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This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news France is one of the world’s oldest democracies, dating back to the French Revolution of 1789. It was reaffirmed as the Fifth Republic in 1958 under President Charles de Gaulle. Since then, France has held regular, competitive elections for both the presidency and the National Assembly. The world has regarded France as a...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news No country did more than Britain to establish the values of free speech and equal justice under the law. In 1215, King John issued the Magna Carta, which established that even the king was subject to equal justice under the law, and in 1644, John Milton published his famous defense of free speech. That tradition is now a...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news Since taking office, President Donald Trump has pulled the US out of the United Nations Paris agreement on climate change, unleashed fossil fuel production, cut climate subsidies that were part of the Inflation Reduction Act, and chosen as his Secretary of Energy an oilman who helped create the fracking revolution. Given...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news Since World War II, elites across the Western world have promoted the opening up of nations to globalization through the weakening of national cultural traditions. According to Rusty Reno, author of a little-known 2019 book about nationalism, Return of the Strong Gods , this “Open Society Consensus” made sense following...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news For many decades after World War II, fears of nuclear war eclipsed all other fears, including overpopulation, climate change, and asteroids. Thousands of Hollywood movies, documentaries, and books raised the alarm. Images of devastation from Hiroshima and Nagasaki and deathly images of mushroom clouds from thermonuclear...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news Great Britain seems like a free nation. In recent years, there have been mass protests against everything from Israel’s war with Hamas to fossil fuels. Newspaper editorialists denounce the government in strong terms daily. The nation draws upon hundreds of years of demands for free speech from intellectual giants, includ...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news Hi Friends, Please enjoy my talk from the recent Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London! Michael I love AI. I use chat GPT every day, and I encourage my students to do the same. I'm particularly excited about AI's potential to help doctors diagnose diseases before we could otherwise. At the same time,...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news President Donald Trump’s cuts to USAID were cruel, said Democrats and the media. Indeed, they argue, the underlying cause of most of society’s problems is lack of empathy. If only we were kinder and gentler with each other, they say, we would finally be able to end poverty, inequality, homelessness, war, and oppression g...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news For many, the Executive Order issued last month by President Donald Trump to declassify and release the remaining records relating to the assassination of President John F. Kennedy is not that interesting or important. There’s little evidence to support the conspiracy theories that anyone other than Lee Harvey Oswald kil...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news Ben Schreckinger is an old-fashioned investigative journalist with Politico who wrote the best book on Joe Biden. Schreckinger’s book is called, simply, The Bidens. Hachette published the book in 2021. “It got a fair amount of attention in the conservative press,” he told me recently, “but in terms of mainstream media at...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news The mainstream story about Joe Biden has long been that he would bring “adult supervision or gravitas” to political life, notes investigative journalist Peter Schweizer. As someone who had served on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Biden ostensibly offered a “greater understanding of politics…. Joe Biden has made...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news Two people are dead, and 80,000 have been forced to evacuate neighborhoods in Los Angeles thanks to fires raging out of control. According to the media and some scientists, climate change is causing the fires. “Researchers believe that a warming world is increasing the conditions that are conducive to wildland fire, incl...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news In mid-September, NBC Saturday Night Live producer Lorne Michaels told the Hollywood Reporter that neither Kamala Harris nor Donald Trump would be on the show because doing so would be illegal. “You can’t bring the actual people who are running on because of election laws and the equal time provisions,” he told The Holly...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news For as long as most of us can remember, the news media has reflected reality. Even many of us who felt the media was biased or deferential to the government and big corporations still believed that basic facts about what was happening in the world were getting out. Social media, the exodus of investigative journalists fr...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news All of us rely on the federal government to protect us from industries selling poison. That’s why we have thousands of regulations and people working to enforce them. And yet, according to former CBS News investigative reporter, Sharyl Attkison, one industry is not only getting away with poisoning the American people, it...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news The conventional wisdom has long held that Democrats are the party that protects the little guy. Democrats are the party of working people while Republicans are the party of the rich, the thinking goes. Democrats are the party of anti-racists and people of color whereas Republicans are the party of whites and racists, pe...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news The government needs to step up its efforts to fight health misinformation, say Bill Gates, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama, because it’s reducing public trust in the medical establishment. “People are dying because of misinformation,” said Obama in a 2022 Stanford speech to promote a sweeping government censorship age...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news Over the last 25 years, a consensus view of drug addiction has taken hold among experts, the media, and much of the public. “You can’t make someone quit drugs; they have to want to quit.” “Addicts who break laws should be offered treatment, not arrested, which is cruel and counterproductive because drug use is rampant in...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news The biggest unsolved mystery of the 2024 presidential election is how Kamala Harris got the Democratic nomination. After all, she was so unpopular with Democratic voters in Iowa that she dropped out of the race in December 2019. Barack Obama, Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and many other Democratic Party leaders all wanted...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news For decades, universities, corporations, and nonprofit organizations have argued that they need diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs to create positive work and educational environments. The idea has been that training employees, students, and faculty to see structural racism and white supremacy everywhere wil...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news Last April, a squad of armed police officers in Brussels, Belgium, marched into a National Conservatism Conference with the intent of shutting it down. The alleged crime? Hate speech. When the police saw the TV cameras, they turned tail, exited the building, and blocked people from entering. The next day, a judge ruled t...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news One of the most famous moments in American journalism occurred in 1971 when The New York Times and The Washington Post published excerpts of what would be known as “The Pentagon Papers.” Daniel Ellsberg, a Defense Department analyst working for the RAND Corporation, had given the two newspapers top-secret documents. They...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news Vaclav Klaus is an economist who served as president of the Czech Republic from 2003 to 2013. He is a famously outspoken critic of anti-human environmentalism, the European Union, and Wokeism. We interviewed him last Thursday at his institute in Prague to get his thoughts on the recent European elections, the Ukraine war...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news Jean Twenge is a psychologist and author of a series of important and influential books, including Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents―and What They Mean for America's Future (2023); iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant,...

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news Anybody who has been canceled for holding disfavored views knows how lonely and depressing the experience can be. It often means watching trusted people in positions of authority turn into bullies and, worse, watching friends and colleagues turn into cowards. That dark reality makes it all the more important to understan...