science.Since the publication of this statement five years ago, thousands of American minors have received “gender-affirming” hormonal and/or surgical treatment for their self-declared transgender identities.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsWe’ve all experienced it. You get in an argument with someone who knows little about the subject they’re talking about, but who is absolutely confident they’re right. Maybe it’s police violence, maybe it’s climate change, or school closures during the pandemic. They’re reciting tired progressive talking points that have been debunked a dozen times over. You’re presenting them with counterarguments that are hardly original, but your interlocutor seems to have never considered them before. Pretty soon they’re backed into a corner.So they pull out the card you knew was coming from the very beginning: “Oh, so you’re just content to let them die???”The argument has now pivoted from a dispute over facts and reason to an unwinnable contest over who has the purer heart. And the assumption is, quite clearly, that you’re the monster for having your awful opinions. You can keep arguing if you want, but at this point there’s no more persuasion to be had, if there ever was any. You’ve been condemned for your thought crimes and there’s no appeals process. The person you just wasted ten minutes arguing with will walk away with their position utterly unchanged, but their opinion of you diminished. According to terms you never agreed to, you’ve lost the debate.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsFor a person suffering from gender dysphoria, the prospect of medical transition can offer the tantalizing promise of a pathway to inner peace. The anticipation and excitement about starting cross-sex hormones or undergoing a mastectomy or genital surgery often become a focal point for the distressed mind, with individuals pinning their hopes on these medical procedures to resolve all their pain and suffering.Proponents of sex-trait modification treatments, known euphemistically as “gender-affirming care,” argue that any attempt to reconcile a transgender person with their birth sex, thereby averting the need for hormonal and surgical interventions, amounts to conversion therapy and is therefore unethical.But the rising rate of detransition and the sharply increasing number of young people telling their stories of regret paint a very different picture. The existence of detransitioners proves that, at least for some, gender identity is not innate and fixed but instead subject to change as a young person grows and matures. Many detransitioners say they wish someone had sat them down and thoroughly explained the possibility of regret. They lament not being warned of the serious complications that could arise from the surgeries they chose to undergo, and many feel they were unprepared for the reality of life post-transition. But more than two decades ago, a British consultant psychiatrist working at the Portman adult gender clinic in London came up with an innovative approach to minimizing transition regret.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsThe public debate on how to address America’s street addiction crisis has centered on two competing approaches: the “harm reduction” strategy of keeping addicts safe as they continue to use, and the “recovery” model, which advocates mandated treatment to get addicts off of drugs altogether.But there’s a dark reality that goes unacknowledged in that debate. With massive volumes of fentanyl and meth flooding into the country, neither approach can ever keep up with the pace at which the addiction crisis is growing.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsThe World Economic Forum claims to be an impartial, independent organization dedicated to making corporations around the globe accountable to all sectors of society. In partnership with the United Nations, the WEF is shepherding private-public sector cooperation toward sustainable development goals that will be a “shared blueprint for peace and prosperity, now and into the future.” These goals include ending hunger, gender equality, access to education, clean water, and clean energy across the globe.But for all its utopian promise, the WEF platform is not about liberation – it’s about pathological domination — a “megalomaniacal control scheme,” according to author and academic Michael Rectenwald, who argues as much in his book, “The Great Reset and the Struggle for Liberty: Unraveling the Global Agenda.”This might sound like something a lifelong conservative and conspiracy theorist would say. In fact, Rectenwald is a former Marxist and professor of liberal studies. So why did he leave the Left and become a prominent critic of woke excess? And why did he write a book about the WEF and the threat of the transhumanist agenda?

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsWe must be kinder and more altruistic, progressives say. The contemporary Left lionizes empathy above all virtues as the basis for a just and equitable society. But behind these pleas for selflessness can lie darker motivations of narcissism and authoritarianism, a growing body of psychological research suggests. A Swiss study published in Current Psychology earlier this year found antagonistic narcissism and psychopathic tendencies to be strong predictors of left-wing anti-hierarchical aggression. Individuals displaying these traits are drawn to social justice causes, researchers posit, not through the pull of altruism but to satisfy their own ego-focused, even antisocial needs.Historically, most scholarly attention has focused on Right Wing Authoritarianism. But a growing body of literature, especially in the past decade or so, is exploring how psychological traits correlate with political ideology — including expressions of authoritarianism on both sides of the political spectrum, where they overlap, and how they differ.Previous research found that Left Wing Authoritarianism (LWA) powerfully predicts behavioral aggression and participation in political violence. Others found a strong correlation between Dark Triad Traits (Machiavellianism, Narcissism, Psychopathy) and virtuous victim signaling, or conspicuously projecting victimhood as a moral value, which researchers say individuals use as a means of non-reciprocal resource extraction.The research does not suggest all progressives are narcissists nor that conservatives never are. Most psychologists will likely tell you narcissism knows no bounds, political or otherwise. A 2018 study published in the American Journal of Political Science found people on the left and right to be equally narcissistic but with varying expressions, e.g., conservatives’ penchant for feelings of entitlement and superiority when it comes to issues like immigration, and liberal tendencies toward exhibitionism in the case of climate activism.Entitlement and self-importance, the need to be great and be recognized for it, whether expressed in the tirades of a grandiose narcissist or the quieter machinations of a vulnerable narcissist, form a core of narcissism. But as the authors of the 2018 study point out, narcissism is “not simply a hyper-concern with one’s self; it is a distinct construct that groups an interrelated set of dispositions containing views of the self and others, cognitive styles, and motivations that guide behaviors, and it is a normal part of one’s identity.”Increasingly, research showing how specific personality traits at the individual level correlate with behavior in political movements and at the macrosocial level can help us understand some of the chaos of the tumultuous times through which we’re living.Given the current dominance of progressive liberalism, ostensibly driven by compassion, empathy, and the pursuit of social justice, researchers have taken an interest in how bad actors can infiltrate and leverage altruistic movements for nefarious ends — and where, in more subtle ways, well-intentioned activism can veer into authoritarianism.Some progressives are genuinely altruistic in non-narcissistic ways. However, the major role that narcissism plays in today’s progressive movements is well-documented and interrogates the self-perception among many on the Left that they simply care more than conservatives.If you, like me, are from the Left and consider yourself a highly empathetic person who values compassion, the events of the past several years and the current state of progressive politics can seem nonsensical — even absurdist. Compassion can’t begin to account for the precipitous rise of authoritarianism on the Left. So what’s going on?Narcissism, Not Compassion

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsThe lack of affordable housing, not addiction and mental illness, is the main driver of homelessness, say the researchers behind a recent University of California, San Francisco study. Hailed as the “deepest look” at the subject in decades, the Benioff Center for Homelessness and Housing Initiative conducted a statewide survey of thousands of people. The researchers say their conclusions settle the debate over the root causes of America’s homelessness crisis.However, this study is limited by significant methodological issues, critical omissions, and biases. It downplays the influence of addiction and mental illness, exaggerates economic factors behind homelessness, and undercounts the number of people on the street from out of town. While it asks participants about substance abuse, the study never mentions fentanyl, despite the drug’s catastrophic impact on California’s homeless population. In 2020 and 2021, drug overdoses, driven by meth and fentanyl, were the leading cause of death among unhoused residents in Los Angeles County, according to a 2023 report from LA County Public Health.In fact, there is ample evidence to show fentanyl and methamphetamine, specifically, have been driving the catastrophic rise in overdose deaths nationwide — well over 100,000 in 2022, and climbing.While the Benioff study authors insist that “homeless migration is a myth,” Public has interviewed hundreds of homeless people in California since 2019 and found that drug tourism drives San Francisco’s street homelessness. San Francisco’s Police Chief confirmed as much recently when he announced that 95% of people his officers arrested for drug use were from out of town. Even the San Francisco Chronicle, which has long insisted that street addicts were mostly local, admitted the Chief’s remarks “corroborat[ed] perceptions that many residents already have — that their city has become a magnet for the narcotics trade.”Even in progressive West Coast cities, it is becoming increasingly difficult to justify the failure of “Housing First” policies. San Francisco Mayor London Breed, responding to an injunction to prevent the city from clearing homeless encampments and moving people into shelters, recently accused non-profit organizations of holding the city hostage for decades.“Since 2018, we’ve helped almost 10,000 people exit homelessness,” Breed said in a recent speech, noting that point-in-time counts of the homeless population never reach as high. “So what does that mean? This city is being taken advantage of and we are tired of it.”Still, many insist the media exaggerates the scope of the methamphetamine problem in the US, employing hyperbolic and hysterical narratives to sensationalize meth addiction in the same way it did crack cocaine. In fact, they claim, meth is “almost identical” to Adderall.Veteran journalist and author Sam Quiñones disagrees. His deep dives, first into the opioid epidemic and then the tsunami of trafficked fentanyl and meth that began to ravage the U.S. over the past decade, are the subject of his most recent books, Dreamland: The True Tales of America's Opiate Epidemic and The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth. Much of the reason people end up homeless in the first place, Sam says, is due to mental illness or drug addiction, often in combination, with one preceding the other.

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

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.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsRates of mental illness across the Western world are surging, with young people being disproportionately impacted. From an exponential increase in referrals to pediatric gender clinics to substantial upticks in depression and anxiety diagnoses, the younger generation has never been more unhappy.A common explanation for this phenomenon is the challenges of contemporary living. With a growing tendency towards isolated lifestyles, coupled with spending excessive amounts of time online, youth mental health is put under strain, leading to an array of mood disorders. However, when writer Gurwinder Bhogal delved deeper into the data, he observed a peculiar trend. Liberals are more likely than conservatives to report psychological problems, and notably, a 2020 Pew survey revealed a staggering 56% of white liberal females reported receiving a mental health diagnosis. Why is that? Is liberalism making people sick?Gurwinder argues that this is because central to Leftism is equality and the belief that individuals' successes and failures stem from external factors, rendering them undeserved. Present-day Leftism tends to downplay the significance of human agency while magnifying the influence of environmental circumstances. Consequently, young people are taught to view their challenges as outcomes of societal forces such as late capitalism or systemic racism, and there is now a growing inclination to attribute them to medical explanations.This has led to what Gurwinder calls a “pathologization pandemic,” in which people, predominantly those on the left of the political spectrum, are increasingly interpreting personal issues and the normal struggles of life as medical disorders. But why are so many people on the left “confusing sadness for sickness?”

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.

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.

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…