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 liberal democratic nation with free speech, an independent judiciary, and regular elections. That r...
Mar 31, 2025•10 min
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 at grave risk of being destroyed, says UK journalist and professor Matt Goodwin. He says that the arr...
Mar 31, 2025•20 min
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 that Democrats have spent the last 20 years describing climate change as an “existential threat” an...
Mar 26, 2025•46 min
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 the catastrophe of World War II, which was driven in part by nationalist passions. But in recent dec...
Mar 24, 2025•28 min
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 tests in the South Pacific and the Western United States made nuclear apocalypse seem like a probabl...
Feb 27, 2025•21 min
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, including John Milton, John Stuart Mill, Thomas Paine, and George Orwell. But today, Britain appears to be...
Feb 23, 2025•28 min
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, I have to wonder: Is the cause of our problems a lack of intelligence? Will more AI help to solve th...
Feb 20, 2025•2 min
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 generally. But societies have become vastly kinder and gentler over time. Levels of poverty have decl...
Feb 17, 2025•17 min
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 killed former President John F. Kennedy, say journalists and historians. Oswald was a Left-wing extremi...
Feb 02, 2025•36 min
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 attention, it was pretty muted. It was inconvenient for a lot of media outlets to have a more unvarnis...
Jan 19, 2025•11 min
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 a career off that. When he ran against Donald Trump in 2020, he tried to make the case that the adul...
Jan 18, 2025•25 min
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, including low relative humidity,” reported the BBC. But one of the country’s top fire experts disagrees....
Jan 08, 2025•5 min
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 Hollywood Reporter. “You can’t have the main candidates without having all the candidates, and there are ...
Nov 03, 2024•8 min
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 from mainstream news media, and Elon Musk's takeover of X have shattered that picture into a thousand ...
Oct 29, 2024•31 min
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’s doing so with gigantic taxpayer subsidies: Big Pharma. We should, of course, be grateful for the ...
Oct 21, 2024•35 min
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, people say, pointing to Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump’s labeling of white supremacist...
Oct 20, 2024•20 min
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 agenda. In his new, heavily-promoted Netflix documentary, Gates called for AI-powered mass government c...
Oct 12, 2024•32 min
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 prison.” “And the problem is not drug addiction per se but rather the problems that come with addic...
Aug 13, 2024•35 min
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 Party delegates to vote for Biden’s replacement at the Democratic National Convention next month. I...
Jul 29, 2024•30 sec
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 will improve relationships. And yet, nothing that employers and universities have done in the last seve...
Jul 08, 2024•25 min
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 that the conference could go forward. But the damage was done: the local political authorities had br...
Jun 26, 2024•52 min
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 showed not only that the US was losing the war in Vietnam but that the Pentagon had known the US co...
Jun 17, 2024•17 min
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, and threats to Western civilization. I think you will enjoy this conversation as much as we did. W...
Jun 15, 2024•27 min
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, Less Happy--and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood--and What That Means for the Rest of Us (2018);...
May 26, 2024•30 min
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 understand those people who do the right thing and stand up for what’s right. One of them is James Esses, a B...
May 18, 2024•45 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news A few weeks after the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel, the Director of the FBI said , “Our most immediate concern is that violent extremists—individuals or small groups—will draw inspiration from the events in the Middle East to carry out attacks against Americans going about their daily lives. That includes not just homegrown violent extremists inspired by a foreign terrorist organization but also domestic...
Mar 22, 2024•30 sec
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news Many journalists, university professors, and Democrats say we must change how we think about the First Amendment for the Internet age. Maybe the government had no role in regulating speech before there existed social media platforms like X and Facebook, where “peer-to-peer misinformation” thrives. But now, given the threat such misinformation poses to democracy, we need the government to restrict what can be said on th...
Mar 17, 2024•28 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news Europeans are free to speak their mind as they wish, most of them believe. They can express their views on controversial political and social issues on social media platforms from Facebook to X. But all of that may soon change. Europe is implementing the Digital Services Act, which is using the exact same censorship system we exposed as part of the Twitter Files, notes Michigan State University legal scholar Adam Cande...
Mar 03, 2024•22 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news Google CEO Sundar Pichai today addressed the public upset with its AI chatbot, Gemini, for its political bias. “I want to address the recent issues with problematic text and image responses in the Gemini app (formerly Bard),” he wrote. I know that some of its responses have offended our users and shown bias—to be clear, that’s completely unacceptable, and we got it wrong.” But Google’s bias has been on public display s...
Feb 28, 2024•2 min
This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.news Last year, Google CEO Sundar Pinchai went on a media offensive to reassure the public and policymakers that he was being responsible with Artificial Intelligence, or AI. “You will see us be bold and ship things,” he told the New York Times in March, “but we are going to be very responsible in how we do it.” But the AI product Google shipped, Gemini, turned out to have a strong racial bias. When asked to depict the Pope...
Feb 28, 2024•29 min
