Public
Michael Shellenberger
www.public.news
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Goodpods has curated a list of the 10 best Public episodes, ranked by the number of listens and likes each episode have garnered from our listeners. If you are listening to Public for the first time, there's no better place to start than with one of these standout episodes. If you are a fan of the show, vote for your favorite Public episode by adding your comments to the episode page.
10/21/24 • 34 min
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 remarkable drugs available to us and our loved ones. They save millions of lives every year.
However, the evidence is overwhelming that the pharmaceutical industry is abusing its power. Its role in creating America’s opioid addiction crisis is just the tip of the iceberg. Over the decades, the government has allowed pharmaceutical companies to sell products that either don’t work better than a placebo or cause serious harm and death.
Now, Attkisson is out with a new book, Follow The Science, that documents the pharmaceutical industry’s corruption of government and medical schools.
Her book, already a bestseller, comes at a moment of growing alarm about the poor and declining health of the American people.
”Chronic diseases have exploded in nature over the past couple of decades without our public health establishment and doctors seeming to notice,” Attkisson told me in a new Public podcast. “Or, if they notice, they're sure not doing anything about it other than throwing pills and treatments at it. We have to understand why the system exists in that way.”
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10/20/24 • 19 min
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 supremacists as “very fine people” after a 2017 protest in Charlottesville, Virginia. Finally, Democrats say they are the party of women’s empowerment, gender equality, and the “Me Too” movement, whereas the Republicans are the party of sexism and sexual harassment, as demonstrated by Trump and Supreme Court Justices Bret Kavanagh and Clarence Thomas.
Reality is more complicated. A recent poll finds that manual laborers in Pennsylvania favor Trump over Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris 56% to 36% while upper-middle-income voters ($100k–$200k/year) favor Harris. Harris recently promised loans to black Americans in violation of the Civil Rights Act, Trump never called neo-Nazis “very fine people,” and he “might well return to the White House by faring better among Black and Hispanic voters combined than any Republican presidential nominee since the enactment of the Civil Rights Act in 1964,” noted the New York Times last week.” Finally, there is no evidence to suggest that Republican politicians harass or sexually assault women at higher rates than Democrats. The accusations against Trump, Kavanagh, and Thomas were “he said, she said,” thus unprovable, and at least three women accused Bill Clinton of sexual assault or harassment.
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07/21/24 • 0 min
President Joe Biden has just announced he’s not running for re-election and will support Vice President Kamala Harris’s candidacy instead.
The announcement came as a shock to the people who work at the White House and to campaign aides, one of whom told Politico, "We’re all finding out by tweet. None of us understand what’s happening.” The same was true in Delaware, Biden’s home state. “I don’t think a soul in Delaware knew,” said a Biden campaign official.
As such, this is the third time in three presidential elections that Democratic Party elites have subverted democracy to choose a presidential candidate.
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07/19/23 • 21 min
Dr. 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.”
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12/25/23 • 42 min
In 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."
01/29/24 • 25 min
In 2010, the family of Monica Harris’s partner held a reunion in southeastern Montana. “She says, ‘Hey, babe, would you ever want to go?’ And I don't know about you, but Montana was one of these places that had always been on my bucket list. It's Big Sky country, you know? So I said, ‘Sure, let's go. And we were there for a week, and it was just — I think it was life-changing.”
Monica is a Harvard-educated entertainment lawyer, author of The Illusion of Division, and the new Executive Director of the Foundation Against Intolerance and Racism (FAIR), which advocates for Martin Luther King’s vision of a color-blind society. The organization, on whose advisory board I sit, is currently supporting a former DEI executive who says she was fired for questioning woke ideology. I interviewed Monica last week for this podcast.
Instead of going back to L.A., Harris and her wife drove through Montana. “We're passing all these little towns, and I'm wondering, ‘What’s that town like?’ Population 2,000 — or 200. ‘What's that about?’ We got off at one of them. They were holding a chili cook-off. I thought, ‘My God! A chili cook-off at Montana! What's that about?’
“We're creeping through town. There are no black people to be found. Just white guys in pickup trucks with shotguns in the back and the big cowboy hats and boots and women looking like they’re from 30 or 40 years ago. I wanted to check it out. But there's a part of me that was kind of afraid. You see a lot of white guys with guns in their trucks and you're thinking, ‘Was this the right move? Am I going to be a statistic? Is someone going to jump out at us as we're walking back to our car?’
“We walk up to the woman who's selling the tickets to the cookoff and I'm bracing myself. She looks at us and she says, ‘Y'all here for the cookoff?’ I'm like, ‘Yeah, we are.’ ‘Well, get yourself a ticket. Settle on in. You're going to have lots of fun.’
It was like something out of a movie. It was great. And we spent like a couple of hours there. Everything was fine. That was the first shift in my thinking. The first clue I got was that, ‘Huh. This isn't what I expected. I wonder what else isn't what I expect?
The 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 Interest
As for NewsGuard’s Pentagon funding, I felt Brill and Crovitz were slippery about what is obviously a conflict of interest.
06/15/24 • 27 min
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. We edited the interview for clarity and length.
Shellenberger: What is your view of the recent European elections?
Klaus: They are not real elections because the European Parliament is not a real parliament. It’s not an authentic parliament. There can't be serious elections in Europe because Europe is not an entity that has a people and a similar topic for someone from Finland, Ireland, Cyprus, and Czech Republic.
On the other hand, at least in our country, it is a big opinion poll on what is relevant for the future of the European continent. Our government, which is crazy—five political parties in a non-homogeneous coalition—is not unified and practically lost the elections. If we recalculate the European elections into the Czech dimensions, into the Czech parliament, the governing coalition suffered a dramatic decline, which suggests some hope as regards the potential change of the Czech political domestic situation.
Nothing will happen in Europe. Europe is a post-democratic entity, and the quasi-elections have practically no role. The European Union will go on, regardless of the election results. Madame von der Leyen will be reappointed as the boss of the European Union, and all the crazy projects that started with the Green Deal will continue.
I think the ruling Eurocrats’ main message is, to use the American phrase, “Some extremists try to spoil our important work of the last couple of years, but we shall overcome.” That’s how they will continue. They will try to suppress all the critical voices. So it’s a mixed blessing, and I have mixed feelings about it.
Shellenberger: Do you believe that Europe is dying?
Klaus: Those are strong terms. For someone like me, there is a strict difference between Europe and the European Union. To mix these two terms together is missing the point
It was me, as Prime Minister, with all my criticisms, who sent the letter asking for EU membership. My signature is there. But we had no other choice as an ex-Communist country. We didn't have the luxury of being Switzerland, sovereign and independent, for centuries.
We were greeted all over Europe as members of the European Union. “Welcome to Europe!” they said. And I always protested: “You should say, ‘Welcome to the European Union.’ We have always been in Europe, even in the darkest Communist days. Don’t push us.”
Europe, as a continent, will not die. The question is how efficiently will European society function? To say it is dying is an overstatement.
Shellenberger: How would you evaluate the efforts of right-wing populists in France and Germany to moderate their public image and agendas?
Klaus: “Populist” is an unacceptable term in this room, building, and institution. “Populist” has no meaning and no substance. This is just a political label — a wrong, crazy, and dangerous political label. To call the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the Le Pen party in France as “populist” is a progressivist attack on rational thinking and political freedom. To use that term is to accept the von der Leyen terminology.
Shellenberger: Okay. So, how would you evaluate the efforts by right-wing parties in France and Germany to expand their appeal?
Klaus: Those are normal, or practically normal, political parties. They just don't shout “Viva Europe!”
The AfD is probably more on the right than Le Pen’s party; it is not quite clear. As an academic social scientist, I would use different terminology than they use. To call them populists is wrong.
Mr. Macron is not my cup of tea. I am always afraid of his policies. That’s one issue. There is a very complicated political structure in France. “Left” and “Right” have always been confused in France. This confusion is more visible in other countries in Europe, but it is always special in France.
Shellenberger: We interviewed some of the political leaders of AfD in Germany and were surprised that they wanted to re-migrate even legal immigrants who had arrived in Germany legally. Do you think that's too extreme?
Klaus: Extreme is one thing. My interest is whether it's pragmatically possible. In this respect, my answer would probably be no. It can't be done.
And I am a fundamental critic of the migration process. I have...
03/17/24 • 27 min
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 the Internet, claim Stanford researchers, the New York Times, and the Biden administration.
All of that is dangerous nonsense, according to Jeff Kosseff, a cybersecurity law professor at the U.S. Naval Academy and author of a new book, Liar In A Crowded Theater. “Starting about a century ago,” he told me in a new podcast, “the Supreme Court gradually developed robust [free speech] protections for all but a handful of exceptions.... And I think that, for the Internet, it needs to be the same, where we start off with the premise that this speech is not subject to regulation.”
11/30/23 • 14 min
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 Natio...
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How many episodes does Public have?
Public currently has 98 episodes available.
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The podcast is about News, Society & Culture, Podcasts and Politics.
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The episode title 'Democratic Elites Subvert Democracy For The Third Time Since 2016' is the most popular.
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The average episode length on Public is 23 minutes.
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The first episode of Public was released on Mar 2, 2023.
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