For nearly 75 years, the US government and its intermediaries have ridiculed people who report Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs). In 1953, the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) created a task force that recommended debunking all reports of UAPs, then called UFOs. In the 1960s, a government-created study by the University of Colorado falsely suggested there were few to no UAPs. In the 1980s, the US military and intelligence agents fed false information to investigators and journalists and drove at least one man to a mental breakdown.

That Cold War era of secrecy has been replaced by a new age of disclosure, as the DoW’s release of a third tranche of videos and documents last week shows. The documents released last week show that the FBI is actively investigating and even reconstructing images of UAPs based on testimony. The files reveal that FBI and perhaps other federal agents investigated UAPs, witnessed them, and made and gathered videos. In one case, six “federal agents,” with no agency specified, testified about seeing a large, unidentified orb appear to launch smaller orbs somewhere in the Western US in 2023. Two agents reported interacting with a UAP that made itself look like a car traveling on the road ahead of them.

In a separate 2025 incident, a senior intelligence enforcement official described searching for UAP in a helicopter in close proximity to a sensitive military testing range. According to the agent, he, a colleague, two pilots, and multiple ground observers watched as multiple brightly illuminated “orbs,” which were tracked simultaneously on radar, appeared near their helicopter. The DoW released 32 infrared sensor images associated with the event.

There is still far more secrecy than disclosure. In response to a demand from Congress, the Department of War in 2022 created a new agency called AARO that claims to investigate cases and to release documents about major events. And yet AARO has failed to publish the second volume of a historical report, which its director had promised to publish in early 2025, and which, according to legal requirements signed into law in the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2023, is now over two years overdue. The first volume of the historical review excluded a significant amount of relevant information. The former AARO director ridiculed UAP disclosure advocates after he left his position. And AARO has not yet released unredacted versions of heavily redacted UAP task force memos and reports. The three tranches released reveal that AARO has, to date, failed to realize the intent of Congress in creating it.

In other cases, AARO is either covering up or making serious errors in the way it describes important cases. In an official AARO memo about the 2023 incident by its Director, Jon Kosloski, which was included in the Friday tranche, he claims there were six witnesses, but the release only contains five. He also claims there was no video, even though Witness 2 said there was.

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And yet psychological problems and psychiatric disorders keep rising. Depression among Americans aged 12 and older rose 60 percent over the last decade, from 8.2 percent in 2013 and 2014 to 13.1 percent in 2021 to 2023. The share of adults ever diagnosed with depression is today an astonishing 30%, almost ten points above its 2015 reading.

A 2016 study in Pediatrics tracked the share of adolescents reporting a major depressive episode rising from 8.7 percent in 2005 to 11.3 percent in 2014. A 2024 study of 1.7 million young people found clinical depression up about 60 percent and anxiety up 31 percent in only four years.

“Endless psychotherapy is a waste of time and money at best, and harmful at worst,” writes psychotherapist Jonathan Alpert in a new book, Therapy Nation. I spoke to Alpert last week, and our conversation follows the video above.

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Last September, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen addressed Europeans in her State of the Union speech. “The rise in information manipulation and disinformation is, as we hear, dividing our societies,” she said. “That is why we urgently need the ‘European Democracy Shield.’”

But the “Democracy Shield” is, in reality, the Orwellian name for Europe’s plan to interfere in national elections by censoring millions of citizens on social media based on pro-EU propaganda “news” that the Commission will fund. It says it must do so in order to safeguard “the truth.”

The Commission, which is the EU’s powerful executive branch, says “disinformation,” including “foreign disinformation,” threatens to mislead voters and thus undermine democracy.

But Public and others have documented repeated instances of the EU spreading disinformation to undermine elections in Romania, the Czech Republic, and other nations, and then demanding social media on the basis of that disinformation.

Last year, the Commission fined Elon Musk $140 million for refusing to comply with its censorship demands, and the French government is attempting to prosecute him on the same grounds.

The Commission is planning a massive increase in government money for state propaganda, which it calls “independent” and “fact checking.

The unelected von der Leyen and the rest of her Commission are more powerful than the democratically elected European Parliament, and are essentially pursuing the agenda sought by the leaders of France and Germany, who are trying to prevent right-wing victories over the next several years.

And now, the EU plans to pump billions of euros in taxpayer money into selected media organizations to strengthen their purported “independence,” which in reality would make these media groups financially dependent on the state.

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In response to a Reddit post titled “shorts that prevent you from being raped,” Platner had written, “how about people just take some responsibility for themselves and not get so fucked up they wind up having sex with someone they don’t mean to?”

At the same time, all four Senators refused to confirm Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court after a woman alleged that he had tried to sexually assault her while they were in high school. Warren opposed the nomination, citing “credible allegations” of sexual assault. “I listened to Dr. Ford, and I listened to Judge Kavanaugh,” said Sanders. “I believe Dr. Ford.” Said Schumer, “For too long, when women have made serious allegations of abuse, they have been ignored. That cannot happen in this case.” And yet that’s precisely what Schumer has done in the case of Platner.

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They did so to comply with legislation Congress passed in 1990, the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA). The goal of the legislation was to end more than a century of museums and collectors digging up and warehousing the Native American dead. For generations, private collectors, museums, and federal agencies had assembled collections of Native skeletons and grave goods taken during expeditions across tribal homelands.

NAGPRA required museums and agencies that take federal money to identify Native remains and cultural items and return them to lineal descendants and affiliated tribes. It was, by design, a compromise. Identifiable ancestors and genuine sacred objects would go home, while ancient or unaffiliated materials would stay available for research and public education.

But the law has spiraled wildly beyond its purpose, says anthropologist Elizabeth Weiss in a new podcast, and now reaches objects no one would call an ancestor. Consider a fragment of a Chinese bowl. The Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, catalogs a Ming dynasty porcelain bowl base fragment made in China around 1595. Its own record says the piece was presumed salvaged from the wreck of the Spanish galleon San Agustin, which sank off Point Reyes, California, in November 1595. The museum files this Chinese trade fragment under its Native California department and has hidden it away.

The law has even led anthropologists and curators to treat photographs and recent books as Native American artifacts. In a notice published in January 2026, the Fowler Museum at UCLA moved to repatriate photographic negatives of petroglyphs from Black Canyon in San Bernardino County. A separate notice that same month listed 146 objects that Turtle Bay Exploration Park in Redding would repatriate, among them Jaime de Angulo’s Indian Tales, a book the City of Redding bought for a museum reference library in 1981.

Weiss says the skeletal collections now disappearing are what train the people who read bones for a living, the forensic anthropologists who identify crime victims, and the anatomists who teach in medical schools. “There is a real danger,” she said, “that we’re going to lose some skills that are really essential to medicine, to forensics, and who knows what else.”

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After being fired from CBS, former “60 Minutes” correspondent Scott Pelley yesterday said that “new management has instructed me to inject falsehoods and bias into a politically sensitive story. I’ve been told to include assertions that are unverified.”

Those are remarkable claims for which Pelley presented no evidence. Indeed, it would be extraordinary for CBS to demand such things of a correspondent, either verbally or in writing, given the reputational risk to the network.

A more likely explanation is that Pelley disagreed with someone at CBS and then declared a difference of opinion to be a demand to lie. Support for this interpretation comes from the fact that he claimed Tuesday that CBS’s new management, led by Bari Weiss, was trying to kill “60 Minutes,” something for which he also did not provide evidence.

Moreover, the accusation makes no sense. CBS Editor-in-Chief Bari Weiss took the job to rebuild CBS News, not to wreck it, and a ruined “60 Minutes” would hurt her. Paramount’s owners did not pay billions for the network to burn its best asset for spite. So the simpler reading is that Pelley is the one stretching the truth.

Doing so appears to be a habit for Pelley. He told The New York Times, “I have been in combat in Afghanistan. I have been in combat in Iraq,” but being in a combat zone as a journalist is not the same as being “in combat.” The remark is yet more evidence of Pelley’s propensity to exaggerate to the point of lying.

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Pelley went further yesterday, confronting Weiss’s new executive producer, Nick Bilton, at a staff meeting. When Bilton told the room that Weiss “loves 60 Minutes,” Pelley shot back that “she’s murdering 60 Minutes,” that “she does not love this place,” and that “she was brought in to kill it and is doing exactly that.” Pelley told Bilton, a technology journalist, that he held “slender qualifications” for the job. Cecilia Vega, another ousted correspondent, framed Weiss’s firings as “censorship, both imposed and self-driven,” and “dangerous for democracy.”

But a review of the last two decades of “60 Minutes” by Public shows that the program has been inaccurate and partisan on many major issues, including the border, transgenderism, climate, species extinctions, Russiagate, and the Hunter Biden laptop.

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Homelessness is the cause of mental illness and addiction, not the other way around, say Democrats. “Only one in seven people who becomes homeless has a mental health problem,” said California gubernatorial candidate Tom Steyer in a forum with Ezra Klein, “But virtually everyone who stays on the street for a long time develops one.” Klein agreed that the main issue was economic. “Before people become homeless, they are housed,” he said, “and what tends to happen is that they have an income shock or a health crisis or something happens where they can no longer pay their rent, and they’re evicted.” Los Angeles councilmember Nithya Raman, who is running for mayor, similarly frames homelessness as a structural issue, saying, “LA simply does not have the shelter beds it needs for its homeless population.”

When asked about Spencer Pratt’s use of the word “zombie” to describe homeless people, LA Mayor Karen Bass said, “I doubt that he knows and many Angelenos know that the fastest growing sector of the unhoused population are senior citizen women in their late 60s and 70s… So I would be reluctant to call an 80-year-old woman a zombie.” Homelessness leads to addiction, she argued. “I don’t think her drug abuse led to her being on the street. I think it was economic factors,” Bass said. “Sleep on the street for a couple weeks, and tell me that your mental health is the same as it was before you were unhoused.”

But the reality on the ground is that homeless encampments are open-air drug scenes, and their inhabitants are usually not there because of an “income shock.” In July 2024, my colleague Michael Shellenberger and I visited LA’s Skid Row, which spans about 50 city blocks and has one of the most densely concentrated homeless populations in the country. There, we shadowed street doctors administering injectable anti-psychotic medications, as well as pharmaceutical-grade opioids, to homeless people.

In one case, we saw a woman and a man with a severe infection on his leg get into a violent altercation on the street. In another case, a doctor approached a woman with a large, untreated abscess on her neck to offer her medication. The woman was in too deep a psychosis to accept help. Case workers told us to walk quickly through one block because, they said, drug dealers controlled it.

The levels of drug use and psychosis we saw on Skid Row are not the results of simply losing housing and “sleeping on the street for a couple weeks.” And the evidence shows that unsheltered homelessness is the effect of addiction and mental illness rather than the cause. A University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) survey found that 82% of homeless people in California reported experiencing a serious mental health issue, 65% reported regularly using illicit drugs, and 62% reported heavy drinking. These issues often “predated their first episode of homelessness,” the survey authors noted. The California Policy Lab found in 2025 that half of unsheltered homeless people admitted substance abuse or mental health problems contributed to them becoming homeless.

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On American policy, he argues that the United States must keep arming, funding, and sharing intelligence with Ukraine until Kyiv recovers the territories Russia has seized since 2022. “The Ukrainians will never submit to a truce or a peace agreement that allows Russia to keep any of the territories it’s occupied since 2022,” he said. Verini describes Russia’s invasion as a colonial war of annihilation and frames continued American support as both a moral duty and a winning bet. “If you want to bet on a winner,” he said, “you’d be betting on Ukraine right now, not on Russia.”

But much of the foreign policy establishment has reached a different conclusion than Verini’s. Most Western military analysts describe the war as a grinding war of attrition that shifted modestly in Russia’s favor in 2025. Russia controls about one-fifth of Ukraine, including Crimea and other territory occupied before 2022. Depending on the dataset, Russian forces captured roughly 4,800 to 5,600 square kilometers in 2025, the largest annual gain since 2022. Ukraine has not achieved a large-scale reconquest of occupied Ukrainian territory comparable to the Kharkiv and Kherson counteroffensives, though it has conducted later offensive operations, including the 2024 Kursk incursion and localized counteroffensives in 2025.

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That assumption has now collapsed. In April 2026, the scenario committee that supplies the IPCC’s Seventh Assessment Report, known as ScenarioMIP, published a paper that concluded that “on the high-end of the range, the CMIP6 high emission levels (quantified by SSP5-8.5) have become implausible…” In other words, the worst-case future that has anchored climate science for fifteen years describes a world that cannot exist. Scenario “RCP 8.5,” and its successor SSP5-8.5, generated more than half of the references in the 2018 U.S. Fourth National Climate Assessment. They accounted for nearly 60% of the references in the IPCC’s Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere. Thirty new studies per day are published based on RCP 8.5.

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That is no longer the world we live in. “One of the most remarkable things we’ve seen in the last couple of years is this sense that Trumpism is at the cultural cutting edge, or the avant-garde,” says Matthew Schmitz, “and liberal America is racing to catch up.” Schmitz, the cofounder and editor of Compact magazine and religion editor at the Washington Post’s opinions page, recorded a podcast with us last week. Schmitz lives in Manhattan, a county that went for Kamala Harris by more than 80 percent, and grew up in rural Nebraska, where his county went for Trump by 86 percent. He calls himself a conservative but spends much of his working life among liberals.

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Isabella Reinhardt, an assistant professor of classics at the University of Austin, and my colleague, disagrees with some of Wilson’s choices. For example, Wilson translates polytropos, which Homer uses to describe Odysseus, as a “complicated man,” where Robert Fagles, in his 1996 translation, renders it as a “man of twists and turns.” The choice is representative of Wilson’s depiction of Odysseus as something other than heroic. Reinhardt, who recorded a podcast with me last week, received her PhD in the same Penn classics department where Wilson teaches. “I do think Odysseus is not a perfect hero,” says Reinhardt, “but he is the hero. Her translation strays into a negative view of Odysseus that’s not entirely warranted.”

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But the autopsy does not explain what pulled the party away from it, nor where the party went, which was the topic of a recent conversation I had with The Free Press’ Coleman Hughes (above). The answer the autopsy dared not say is that “progressive” (radical) Left turned it against the core structures of Western civilization and took over the Party. Starting around 2010, meritocracy increasingly gave way to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) mandates, which the Biden White House imposed across the federal government in 2021. Law and order gave way to defund-the-police rhetoric and progressive prosecutors. Cheap energy gave way to a climate agenda that was on track to cost trillions in taxes and higher energy prices. National borders gave way to an unenforced southern frontier. And personal agency gave way to victimhood ideology, which casts citizens as products of oppressive systems rather than authors of their own lives.

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For exactly that reason, it was dispiriting to watch students at Haidt’s own university enact the behavior he and Lukianoff have spent a decade trying to combat. Graduates booed Haidt as NYU President Linda Mills welcomed him to the stage at Yankee Stadium on May 14, 2026. About three dozen students walked out of the venue while he spoke. The booing followed a May 5 open letter from the Executive Committee of the NYU Student Government Assembly, which called Haidt’s selection “deeply unsettling” and demanded that the administration reconsider. Most revealingly, the committee complained that “many students have reported feelings of disappointment, disgust, unenthusiasm, defeat, and embarrassment,” language that mirrors the therapeutic vocabulary Haidt and Lukianoff diagnosed as the central pathology in Coddling. The students treated emotional discomfort with a speaker’s ideas as the equivalent of a physical threat. “Was he the safest option,” asked the students, without any apparent irony, “considering the current political climate and his critiques of liberal ideology?”

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AI-generated “deepfake” photos and videos, like the ones being put out by supporters of Los Angeles Mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt, are a threat to democracy, say many. “These Pratt social videos are catchy but… they are also 100% deep fakes,” said political consultant Mike Murphy. “In fact, Pratt for Mayor is the most AI deep fake-driven campaign I’ve ever seen…. There is no disclaimer on them. They’re not officially from his campaign… not sure who’s paying for this stuff.”

The Wall Street Journal warned last week against AI deep fakes of two JPMorgan executives, one of whom had accused the other of sexual harassment. “One clip shows the female executive dancing suggestively in an office while male co-workers shower her with dollar bills,” it noted. “A particularly alarming example depicts the two parties through the window of a cafe, smiling together over a glass of wine.”

Deepfakes, argued the Brookings Institution in 2023, “threaten to undermine” the “trusted information environment” democracies depend on. “Government needs to step up to protect elections from AI-generated deepfake video and audio,” demanded the progressive Brennan Center in 2024. Stanford researchers warned that political deepfakes remain easy to generate and difficult to detect.

Governments are acting. State legislatures have targeted election speech, satire, and political ads that use altered images or voices. California Governor Gavin Newsom’s deepfake legislation allowed lawsuits over certain election-related deepfakes within a broad pre-election and post-election window. The European Union’s AI Act, which will become fully effective in August, mandates labeling on any AI-generated content depicting “real people, objects, or events.” And France’s SREN Law made it a crime to produce or share AI-manipulated content unless its artificial nature is “made manifest,” carrying a prison term of 1 to 2 years.

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The United Kingdom’s globalist Conservative governments allowed net migration to rise to a record 906,000 in the year ending June 2023, more than four times pre-Brexit levels. Those same Conservatives passed a “net zero” emissions by 2050 into law in 2019, accelerated subsidies for offshore wind, and failed to tap North Sea oil and gas, even as energy bills climbed. And conservative ministers adopted World Health Organization guidance for Covid lockdowns, masking, and vaccination, and they expanded gender self-identification guidance in English schools.

German and French establishment parties enforced a cordon sanitaire or firewall against the “far-right” Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the Rassemblement National (RN) parties, denying them coalition partners and most mainstream coverage, and American voters in 2020 elected Joe Biden, who reversed Trump’s border policies and rejoined the Paris climate accord on his first day in office. Biden restored Obama-era diversity, equity, and inclusion frameworks across the federal bureaucracy and revived federal pressure on social media companies to remove disfavored speech.

But then, the reelection of Donald Trump in November 2024 dashed those hopes. Trump returned to power on promises to seal the southern border, deport illegal immigrants, end the electric vehicle mandate, withdraw from the Paris accord, and dismantle federal censorship of social media.

Within hours of taking office, he signed an executive order banning federal involvement in online censorship and stripped the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency of its role in policing so-called misinformation.

Vice President JD Vance told a stunned Munich Security Conference audience in February 2025 that “the threat I worry the most about vis-à-vis Europe is not Russia, it’s not China, it’s not any other external actor. What I worry about is the threat from within.” In February 2025, Trump called the European Union an “atrocity” and announced new tariffs.

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But an active-duty CIA official testified to the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee today that the CIA and the Intelligence Community (IC) are still hiding information. James Erdman III, a senior CIA operations officer who led the Director’s Initiatives Group investigation into Covid origins under DNI Tulsi Gabbard, appeared under subpoena from committee Chairman Rand Paul. Erdman told senators that the CIA “did not comply with lawful oversight” during his investigation, and said, “CIA managers retaliated against [analysts] for their refusal to agree with management’s middle-of-the-night anonymous review.”

Erdman testifie,d “The CIA illegally monitored the computer and phone usage of DIG [Director’s Initiative Group] personnel, their investigations, and contact with whistleblowers…One CIA contractor assisting with the DIG’s investigation into the events that transpired between 2022 and 2023 was fired by the CIA one day after meeting with the DIG.” Erdman said the CIA had not cleared his testimony or written statement before the hearing.

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Progressives responded by criticizing Becerra’s messaging. A progressive Pod Save America co-host and former Obama spokesman, posted on X, “Politicians and candidates…let your staff have these whiny conversations! Or at least don’t do it on camera!” Former Obama strategist David Axelrod wrote that Becerra, as HHS Secretary during COVID, “rarely was the administration’s point person in communicating to the American people on the pandemic,” adding that the KTLA exchange “may be the reason why.”

But the underlying problem is not that Becerra is a poor communicator but rather that he is the person responsible for losing 85,000 migrant children under Biden’s open borders policy, which was what KTLA’s Ramos asked about. When Becerra was Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS), its Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR) could not reach more than 85,000 unaccompanied children after releasing them to sponsors. Eleven ORR managers warned in a July 2021 memo that labor trafficking was rising and that the system “rewards individuals for making quick releases, and not one that rewards individuals for preventing unsafe releases.” The New York Times found 13-year-olds working in meat plants, 12-year-olds at Hyundai and Kia supplier factories, and children who should have been in middle school working at commercial bakeries.

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The result of those policies is death and destruction. In San Francisco, a mentally ill homeless woman lived on a sidewalk until her feet rotted from gangrene, after which the hospital amputated them and discharged her back to the same block. After Mayor Mamdani paused the sweeps, at least 19 mentally ill or drug addicted homeless people died outdoors in a single cold snap. In Los Angeles, the underfunded fire department failed to stop the fires in Malibu and other neighborhoods last year, and encampment fires continue to shut down freeways.

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But not everything is a conspiracy. There is no evidence that NASA faked the moon landing, and abundant evidence that it happened. There is no evidence that the condensation trails (contrails) left by jets in the sky contain chemicals intentionally sprayed by the government to control the population or weather, and abundant evidence to the contrary. And there is no evidence that low levels of radiation from nuclear power plants, electromagnetic fields, or cell phone towers cause measurable harm.

It’s true that suspicious things have happened and are happening. The FBI didn’t let Joe Kent, the director of the Counterterrorism Center (CTC), investigate Charlie Kirk’s death, and Israel has influenced US foreign policy. Jeffrey Epstein hid cameras in Kleenex boxes, sent himself an email suggesting a scheme to blackmail Bill Gates, and worked for the arms dealer at the heart of the Iran-Contra scandal. President Trump confirmed that the US government knows more about Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAPs) than it has revealed, and high-level current and former IC officials say they exhibit characteristics that US technologies lack and may indicate non-human intelligence (NHI). The CIA experimented with mind control, its director visited Jack Ruby in prison shortly before he became psychotic, and high-level scientists and officials are dying and disappearing.

But those facts do not prove many of the theories currently circulating. The FBI was right to deny Kent and the CTC new powers to go on a fishing expedition, since doing so would be precisely the abuse of IC power the US Constitution protects us against. Trump has wanted to attack Iran for decades and is solely responsible for the US military action. The email Epstein sent himself was in the voice of a Gates advisor trying to get more compensation, and there is no good evidence of a domestic or foreign intelligence agency working with him to run a sex blackmail operation. There is still no hard proof of NHI or recovered craft. And there is no good evidence of any connection between, or pattern of, high-level scientists dying.

And many of those theories undermine the search for truth. Kent’s claim that Israel may have been involved in Kirk’s murder could support the defense of Kirk’s shooter, Tyler Robinson, against whom the evidence is overwhelming. Falsely claiming that Israel controls Trump undermines public trust in democracy, just as did the false conspiracy theory that Russia controlled him. Smearing and scapegoating everyone who associated with Epstein as complicit in his crimes has undermined our justice system and legitimized mob rule. False claims about UAP have been used for decades to maintain government secrecy. And irresponsible claims about the government murdering its scientists worsen delusions about mind control, directed energy weapons, and gangstalking.

And so the question now is: how do we distinguish between real conspiracies and unproven theories? What can we learn from proven conspiracies and disproven ones? And how should we think about conspiracies and conspiracy theories moving forward?

The Liberty Forum of Silicon Valley recently invited me to give a talk on the subject, and I addressed Russiagate, censorship, Hunter Biden’s laptop, Epstein, the JFK assassination, MK-Ultra, and UAPs. An edited version of that talk follows.

Which Conspiracies Are Real?

The Liberty Forum of Silicon Valley, April 14, 2026

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