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Pascal Clérotte: Ban on front-runner Marine Le Pen is “nail in the coffin of French democracy”

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsFrance 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 reputation is now at grave risk. A French court’s decision today to prevent presidential front-runner Marine Le Pen from competing in the next presidential elections is an extraordinary attack on democracy, says journalist Pascal Clérotte, with whom I recorded a podcast this morning.French ruling elites are “just desperate,” he said. “They're scared because they know it's over for them, so they're trying to cling to power for as long as they can.” President Emmanuel Macron currently has a 31% approval rating.The ruling comes two weeks after the Romanian government prevented the presidential front-runner from competing in elections, and at a moment when the Brazilian courts appear poised to incarcerate former president Jair Bolsonaro, who is also a presidential candidate. And, over the last four years, Democrats attempted to incarcerate and otherwise prevent President Donald Trump from running for reelection.

Matt Goodwin: UK is “a big pile of wood covered in gasoline”

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsNo 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 arrest by six police officers of a father who complained on WhatsApp about the local school “is merely the latest symbol of a much broader assault on free speech and free expression.” And it comes at a time when the government’s Sentencing Council is recommending that judges give preference to non-white criminal defendants, undermining the principle of equal justice under the law.

Roger Pielke, Jr.: “Climate change is going to fade from view like overpopulation did”

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsSince 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” and making climate policy their highest priority under Biden, one would expect there to be significant protests and other actions by progressives.And yet we’ve seen no significant climate change protests since Trump took office two months ago. No Greta Thunberg marches — she’s moved on to Palestine. No drumbeat from the news media. No Extinction Rebellion activists blocking traffic in DC. “Climate emergency” was not among the words chosen by Democrats in Congress to put on the little placards they held up during Trump’s address to Congress earlier this month. In fact, to the extent there have been protests by Democrats, they have been against the world’s most pioneering electric car manufacturer, Tesla, and have nothing to do with climate change.

R.R. Reno: “We may be moving to a point where the American right sets the agenda for the future politics of our country."

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsSince 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 decades, the costs of this system in the form of war, deindustrialization, and the alienation of the elites from the rest of society began to outweigh the benefits, at least for most citizens.Then, in 2016, voters in Britain and the US rejected this globalist vision and voted instead for nationalism. The British voted to leave the European Union, and Americans elected Donald Trump. The election of Joe Biden in 2020 created the perception among elites that Brexit and Trump were anomalies. But Trump's reelection last year and the growing power of other populist and nationalist parties around the world strongly suggest that the entire world is reverting to nationalism.Trump’s election continues to stump elites in the West. They blame the weak candidacy of Kamala Harris, the lack of a Left-wing Joe Rogan, and the age of Joe Biden. None can see — or want to see — that voters chose a return to nationalism over more globalism.

Marco Visscher: The atomic bomb was designed to bomb the world to peace, not to pieces. It's worked fairly well."

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsFor 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 probable outcome of continuing human progress.And yet the nuclear apocalypse never arrived. The United States and Russia have reduced their nuclear arsenals. The number of nuclear-armed nations grew only to nine, which is a fraction of the dozens of nations President John F. Kennedy and others in the foreign policy establishment had feared in the early 1960s. “The atomic bomb was designed to bomb the world to peace,” said Marco Visscher, the author of a dazzling new book, The Power of Nuclear. “Not to pieces, but to peace. Deterrence seems to have worked fairly well. We should be honest that this nuclear war that many people expected in the 1960s didn't come about.”