Episodes
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Over the last 25 years, a consensus view of drug addiction has taken hold among experts, the media, and much of the public. âYou canât make someone quit drugs; they have to want to quit.â âAddicts who break laws should be offered treatment, not arrested, which is cruel and counterproductive because drug use is rampant in prison.â âAnd the problem is not drug addiction per se but rather the problems that come with addiction.â
In response to this consensus, federal and state governments reduced penalties for drug dealing, drug use, and many of the crimes addiction causes, including shoplifting.
The results have been catastrophic. The number of Americans who die every year from illicit drugs skyrocketed from under 20,000 in the year 2000 to 108,000 last year. The places that liberalized drugs the most, like California, saw the largest increases in open-air drug use and drug deaths. Many of the people dying on the streets today would have, in the recent past, gone on to quit doing drugs after having been arrested and mandated drug treatment by the courts.
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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 Bidenâs replacement at the Democratic National Convention next month. It was flagrantly undemocratic for President Joe Biden to just declare Harris the Partyâs presidential candidate. So why did he do it?
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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 several decades has proven more toxic, divisive, and dispiriting than DEI. Dozens, if not hundreds of individuals have gone public to describe the cult-like mistreatment of people who refused to accept the DEI dogma that white supremacy is all-pervasive, that non-whites are inherently victims of oppression, and only whites and Asians, not blacks and Latinos, can be racist.
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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 branded national conservatives a menace to public order. It would soon become clear that the police action was just one of a series of dirty tricks by European leaders to demonize their opponents as âfar rightâ fascists and âPutin sympathizers.â
Today, the media are once again cranking out fearful headlines. âThe French election risks torpedoing the global order.â âThe UK election has already failed.â âMacronâs election gambit puts democracy on the table.â The threat? âNational conservatism.â
What is national conservatism, and why do good Europeans fear it? Why did national conservatives achieve such significant gains in the recent European elections? What do national conservatives want, and how is it different from other flavors of conservatism?
To answer those questions, I sat down with James Orr, leader of the National Conservatism movement in the UK. As an associate professor of philosophy and theology at Cambridge University, Orr belies the image of the fire-breathing âfar rightâ nationalists the news media has sold us.
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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 âThe Pentagon Papers.â 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 couldnât win the war for many years and kept fighting it anyway.
The Pentagon had tried to prevent the publication of the documents, but the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment protected newspapers' right to publish them, even though Ellsberg had broken the law by leaking them.
Thanks to the Twitter Files, we learned that individuals with links to US military and intelligence organizations have tried for years to convince reporters that they should no longer follow the Pentagon Papers principle, ostensibly since doing so could help foreign adversaries. They used this argument at the same moment that they were attempting to âpre-bunkâ the Hunter Biden laptop, months before The New York Post published articles about its existence.
Now, a judge in Tennesse may violate the Supreme Courtâs famous Pentagon Papers ruling and order a reporter in Nashville named Michael Patrick Leahy to reveal the source of documents leaked to him. The leaked documents in question came from a trans-identified woman named Audrey Hale, who killed six people at a Christian school last year.
Today, June 17, Leahy, the editor of The Tennessee Star, will appear in court for what is known as a "show cause hearing." The judge will consider his arguments for why Leahy should not be held in contempt of court for having published excerpts from Haleâs writings.
The FBI had blocked the release of the documents, ostensibly fearing copycat killings by a "segment of the population more vulnerable or open to conspiracy theories." Someone leaked them to Leahy anyway, and he published articles that quoted from them.
The case is important for anyone who cares about free speech, a free press, and the Pentagon Papers principle. Leahyâs attorney filed an emergency motion last week, arguing that the Judgeâs order would violate the First Amendment and Tennesee state law.
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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. Itâs 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 crazyâfive political parties in a non-homogeneous coalitionâis 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 Eurocratsâ main message is, to use the American phrase, âSome extremists try to spoil our important work of the last couple of years, but we shall overcome.â Thatâs how they will continue. They will try to suppress all the critical voices. So itâs 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. âWelcome to Europe!â they said. And I always protested: âYou should say, âWelcome to the European Union.â We have always been in Europe, even in the darkest Communist days. Donât push us.â
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: âPopulistâ is an unacceptable term in this room, building, and institution. âPopulistâ has no meaning and no substance. This is just a political label â a wrong, crazy, and dangerous political label. To call the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the Le Pen party in France as âpopulistâ 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 âViva Europe!â
The AfD is probably more on the right than Le Penâs 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. Thatâs one issue. There is a very complicated political structure in France. âLeftâ and âRightâ 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 been a hundred times all over the world, traveling, giving speeches, having state visits. Maybe one thousand times. But I will never migrate. I have never lived abroad. I think that migration is a non-normal state of affairs.
When we discuss migration, I immediately try to interrupt the debate. Do you speak about individual migration or mass migration? The difference is crucial. No one would protest against individual migration, which has happened permanently throughout human history. Mass migration is a different phenomenon.
In Europe and the United States, mass migration is based on the totally wrong idea of multiculturalism.
Shellenberger: Why have European leaders allowed so much migration so quickly?
Klaus: I don't want to say that they are stupid.
Shellenberger: You don't want to say it because you think it's true?
Klaus: On the one hand, they wrongly believe in the idea of multiculturalism. On the other hand, they always find a picture of a two-year-old [migrant] child sitting on a boat.
Shellenberger: So it's a kind of pathological altruism?
Klaus: It is pathological. I am very much in favor of a multicultural world and monocultural nation-states. The difference is fundamental. Itâs multiculturalism. It's just the other way around. They want to introduce multiculturalism to individual countries.
Shellenberger: Before the European elections, there were many accusations that Russia was giving money to journalists and political leaders through Voice of Europe. What was behind those accusations? Is there any truth to them?
Klaus: No. It is a political game. I don't take it seriously.
Shellenberger: But it's striking to us that the Czech, Polish, and German intelligence agencies claimed that they had information that Voice of Europe was bribing politicians. Have you ever seen that sort of thing?
Klaus: You should add another important entity, the U.S. secret services [intelligence agencies]. I don't know.
Shellenberger: Have you ever seen that before? Or is it new for intelligence agencies to make accusations before an election?
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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 Silentsâand 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); and The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement (2009).
Twenge is also sometimes a coauthor to Jonathan Haidt, whose new bestselling book The Anxious Generation argues that society must significantly restrict social media use among children and adolescents. Social media is creating anxiety and depression, reducing resiliency and risk-taking, and contributing to the coddling and closing of the American mind, Haidt, Twenge, and many other psychologists believe.
I spoke to Twenge recently to ask her about how entitlement, a key characteristic of narcissism, appears to be a key element in the rising demand for censorship. She agreed that it was. But Twenge also pointed out that âin most times and places in world history free speech has not really been a thing.â
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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 whatâs right. One of them is James Esses, a British attorney in his early thirties who was kicked out of a training school for therapists for raising concerns about the medical mistreatment of children confused about their gender.
As far as cancelations go, Essesâs wasnât particularly dramatic or noteworthy. He wasnât a famous actor, musician, or writer. He was just someone who, early in his career, decided he didnât want to be a lawyer anymore and instead wanted to help people with mental health problems.
Given that protecting the institutions of civilization requires more ordinary people, without the resources of famous artists and authors, to stand up against bullies, we should seek to understand why they do it so that we might encourage more of it.
Essesâ journey began in 2020 when he was in his third and final year of getting his therapistâs degree from Metanoia Institute and volunteering for a charity to staff a mental health hotline.
âI was on the cusp of setting up my own private practice,â he says. âI had children coming through on this helpline saying they were trapped in the wrong bodies and that they wanted to use breast binders and take puberty blockers. They were younger and younger.â
The charity told Esses âto kind of just affirmâ the pseudoscientific and dehumanizing idea that some children are born into the wrong bodies.
âMany had come across this stuff online,â he said. âMany of them were being taught it in school. Children have been taught from a very young age that it's possible to be born in the wrong body and that you can essentially change your sex.â
Esses started reading about children being medicalized and given drugs and surgeries. âI couldn't believe what I was reading. We were damaging, irreparably, children in the name of an ideology that isn't founded in evidence or fact. I couldn't believe it."
âThe message from the training institutions and our regulatory bodies as therapists was, essentially, affirm,â Esses explained. âDon't explore. Don't challenge. Affirm transitioning, no matter what. And to me, that flew in the face of proper therapeutic ethics and the Hippocratic oath. So I couldn't simply abide by that. I felt compelled to start speaking out about it.â
Esses cofounded with some colleagues a new group, Thoughtful Therapists. âI wrote a petition to the UK government,â he said. âI started engaging on social media for the first time about this, doing some interviews, and writing some articles. And then, out of the blue, one day in May, I received an email from my institution telling me that they were expelling me with immediate effect.â
Esses says the experience was humiliating. âIt was a two-paragraph email that simply said that there had been some complaints about my writing and my advocacy and that I had brought them into disrepute, and so they were expelling me with immediate effect.
âThey blocked my email and my access to the university Intranet portal,â he said. âAnd they had, on Twitter, publicized the fact that they had expelled me.â
Esses was shattered. âI was in an awful state. In a single email, my entire future life plans went up in smoke. I hadn't done anything wrong. All I had done was raise concerns essentially about child safeguarding.â
Esses had done the right thing and was now paying a heavy price. âFor the first for the first couple of days, I didn't want to get out of bed. You know, I was really that low.â
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A few weeks after the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel, the Director of the FBI said, âOur most immediate concern is that violent extremistsâindividuals or small groupsâwill 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 violent extremists targeting Jewish or Muslim communities.â
And indeed, in the three months after October 7, the Anti-Defamation League recorded 3,291 anti-Jewish incidents, which was a 361-percent increase compared to the same period one year prior.
But the terrorist attacks the FBI Director warned about never arrived, and all but 56 of those 3,291 incidents were nonviolent, consisting of hate speech, vandalism, and rallies. And ADL has inflated its recorded number of nonviolent incidents by counting certain political speech as hate speech.
We should, of course, condemn those 56 violent incidents, all forms of hateful rhetoric, and all genuine expressions of support for terrorism. And we must remain vigilant against terrorist attacks like the kind committed on September 11 and in the 2019 terrorist attacks on two Muslim mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.
But fighting terrorism is different from hyping it. What led to the 9/11 terrorist attack was the failure of the US intelligence agencies to communicate with each other, not any downplaying of terrorism, according to the bipartisan 9/11 Commission.
The fact of the matter is that terrorism is incredibly rare and on the decline. Most of it is in the Middle East and South Asia, with tiny amounts in North America and countries like New Zealand.
In truth, most forms of violence have been declining in Western nations for centuries, even millennia.
To the extent governments and NGOs are recording more so-called âhate speech,â itâs because people today are far more likely to label speech âhatefulâ than were people just a few decades ago. By almost every measure, our tolerance of racial, sexual, and religious minorities is at an all-time high.
And we should also be very wary of governments hyping terrorism since it leads to abuses of power. After 9/11, the hyping of terrorism fears allowed the US to invade a country we never should have invaded, occupy a country we shouldnât have occupied, use kidnapping and torture as standard operating procedures, and violate fundamental civil liberties.
Now, it appears that the US and other governments around the world are hyping hate in order to weaponize the government against their political enemies.
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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 âpeer-to-peer misinformationâ 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. âStarting about a century ago,â he told me in a new podcast, âthe Supreme Court gradually developed robust [free speech] protections for all but a handful of exceptionsâŠ. 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.â
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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 Candeub.
The EU is saying, ââYou must get trusted flaggers,ââ Candeub said in a podcast with me this morning. ââYou must tag and flag all harmful information, which is illegal under any EU state.â That includes hate speech, incitement, misinformation and disinformation⊠The EU bureaucrats have already made threatening noises toward Elon [Musk].â
You might think you shouldnât worry about this because itâs happening in Europe. European nations have a long history of censoring their citizens far more than the US.
But Candeub says that the EU may end up censoring the whole world.
âWhat's disturbing is that now the platforms will have two choices,â he explained. âThey'll be able to have one EU-compliant platform worldwide. Or they'll have an EU and American Facebook. It seems like the cheaper version is the former version.â
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Google CEO Sundar Pichai today addressed the public upset with its AI chatbot, Gemini, for its political bias. âI want to address the recent issues with problematic text and image responses in the Gemini app (formerly Bard),â he wrote. I know that some of its responses have offended our users and shown biasâto be clear, thatâs completely unacceptable, and we got it wrong.â
But Googleâs bias has been on public display since August 2017, when Pichai fired a Google employee named James Damore for writing a ten-page memo criticizing the company's diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies, particularly its âBias-Bustingâ training.
And the partisan bias of Google was expressed a few days after voters elected Donald Trump as president during an âall handsâ employee meeting. âItâs been an extraordinarily stressful time for many of you,â Pichai said to Google employees. âI certainly find this election deeply offensive,â said Google cofounder Sergey Brin, âand I know many of you do too.â
One Google executive nearly started crying when recounting that Trump won. âIt was this massive kick in the gut that we were gonna lose,â she said. âAnd it was really painful.â
Pichai struck a more neutral political tone in comparison to his colleagues. âWe are in a democratic system,â he said. âI think part of the reason the outcome ended up the way it is is [because] people don't feel heard across both sides.â
But after a Google employee suggested that Trump won due to âmisinformationâ and âfake news coming from fake news websites being shared by millions of low-information voters on social media,â Pichai specifically pointed to the use of artificial intelligence to achieve the aim of countering âmisinformation.â
âI think our investments in machine learning and AI is a big opportunity here,â he said. Machine learning is a form of AI.
Pichai then suggested that Google was already manipulating search results.
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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. âYou will see us be bold and ship things,â he told the New York Times in March, âbut we are going to be very responsible in how we do it.â
But the AI product Google shipped, Gemini, turned out to have a strong racial bias. When asked to depict the Pope, Vikings, and Americaâs founding fathers, Gemini refused to depict them as white.
Gemini responded with misinformation when asked about this misrepresentation, claiming that it âaimed to provide a more accurate and inclusive representation of the historical context.â
To its credit, Google took the image creation feature of Gemini offline, saying it was not âworking as intended.â And, to be fair, tech firms often ship new products aware that there are programming bugs.
But Gemini remains up and running and is a source of misinformation and, arguably, âhate speech.â
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Politicians and activists alike have warned of a looming climate catastrophe for decades. âBiden urged to declare climate change a national emergency,â reported NBC last year. âClimate Changes Threatens Every Facet of U.S. Society, Federal Report Warns,â announced Scientific American.
Cambridge University climate scientist Mike Hulme disagrees. âDeclaring a climate emergency has a chilling effect on politics,â he tells Public. âIt suggests there isnât time for normal, necessary democratic process.â
Climate activists may dismiss Hulme as a âclimate denier,â but he agrees the planet is warming due to human activities and specifically says we should prepare for more heat waves.
Moreover, Hulmeâs credentials are undeniably impressive. He is a Professor at the University of Cambridge and founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research. Hulme has advised everyone from the United Nations to the UK Government and earned a personalized certificate from the Nobel Peace Prize committee for his work with the UNâs Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Now, in his new book, Climate Change Isnât Everything, Hulme strongly denounces âclimatism,â which he describes as the âunyielding belief that stopping climate change is the pre-eminent yardstick against which all policies must be measured.â
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On Monday, Alex Gutentag and I reported that the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) is misrepresenting the location of the alleged bomb allegedly found at the Republican National Committee (RNC) headquarters on January 5, 2021, and that little about the alleged bomb scare makes any sense.
Today, I sat down with Briahna Joy Gray and Robby Soave of âThe Risingâ to discuss the issue. They asked me hard questions, and I was glad to have the dialogue.
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In 2020, progressives rode a wave of righteous anger toward what many believed would be decisive and lasting change. The pandemic ensured a captive audience; America could no longer look away.
So why did a year that saw the largest combined protests in the history of this country fail to deliver substantive change, let alone the radical shift progressives were banking on?
Essayist and author Freddie deBoer parses these disappointments in his 2023 book, âHow Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement.â
âPeople didn't appear to want to confront the fact that nothing of substance happened and were eager to just move on,â deBoer said of his motivations for writing the book. âI said itâs really important we think about this⊠I wanted to force that conversation.â
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Rob Henderson is a writer and academic perhaps best known for popularizing the concept of âluxury beliefs.â Over the past several years, heâs become an influential commentator, both in mainstream media and with his own Substack.
Now, he has a much-anticipated book coming out from a major publisher. âTroubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family and Social Class,â recounts his tumultuous childhood and unlikely path to elite universities, and expands on ideas â about class, social psychology and culture â he developed while studying at Yale and Cambridge.
His profile and social media following all but guarantee an audience. And yet, bookstores in progressive cities like San Francisco and New York wonât host his book events.
Donât worry about Rob, the book will do fine. But itâs bizarre that liberals arenât more open to his ideas, especially since he spends a lot of time thinking about how social and cultural trends impact poor and working class people.
Perhaps the reason Henderson is such an insightful critic is that he traverses boundaries that remain invisible to some, intractable to others. Moving through class divides, from the foster system, blue-collar America and the military to the most prestigious institutions, he is both outsider and insider. From this vantage point, he asks us to think deeply about the meaning of privilege.
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Last week, former Speaker Nancy Pelosi accused pro-Palestinian protesters who demonstrated outside her San Francisco home of being Russian stooges. She even urged the FBI to investigate them.
Obviously, the FBI canât legally investigate an allegation for which there is zero evidence. And to be clear, Pelosi offered zero evidence.
Is it possible that Russian interests have funded pro-Palestine activists? Sure, just like itâs possible that Russian interests have funded Nancy Pelosi. But thereâs no evidence. And itâs a dangerous abuse of power for a politician to call for the FBI to investigate her critics based on nothing but wild accusations.
What was Pelosi thinking? You might say she just lost her cool. But itâs noticeable that the Democrats made Russia the new bogeyman starting in 2016, during the election campaign of Donald Trump.
Democrats made various accusations of Trumpâs collusion with Russia. All turned out to be false and misleading. They suggested a bank in Russia had wired money to the Trump campaign. They claimed Trumpâs campaign was working with the Russians on the release of embarrassing emails.
But two Justice Department investigations, one by Robert Mueller and the other by John Durham, concluded that there was no illegal collusion. Durham believed the FBI should never have begun an investigation of Trump and Russia in the first place.
After this, Democrats used Russia constantly to dismiss issues they didnât want to deal with. After the New York Post published its mid-October 2020 article about Hunter Bidenâs laptop, which revealed a massive influence-peddling scheme involving the whole family, dozens of former CIA and intelligence officials said it had âall the markings of a Russian information operation, which then-presidential candidate Joe Biden referred to in a debate with Trump in 2020.
Attacking oneâs opponents as being backed by Putin and aligned with Russia dates back even to earlier in 2015 and 2016. Back then, opponents of the Brexit referendum in the UK claimed that supporters of Brexit were pro-Putin.
Today, the accusation is everywhere. Government-funded think tanks in North America and Europe accuse critics of the Westâs support for Ukraine in its war against Russia of being Russian agents. And a few days ago, Correctiv, an influential âanti-disinformationâ website in Germany, which both the German government and George Sorosâs foundation finance, falsely suggested that protesting German farmers are pro-Putin or supported by Putin.
There is a good psychological reason for Democrats to focus on Russia.
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Rope, not the wind industry, killed the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale found dead last Monday, claim scientific organizations, the US government, and the news media. âThis case highlights the ongoing threat right whales and other whale species have been facing from fishing gear entanglements for decades,â said Amy Knowlton of the New England Aquarium, which is working with the North Atlantic Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) to identify the cause of death.
But neither Knowlton nor anyone else knows if the rope killed the three-year-old female whale, who is known only as â5120.â Whales can live long lives with a rope embedded in their bodies. Indeed, nearly 90 percent of right whales have been entangled in rope at least once, and others as often as nine times. This young whale was first observed to have rope around her tail in August 2022.
Itâs true that, in the past, rope entanglements were the primary cause of death for North Atlantic right whales, and late today, NOAA reported that âThe necropsy showed no evidence of blunt force trauma.â
But NOAA did not address whether high-decibel sonar, measured at illegal levels last year, played a role. Nor did NOAA establish a cause of death. âCause of death is pending further histological and diagnostic testing of collected samples, which can take weeks to complete.
As such, it is inappropriate for the New England Aquarium, which is participating in NOAAâs investigation of the cause of the whaleâs death, to suggest that rope entanglement killed the whale before NOAA has completed its investigation.
And this is particularly inappropriate since the threats to the whales have increased as boat traffic related to offshore wind development increased.
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Have you ever heard of the âFive Eyesâ nations? I confess that I hadnât until I started covering censorship and other governmental abuses of power last year.
But it turns out to be something really important. The Five Eyes refers to intelligence agencies in the US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, and Canada, which have collaborated on spying and intelligence sharing since World War II.
Now it appears Canada spread disinformation to other Five Eyes nations after Canadaâs Justin Trudeau government used the same faked intelligence to illegally frame protesters as violent extremists.
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