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Matthew Feeney: “There is a panic over, ‘If we allow free speech, what will result?’”

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsGreat 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 descending into tyranny. In 2023, Britain’s parliament passed the Public Order Act and Online Safety Act to crack down on protests and online content and then failed to pass the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Act that same year. Then, last summer, the Keir Starmer Labor government appears to have deliberately spread disinformation about the high-profile killings of three little girls to justify censorship and repression of anti-mass migration protesters and rioters.

AI Can't Solve Our Biggest Problems

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsHi Friends,Please enjoy my talk from the recent Alliance for Responsible Citizenship conference in London!MichaelI 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 them? Well, before we look at some of those big problems, I want to tell the story of Sam Bankman-Fried. Sam Bankman-Fried is serving a 25-year sentence for extraordinary, groundbreaking fraud. Towards the end, he tried to pin it on his ex-girlfriend. Does anybody doubt that Sam Bankman Freed was intelligent? My mother's father would say he was probably too smart for his own good. What about the German censorship police, who were just profiled a couple of days ago on 60 Minutes? Is the problem a lack of intelligence? I think we can imagine we've already seen the use of AI for mass censorship over the last several years. Now, the Germans are invading people's homes to look for Disfavored memes and speech that would be legal in all other parts of the world. Does the malady that afflicts the Germans have anything to do with intelligence? (My favorite part of this photo, by the way, is the apparent shame on their faces.)

Jonathan Keeperman: “We need to reassert a healthy masculinity”

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsPresident 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 declined dramatically in part because we redistribute wealth from the rich to the poor. And racial and sexual minorities experience less oppression and greater freedom today than at any point in recorded history.Of course, more should still be done to enable all humans to flourish. For example, the United States is in the midst of a severe crisis of homelessness, untreated mental illness, and drug addiction.But those problems do not result from a lack of empathy or care. California, for example, has spent $24 billion on homelessness since 2019; it grew 40% in that time period.In fact, the increase in homelessness, addiction, and untreated mental illness is more the result of enabling and even subsidizing them than cracking down on them. That’s because being arrested and being mandated rehab or psychiatric care is often the only way that addicts and mentally ill people are able to escape life on the streets.A similar story can be told about many other social problems. Psychologists, including Jonathan Haidt, have found that coddling children results in them being discouraged more easily when they encounter problems. Their challenges continue in schools when teachers allow children to pass classes despite not being able to read.In fact, argues author and publisher Jonathan Keeperman, who I interviewed recently for this podcast, there has been a “remarkable overcorrection of the last two generations toward social norms centering feminine needs and feminine methods for controlling, directing, and modeling behavior. Many from left, right, and center have made note of this shift. In 2010, Hanna Rosin announced ‘The End of Men.’ Hillary Clinton made it a slogan of her 2016 campaign: ‘The future is female.’ She was correct.”In a viral 2023 essay in First Things, “What is the Longhouse,” Keeperman used the metaphor of the indigenous Longhouse to describe female-dominated and overly feminized institutions.“The most important feature of the Longhouse, and why it makes such a resonant (and controversial) symbol of our current circumstances, is the ubiquitous rule of the Den Mother,” he writes. “As of 2022, women held 52 percent of professional-managerial roles in the U.S.… And because they are overrepresented in professions, such as human resource management (73 percent) and compliance officers (57 percent), that determine workplace behavioral norms, they have an outsized influence on professional culture, which itself has an outsized influence on American culture more generally.”The increase of women in our institutions is not the only reason for the rising power of feminine values in society. Other factors play a key role. One of them is likely the success of civilization itself in reducing violence and obviating the need for traditionally masculine norms. Another factor is the well-intended turn toward values of openness and inclusion after the horrors of the First and Second World Wars.

Jefferson Morley: “The people behind JFK’s murder had impunity”

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsFor 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 extremist who had strong rifle skills from his time in the military. He could have shot Kennedy from the book depository behind the former president. Neither the investigation of the murder by Supreme Court Justice Earl Warren nor any other in the 60 years since has produced evidence that can’t be explained.In truth, there are significant problems with the conventional explanation of Kennedy’s assassination, and understanding what happened is essential to protecting America’s democratic system, which assassinations, particularly ones that may have involved US government officials and agencies, undermine. There is evidence that Oswald didn’t hate and rather admired Kennedy, particularly for what he had done for civil rights. And if Oswald had been motivated by politics to kill Kennedy, why would he have denied it when caught, claiming to be a “patsy,” a person set up to take the blame for a crime they didn’t commit? If no other shooters were involved, then why does the famous Zapruder film of the assassination show Kennedy being shot in the front of the head at an angle Oswald did not have? And why did a man tied to the criminal underworld kill Oswald two days after the Kennedy assassination?

Ben Schreckinger: On Biden’s Long History Of Shady Deals

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit www.public.newsBen 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 unvarnished look at these business dealings. It was the first mainstream book to say that the [Hunter Biden] laptop was largely genuine.”In truth, the book shows that Joe Biden has been involved in shady influence-peddling his entire career. While intense focus has rightly been paid to the Biden family’s influence peddling with America’s foreign adversaries, the evidence assembled by Schreckinger suggests that Biden owes his political career to election interference by the mafia.