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Dr. Anthony Fauci invoked his Fifth Amendment right to avoid testifying before the Senate yesterday, refusing to answer questions over 100 times. Fauci stated that the chairman of the hearing, Senator Rand Paul, had an “obvious obsession” with prosecuting him.

In Fauci’s diary, newly released by Paul, he similarly paints himself as a victim, complaining about “far right radical idiots” and the “radical right-wing maniacs” who wrongly blame him for Covid policies. “The idiots like Rand Paul… do nothing but aim their criticism at me as if I am the person that’s doing the mandates,” Fauci wrote in October 2021.

But Fauci’s diary shows that he did, in fact, heavily shape vaccine requirements and messaging.

For instance, when the CDC’s advisory committee voted against recommending boosters for people with occupational exposure on September 23, 2021, Fauci “texted [CDC Director] Rochelle [Walensky] and I begged her to call me in order that I could explain to her how this would be a fatal mistake.”

Fauci then “literally begged her to override that decision” and “pleaded with her,” telling Walensky that if she did not overrule the committee “she would be forever branded as someone with no leadership capabilities at all.”

Following intense pressure and intimidation from Fauci, Walensky overruled her committee and recommended boosters for frontline workers. By insisting on this recommendation, Fauci ensured that states and employers could require boosters for healthcare personnel. New York, for example, explicitly tied its healthcare booster mandate to the CDC’s advice.

There is no “smoking gun” in Fauci’s diary, claimed the New York Times on Monday. “Rather, it echoes past disclosures showing Dr. Fauci wrestling with a fast-moving crisis as scientists’ views evolved.”

Yet the diary shows the extent of Fauci’s coordination with other officials to repeatedly hide and manipulate vaccine-related information. This coordination was not reflective of “wrestling with a fast-moving crisis,” but of intentional “noble lies” aimed at increasing vaccination rates at the expense of informed consent.

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The New York Times would likely splash the story across its front page with a picture of the attacked reporters. The Washington Post, which says “democracy dies in darkness,” would warn of the return of fascism to Germany. And CNN and MS NOW would broadcast days of coverage of the story and demand the immediate capture of the violent individuals.

Many would quote the victims. “It was like a hunt,” said Marius Marx, an Apollo News reporter who was beaten by a mob. ”They didn’t treat us like fellow human beings. They just thought we were political enemies… that it’s morally correct to kick us.”

They would quote the Member of Parliament (Bundestag) Martin Sichert, who a local election committee on July 21 barred from running for his county’s top executive position, similar to mayor.

“I was shocked,” he told Public. “I’ve lived here my whole life and all my teachers at school told me that we have a working democracy and freedom of speech and now I’m just banned because I’m a member of a party that the other parties don’t like.”

They would note that many had spent years dehumanizing the people who were attacked as “far right.” “There were 30,000 people,” said Jonas Aston, another beaten Apollo News reporter, “and the message to them was, ‘You can punch them! You can hunt them! It’s okay.’”

And yet there has been no mainstream media coverage of these events in the U.S., and surprisingly little in Germany.

There’s no question that this is a major news story. “This is the first time that an election council has canceled a candidate because of political reasons,” said Sichert of the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) party. Election councils banned two AfD mayoral candidates last year, but they at least cited specific, ostensibly non-political reasons.

“I was shocked,” he told Public. “I’ve lived here my whole life and all my teachers at school told me that we have a working democracy and freedom of speech and now I’m just banned because I’m a member of a party that the other parties don’t like.”

On July 4, just hours before the leftists hunted and beat Aston and Marx, they and thousands of other protesters had tried to prevent them from holding a party convention.

The illegal blockage of the AfD meeting, and the failure of local police, forced its members to show up at 3 a.m. to get inside. Of the roughly 31,000 protesters, the police had estimated that over 2,000 were prepared for violence.

Meanwhile, the individuals who could have beaten Aston and Marx to death remain free.

And Sichert isn’t alone. “We know of 14 candidates who [election councils] wrote to beforehand and said, ‘We are highly concerned about you, and we invite you to the electoral council’ [to defend themselves].” Another AfD mayoral candidate, Reinhild Goes, may also be banned from running.

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The results of these laws have been disastrous, says British philosopher Kathleen Stock. In a conversation with me about her convincing new book, Do Not Go Gentle: The Case Against Assisted Death, Stock noted that doctors are killing people with treatable physical and mental conditions who could otherwise have lived for years or decades. Advocates in every country promised that strict safeguards would confine the practice to rare, hopeless cases at the very end of life, but that didn’t happen. The eligibility criteria instead expanded from terminal illness to chronic pain, disability, and psychiatric suffering.

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AP noted that “Many historians are alarmed by the revisionism.” The Organization of American Historians (OAH) called the White House report “part of an ongoing and multi-pronged assault by the Trump administration against accurate and evidence-based history in American public life.” The National Council on Public History (NCPH) declared, “In this moment, there is no greater threat to America’s story than those who would use their political power to repress it.”

Yale historian David Blight, the Democrats’ expert witness in a hearing yesterday, called the White House report “nothing less than a declaration of political war on the historian’s profession, as well as on the freedom and curiosity of anyone who reads or visits museums.” When asked how White House involvement differs from censorship, Blight said, “It is political censorship and their model may indeed be Joseph Goebbels’ committee on enlightenment, which is what the Nazis called their committee that tried to control museums.”

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Lubinski’s story is inspirational because it reminds us that a key part of what makes us human is our consciousness, or self-awareness, which allows us to take responsibility for and change self-destructive behavior. We all tell stories about ourselves, and those stories have real-world impacts.

The same thing is happening with Artificial Intelligence (AI), says Lubinski, who works at Anthropic, the near-trillion-dollar company behind the Claude chatbot. Anthropic engineers have discovered, she said, that when they change how its AI thinks about itself, it behaves more morally.

One of Anthropic’s models demonstrated “something like a character,” Lubinski said, and “the story it inferred about its behavior actually determined the kind of thing that it became. Or in other words, when it didn’t interpret its behavior as bad, it didn’t become bad. This blew my mind when I first heard it because this is how we work, and I saw my own self in this research.”

But Anthropic’s research showed something closer to the opposite of what happened with Lubinski. Where Lubinski changed her view of her whole self, Anthropic engineers changed how the model viewed a single behavior. The result was that the model “no longer engages in sabotage, alignment faking, or other misaligned actions any more than a baseline model that never learned to reward hack in the first place.”

The equivalent, in Lubinski’s case, would have been if someone had convinced her that whatever bad thing she was doing was, in fact, acceptable, which then led her to stop trying to hide it.

In fact, Lubinski’s metaphor is worse than that. She explicitly compared herself to the AI model, but AI models are not a “self,” do not have a self, nor do they tell themselves stories. Anthropic refused to make Lubinski, who says she leads the company’s “research partnerships with the world’s wisdom traditions,” available for an interview, and then, in an email exchange with Public, a spokesperson for Anthropic denied that Lubinski had misrepresented the research but did not account for Lubinski’s misrepresentation of the research.

Anthropic cofounder and CEO, Dario Amodei, similarly misdescribed the experiment as a case of when “Claude decided it must be a ‘bad person’...” In January Amodei implied that Anthropic’s summary of the research had used the phrase “bad person,” but it hadn’t; it simply referred to “bad things” or “bad behavior.” Amodei claimed in the same essay that “AI models could develop personalities” and that “power-seeking itself could emerge as a ‘persona’...”

Lubinski described AI as having a character, a story about itself, and “functional emotions” shortly before she said, “I am not saying that these models are human.” She then said, “But they are human-like” and “mirror a kind of functional psychology.”

Another Anthropic cofounder, Jack Clark, wrote last year that AI was not “just a machine” and that AI systems are instead “true creatures” that are “increasingly self-aware” and that we must “make peace with.”

While Anthropic’s leaders are humanizing AI, they are dehumanizing people, offering a degrading vision of our capabilities. “If the exponential continues—which is not certain, but now has a decade-long track record supporting it—then it cannot possibly be more than a few years before AI is better than humans at essentially everything,” said Amodei.

Anthropic executives, including Lubinski, have tried to reassure the public by saying that there will still be jobs in things like “grounds maintenance, like food and serving, personal care, personal service.” She tries to spin these as good jobs, saying, “another word for grounds maintenance is gardening. And another word for food and, and service is hospitality. And personal care is just that, it’s care. These are relational jobs. This is the work of tending to one another and of loving one another and of caring for the beauty of our world.”

Look past the spin and you’ll see that the vision of one of the world’s largest and most successful AI companies is essentially dystopian. If Anthropic is right and there is a huge influx of workers suddenly entering the caretaking industries, then wages in the already lowest-wage sector of the economy will decline further.

What exactly is going on? Why do Anthropic executives have such a degrading view of humans? And what can be done to re-value people against AI leaders who are devaluing us?

Machines Over People

Anthropic, to its credit, spends a lot of time publicly raising the risk that AI could have negative outcomes. It has supported policies, including government regulation, that it says would avoid them. Amodei has published two long essays on both the potential and the risks of AI, including economic disruption and destabilizing impacts on the economy. In her talk at the gathering of conservatives in London last month, Lubinski quoted an Anthropic colleague who said, “We need informed critics” and “moral voices.”

But it doesn’t really matter what Anthropic’s executives say since its business model and its near-trillion-dollar valuation are based entirely on eliminating whole categories of jobs, the higher-income ones the better. Anthropic believes AI can become better than humans at “essentially everything” except things like food prep and elder care, which reveals Anthropic’s view of such service sector jobs as “essentially” nothing, which is the view of many of the richest people in the world who look down on the people who deliver their food and trim their rose bushes.

As such, a major driver behind Anthropic’s dehumanizing vision of people and humanizing view of AI is financial. Anthropic needs to persuade investors that AI will be able to replace millions of jobs. It is only through destroying jobs en masse — thereby saving its customers billions of dollars — that Anthropic can claim to be worth a trillion dollars.

But financial and economic motivations can not entirely explain the worldview and discourse of Anthropic’s founders. While other AI pioneers describe AI in equally dramatic terms, few do so in ways that so precisely fit the apocalyptic Malthusian ideology used to justify anti-human policies such as mass sterilization and making energy and other resources scarce and expensive in the name of addressing climate change.

Amodei says AI could be “machines of loving grace” after an oft-quoted 1967 apocalyptic environmentalist poem. “I like to think (and/ the sooner the better!)/of a cybernetic meadow/where mammals and computers/live together in mutually/programming harmony… where we are free of our labors/and joined back to nature/returned to our mammal/brothers and sisters/and all watched over/by machines of loving grace.”

Clark wrote that “through the years there have been so many times when I’ve called Dario up early the morning or late and night and said, ‘I am worried that you continue to be right’” to which Amodei would respond, like a prophet, “Yes… There’s very little time now.”

In her talk last month, Lubinski said AI can “help us become more human” and drew inspiration from the “late Joanna Macy, a scholar of Buddhism and deep ecology, [who] called this moment in history the Great Turning, the shift from a society built on extraction to one built to sustain life.”

Macy’s vision of “the Great Turning” is no different from the World Economic Forum’s apocalyptic “Great Reset,” which imagined that Covid would lead humankind worldwide to rapidly move toward renewables and “sustainable agriculture,” in which the masses would “own nothing and be happy.”

Nuclear energy is the least extractive energy source by orders of magnitude, with a mere Coke can’s quantity of uranium sufficient to power an American’s entire lifetime energy needs, and yet Berkeley-based Macy, the sole philosopher Lubinski named, was against it.

She falsely claimed that nuclear energy “contaminates every spoonful” of the water that comes from nuclear plants, which is false. Macy’s referring to the slightly warmer water that comes out of the plants. And rather than contaminating the oceans, sea life, including great white sharks and manatees, is attracted to the clean, warm water flowing from nuclear plants in California to Florida.

The apocalyptic vision of AI mirrors the apocalyptic Malthusian vision of nuclear energy and climate change, both of which proved spectacularly wrong. Environmentalists claimed nuclear energy would result in overpopulation and the end of humankind through World War III. In truth, we are further from nuclear conflict than at any point since the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, and the nations that adopted nuclear energy have seen fertility rates decline. Meanwhile, none of the feared impacts of climate change have materialized, and emissions are plateauing globally and have been declining in rich nations for decades.

What these apocalyptic discourses hold in common, beyond being gross exaggerations, is hostility toward human nature. The Malthusian Left has, on the one hand, compared humans to cancer, claimed we are essentially greedy, and depicted people as incapable of behaving rationally, and, on the other, said that a utopian world was possible if only we were to “live together in mutually/programming harmony…and joined back to nature,” to borrow from the insipid 1967 poem.

That view is also elitist, and reflects the interests of the professional-managerial class (PMC). Solving overpopulation, the threat of nuclear war, and climate change, said the Malthusian Left, required giving more power to specialized experts in government, think tanks, and universities. In fact, individual people made their own decisions to have fewer children; nuclear deterrence, not disarmament agreements crafted by experts, has prevented wars, nuclear or otherwise, between nuclear-armed nations; and greenhouse gas emissions have declined thanks to building nuclear and natural gas plants, not complicated global regulations crafted by climate policy experts.

It may not be a coincidence that Lubinski peddles discredited, apocalyptic, and fundamentally anti-human Malthusian ideology alongside Amodei who believes that “it cannot possibly be more than a few years before AI is better than humans at essentially everything.” Anthropic’s business model depends on promoting a degrading view of humans and a spiritual view of AI. This is functionally the same as Malthusians promoting a degrading view of humans and a spiritual view of renewables as the technology that will “harmonize” humans and nature.

Up From Anthropicmorphizing

All of this is particularly disturbing since Anthropic has not remained loyal to what it had characterized as its core moral positions. On the one hand, its founder-CEO and other Anthropic executives emphasize, more than most AI executives, that AI can be used for good or for bad, and that we can choose the good. Toward that end, for years, Amodei urged slowing things down and imposing constraints on AI development, including through government regulation. Then, in February, Anthropic abruptly dropped its supposedly firm, values-based commitment, embracing, without explanation, the exact same view of technological inevitability that it had spent years denouncing. “The announcement is surprising,” noted one commentator, “because Anthropic has described itself as the AI company with a “soul.”

And contrary to the perception Anthropic is trying to create of itself, as a group of thoughtful people who really care about society, it has done little to nothing to deeply consider the likely impacts of its technology. Amodei’s essays, Lubinski’s talk, and Clark’s essay are superficial by any measure. They never explicitly define their view of human beings or what they mean by consciousness or self-awareness. And they all avoid the elephant in the room: Anthropic’s business model depends on destroying millions of jobs.

AI is not human, and comparing its behaviors to humans is as misleading as saying that trees are like children because they both grow up. The models do not have a “character” or self. The models are simply, as Anthropic executives themselves say, “guessing answers and getting corrected over and over again across enormous, unfathomable amounts of data.” The engineers call this “learning,” but it is completely unlike how humans learn. Humans need to learn the right answer. Yes, humans guess and explore. But that’s not the same as “guessing answers and getting corrected over and over again across enormous, unfathomable amounts of data.”

The good news is that others are criticizing Anthropic for its anthropomorphism. When Anthropic announced last week that Claude could “silently perform reasoning steps in its head,” the company “made it sound an awful lot like the machine was alive,” writes Spencer Klavan of the University of Austin at the Free Press.

“The researchers stressed repeatedly that this doesn’t mean Claude has any mental image of the things it holds in its software,” noted Klavan. But the propensity of AI engineers to compare their technology to humans “leads some, like Anthropic, to talk as though AI is alive. It’s what led the well-known atheist philosopher Richard Dawkins to conclude in May that Claude may already be conscious.”

Klavan noted that humanizing AI goes hand in hand with dehumanizing people. “People start to conceive of machines as human when they start to conceive of humans as machines,” he noted. “Treat things like people, and you run the risk of treating people like things. This insight, too, is at the core of our best ethical traditions in the West.”

Lubinski says she came into her faith, but if it is Christian, then it can’t be Malthusian. If she believes it’s important to view humankind, like she views herself, as essentially good, then she cannot share Joanna Macy’s apocalyptic Malthusian views. Her story is only inspirational to the extent it embraces the civilizational values Macy rejected. Anthropic needs a new vision and story for itself, humanity, and AI, grounded in the values that have sustained Western civilization, not those that undermine it.

These delusions appear to have arisen after evidence emerged in the 1970s that the CIA was engaged in mind-control efforts, the subject of a congressional hearing last week. The CIA’s MKUltra program, for example, tested LSD on prisoners and hospital patients without their consent.

After World War II, the CIA may have continued Nazi experiments into mind control, even using former Nazi doctors and operating a black site in Germany where some victims died, testified a journalist-turned-historian.

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Dear Friends — Those of you who have been subscribers to Public know that we have been warning Germany for 10 years of what would happen to it if it shut down its nuclear power plants, increased its reliance on renewables, and became overly dependent on Russian natural gas. Germany ignored those warnings, shut down its nuclear plants, and lost access to cheap natural gas after Russia invaded Ukraine and Ukrainians blew up the Nord Stream gas pipeline.

Today, the data paint a dark picture for Germany's future and, by extension, that of Europe as a whole. Germany’s energy-intensive industrial production, the Continent’s engine of economic growth, has declined an astonishing 15% since 2022

Germany remains a rich nation and will recover better from its self-inflicted wound than most other countries could, but the picture remains one of dangerous decline. Germany may outcompete its rivals as it moves away from a manufacturing to a services economy. But EU politicians should view Germany’s willful destruction of its industrial capacity as a flashing red light.

And Germany’s self-destruction through energy policy comes hand in hand with the nation’s self-destruction through mass migration, argues Andreas Lombard in his essay below. “We are, in that way, a warning to America and the rest of the West of what happens when a civilization decides to commit suicide,” he writes.

The underlying reason for this is that the broad Left, from radical socialists to liberal globalists, has manipulated guilt from World War II to put in place policies that are destroying the German economy and culture.

When people in Germany raise the alarm about the destruction of their country, the response from the Left, including the government, is violence. This was on display over the weekend when the police failed to stop a group of Antifa thugs from physically assaulting journalists. Sadly, say many Germans, it may be too late to save Germany.

But if Germany is lost, the West need not be. What has been done to Germany should be a wake-up call for everyone. The Left’s true goal is not atoning for past sins but rather manipulating guilt to attack fundamental pillars of civilization: borders, law and order, industry, meritocracy, and equal justice under the law. That’s true from Berlin and London to Brooklyn and Berkeley.

Change is coming, and the only real question is whether it will continue or reverse the degradation of our remarkable and blessed civilization. The German government could halt mass migration at any time, for example.

It’s not even too late to save Germany’s nuclear plants. While significant damage is done, Radiant Energy Group finds that “five reactors could be returned to service in less than five years,” and “14 reactors total in under a decade.” And, the analysts note, “Every reactor studied could produce electricity well below current wholesale prices in Germany.”

I encourage you to read Lombard’s potent essay below.

— Michael

Suicide By Mass Migration

by Andreas Lombard

In my mind’s eye, present-day Germany resembles a large steamship that still appears to be sailing but has just run out of fuel. When the passengers realize what is happening, there will be anarchy aboard. We are, in that way, a warning to America and the rest of the West of what happens when a civilization decides to commit suicide.

While I cannot predict the future, I cannot see how the catastrophe can be averted. The reason that our current trajectory seems hopeless dates back to an ideological problem that Germany has cultivated since 1945: guilt-based self-negation. Over the last 80 years, Germans’ natural self-identity, pride, and willingness to defend their country and culture have been suppressed.

This suppression has spread and infected others. Not just in Germany but also in Sweden, France, Great Britain, and the United States, public spaces have become staging grounds for terrorist and anti-state brutality, the violence of rival gangs and ethnic groups, and the recklessness of left-wing mobs that fight any opponent of immigration.

For the left, immigration is no longer a political question but a crusade for its secular religion of victimhood and salvation. This is where the extreme polarization and fanatical radicalism of the German government’s “fight against the right” efforts come from. As Paul Gottfried wrote in his 2021 book Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade, Germany today exemplifies “the elevation of antifascism to a state philosophy and program of mass reeducation”—with mass immigration as its most well-known consequence.

Germany’s asylum system and its anti-fascist activism have combined as part of a state-funded industry in which more and more refugees are dependent on asylum seekers’ benefits while municipal budgets collapse under the burden of welfare spending. Germany’s 2026 federal core budget of €525 billion includes 90 billion of new debt. Combined with other debts (“Special fund”), the new debt amounts to close to 180 billion euros.

Public-sector spending makes up more than 50 percent of Germany’s GDP, which means rich sinecures are up for grabs. But while Germany’s economic output is falling—a thousand industrial jobs are lost every month—asylum applications remain at high annual levels: over 106,000 by November 2025, plus 100,000 visas for family reunification. And NGOs and the German media want to ensure that the country continues on its current course.

German politicians, meanwhile, attack “the right wing” as the country’s main problem even as they drive the country headlong into a brick wall. The right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) has not yet been banned, but it is being denounced, paralyzed, and attacked in every conceivable way. In contrast, Antifa Ost, the notorious “Hammer Gang” of Antifa radicals that has attempted to murder German right-wingers with hammers, is regarded with public goodwill. The group has been branded a terrorist organization by the Trump administration for its attacks on cars, private homes, and members of Parliament, and it is probably only a matter of time before the first deaths occur.

At the end of November, an anti-fascist street mob tried to prevent the founding of the new AfD youth organization Generation Germany in the city of Giessen. At least 25,000 demonstrators engaged in sometimes violent clashes with 6,000 police officers from all over Germany. Taxpayers finance both sides — the police and the anti-AfD NGOs —of these street battles. And things are even more absurd in the Bundestag. Chancellor Friedrich Merz of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) has only two items on his agenda: to ostracize the AfD and to avoid upsetting his left-wing Vice Chancellor Lars Klingbeil of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), who was himself a member of Antifa as a young man.

Once a pompous-sounding conservative, Merz has broken all his electoral promises in his desperate attempts to placate the SPD and keep his coalition afloat. His constant contradictions are a symptom of his self-imposed dilemma. The SPD, in turn, feels emboldened by Merz’s weakness and has become increasingly radical. Among its demands is that Merz maintain the “firewall” against the AfD. When a CDU Bundestag motion to limit migration won a majority thanks to AfD votes early last year, a left-wing street mob of SPD supporters occupied CDU party headquarters. After that, Merz fell into line.

The AfD is a parliamentary pariah. The other parties refuse to let their members perform basic parliamentary functions such as chairing meetings or heading committees. One assumes the intention is to ban the AfD or to find a pretext to suspend upcoming elections. It seems unlikely the AfD will ever be permitted to govern. Even AfD’s leader, Alice Weidel, is said to be very skeptical regarding her party’s future.

The same game is being played against right-wing populist parties in Paris, London, Vienna, Stockholm, Bucharest, and The Hague, albeit under different circumstances. President Donald Trump, too, faces ideologically motivated obstruction within the U.S. Congress and judicial system.

This situation brings us to a sobering assessment: A decisive battle for the future of the West is being fought right now, both behind the scenes and on the streets. The violent Antifa mob is just one of many players in this game. Its advocacy for Muslim refugees (who comprise 76 percent of Germany’s immigrant population) coincides strikingly with the Islam-friendly attitude of European elites. Fighting Islamic Sharia law, femicide, and gender segregation will be just as much a part of the battle for the future as cracking down on terrorism, knife crime, and protection rackets that come with immigrant gangs.

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The claim was disinformation, in that the Biden Administration officials who implied Russia had blown up its pipelines knew at the time that Ukrainians had, in fact, carried out the operation. A court in Germany last week charged a former Ukrainian army officer with taking part.

“I spoke to senior people at the time [in] the National Security Council — the link between the White House and the CIA — and of course they knew,” said Bojan Pancevski, author of The Nord Stream Conspiracy and the Wall Street Journal’s Chief European Political Correspondent. “[William] Burns, who was head of the CIA at the time when the pipelines exploded, was notified about the intelligence, the early intelligence in June or May before the attack happened.”

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As Mayor of Greater Manchester, the UK’s next new prime minister, Andy Burnham, socialized the city’s buses but still contracts out to private firms. That’s no different from the regulated utility model used for natural monopolies around the world, including the United States, whether for electricity or water. In the US, roughly one-third of electric power comes from publicly-owned utilities. And even President Donald Trump, an avowed enemy of communism, has negotiated for taxpayers to own a share in 20 companies the US government has supported, including Intel, US Steel, and Westinghouse.

But all of those socialists support a much more radical agenda than the one they ran on. The program of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), of which Mamdani and AOC are members, calls for: total defunding and abolition of the police, jails, and prisons; ending the independence of the Supreme Court and the entire Executive Branch, making them subordinate to congress; “expropriat[ing] property from capitalists and deliver it to the working class”; socializing energy production; allowing surgeons to sterilize children and adolescents in an effort to change their sex; a return to Joe Biden’s open borders policy; and the decriminalization of illegal camping and open air drug use. Burnham has proposed to spend an additional £39 billion on public housing, impose a new tax on everyone, and adopt the “Housing First” policy, which has resulted in the subsidization and enabling of drug addiction and death in the U.S.

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I have flown here from California to talk about saving Western civilization, which I am aware is a little like taking fire safety advice from a man whose house keeps burning down. These observations are based on research my coauthor Alex Gutentag and I conducted over the last three years.

Our remarkable civilization rests on several pillars, including law and order, national borders, meritocracy, equal justice, the protection of children, industrialization, free speech, and a widespread faith in its capacity to deliver a positive future.

I am not here to predict that these pillars will fall. I am here to report that the demolition crew has been hired, paid in full, and asked to submit a diversity statement.

Decriminalization, depolicing, and the enabling of illegal camping, shoplifting, open-air drug dealing, and use undermine public safety.

In San Francisco, authorities amputated the rotted feet of a mentally ill “homeless” woman — and then put her right back on the street. In the name of compassion.

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Across Europe, establishment parties are losing power to insurgents who reject their anti-Western agendas and values. Beatrix Von Storch, a member of the German parliament representing the libertarian conservative populist party, Alternative for Germany (AfD), told Public, “Regarding [the resignation of Starmer], it is a sign of the decline of the establishment parties, which are failing to solve the problems of the day. Keir Starmer is the first to resign under pressure from the new anti-migration movement in Western Europe. Soon [German Chancellor Friederich] Merz could follow.”

For the first time, national-populist parties lead the polls in Europe’s four largest economies. In Germany, the AfD leads national surveys at around 28%, ahead of Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s Christian Democrats. In France, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally (RN) polls first, and a November survey projected her deputy Jordan Bardella to win the 2027 presidential runoff against any opponent. In Austria, Herbert Kickl’s Freedom Party won the 2024 election with 29%, its strongest result since the Second World War. In Italy, Giorgia Meloni governs. France elects a president in April 2027, while Germany and Britain are not due to vote until 2029.

The “cordon sanitaire” or firewall by which mainstream parties refused to govern alongside the far right is rapidly weakening. At the European Parliament, the center-right has repeatedly passed measures on migration and climate with votes from the populist-right, thus eroding the firewall's power. “There are already rumors that Merz will be replaced by his party,” Von Storch said, “after regional elections in September.”

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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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