Public Michael Shellenberger

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit public.substack.com

Last April, a squad of armed police officers in Brussels, Belgium, marched into a National Conservatism Conference with the intent of shutting it down. The alleged crime? Hate speech.
When the police saw the TV cameras, they turned tail, exited the building, and blocked people from entering. The next day, a judge ruled that the conference could go forward.
But the damage was done: the local political authorities had branded national conservatives a menace to public order. It would soon become clear that the police action was just one of a series of dirty tricks by European leaders to demonize their opponents as “far right” fascists and “Putin sympathizers.”
Today, the media are once again cranking out fearful headlines. “The French election risks torpedoing the global order.” “The UK election has already failed.” “Macron’s election gambit puts democracy on the table.” The threat? “National conservatism.”
What is national conservatism, and why do good Europeans fear it? Why did national conservatives achieve such significant gains in the recent European elections? What do national conservatives want, and how is it different from other flavors of conservatism?
To answer those questions, I sat down with James Orr, leader of the National Conservatism movement in the UK. As an associate professor of philosophy and theology at Cambridge University, Orr belies the image of the fire-breathing “far right” nationalists the news media has sold us.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit public.substack.com

One of the most famous moments in American journalism occurred in 1971 when The New York Times and The Washington Post published excerpts of what would be known as “The Pentagon Papers.” Daniel Ellsberg, a Defense Department analyst working for the RAND Corporation, had given the two newspapers top-secret documents. They showed not only that the US was losing the war in Vietnam but that the Pentagon had known the US couldn’t win the war for many years and kept fighting it anyway.
The Pentagon had tried to prevent the publication of the documents, but the Supreme Court ruled that the First Amendment protected newspapers' right to publish them, even though Ellsberg had broken the law by leaking them.
Thanks to the Twitter Files, we learned that individuals with links to US military and intelligence organizations have tried for years to convince reporters that they should no longer follow the Pentagon Papers principle, ostensibly since doing so could help foreign adversaries. They used this argument at the same moment that they were attempting to “pre-bunk” the Hunter Biden laptop, months before The New York Post published articles about its existence.
Now, a judge in Tennesse may violate the Supreme Court’s famous Pentagon Papers ruling and order a reporter in Nashville named Michael Patrick Leahy to reveal the source of documents leaked to him. The leaked documents in question came from a trans-identified woman named Audrey Hale, who killed six people at a Christian school last year.
Today, June 17, Leahy, the editor of The Tennessee Star, will appear in court for what is known as a "show cause hearing." The judge will consider his arguments for why Leahy should not be held in contempt of court for having published excerpts from Hale’s writings.
The FBI had blocked the release of the documents, ostensibly fearing copycat killings by a "segment of the population more vulnerable or open to conspiracy theories." Someone leaked them to Leahy anyway, and he published articles that quoted from them.
The case is important for anyone who cares about free speech, a free press, and the Pentagon Papers principle. Leahy’s attorney filed an emergency motion last week, arguing that the Judge’s order would violate the First Amendment and Tennesee state law.

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit public.substack.com

Vaclav Klaus is an economist who served as president of the Czech Republic from 2003 to 2013. He is a famously outspoken critic of anti-human environmentalism, the European Union, and Wokeism. We interviewed him last Thursday at his institute in Prague to get his thoughts on the recent European elections, the Ukraine war, and threats to Western civilization. I think you will enjoy this conversation as much as we did. We edited the interview for clarity and length.
Shellenberger: What is your view of the recent European elections?
Klaus: They are not real elections because the European Parliament is not a real parliament. It’s not an authentic parliament. There can't be serious elections in Europe because Europe is not an entity that has a people and a similar topic for someone from Finland, Ireland, Cyprus, and Czech Republic.
On the other hand, at least in our country, it is a big opinion poll on what is relevant for the future of the European continent. Our government, which is crazy—five political parties in a non-homogeneous coalition—is not unified and practically lost the elections. If we recalculate the European elections into the Czech dimensions, into the Czech parliament, the governing coalition suffered a dramatic decline, which suggests some hope as regards the potential change of the Czech political domestic situation.
Nothing will happen in Europe. Europe is a post-democratic entity, and the quasi-elections have practically no role. The European Union will go on, regardless of the election results. Madame von der Leyen will be reappointed as the boss of the European Union, and all the crazy projects that started with the Green Deal will continue.
I think the ruling Eurocrats’ main message is, to use the American phrase, “Some extremists try to spoil our important work of the last couple of years, but we shall overcome.” That’s how they will continue. They will try to suppress all the critical voices. So it’s a mixed blessing, and I have mixed feelings about it.
Shellenberger: Do you believe that Europe is dying?
Klaus: Those are strong terms. For someone like me, there is a strict difference between Europe and the European Union. To mix these two terms together is missing the point
It was me, as Prime Minister, with all my criticisms, who sent the letter asking for EU membership. My signature is there. But we had no other choice as an ex-Communist country. We didn't have the luxury of being Switzerland, sovereign and independent, for centuries.
We were greeted all over Europe as members of the European Union. “Welcome to Europe!” they said. And I always protested: “You should say, ‘Welcome to the European Union.’ We have always been in Europe, even in the darkest Communist days. Don’t push us.”
Europe, as a continent, will not die. The question is how efficiently will European society function? To say it is dying is an overstatement.
Shellenberger: How would you evaluate the efforts of right-wing populists in France and Germany to moderate their public image and agendas?
Klaus: “Populist” is an unacceptable term in this room, building, and institution. “Populist” has no meaning and no substance. This is just a political label — a wrong, crazy, and dangerous political label. To call the Alternative for Germany (AfD) and the Le Pen party in France as “populist” is a progressivist attack on rational thinking and political freedom. To use that term is to accept the von der Leyen terminology.
Shellenberger: Okay. So, how would you evaluate the efforts by right-wing parties in France and Germany to expand their appeal?
Klaus: Those are normal, or practically normal, political parties. They just don't shout “Viva Europe!”
The AfD is probably more on the right than Le Pen’s party; it is not quite clear. As an academic social scientist, I would use different terminology than they use. To

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit public.substack.com

Jean Twenge is a psychologist and author of a series of important and influential books, including Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents―and What They Mean for America's Future (2023); iGen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy--and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood--and What That Means for the Rest of Us (2018); and The Narcissism Epidemic: Living in the Age of Entitlement (2009).
Twenge is also sometimes a coauthor to Jonathan Haidt, whose new bestselling book The Anxious Generation argues that society must significantly restrict social media use among children and adolescents. Social media is creating anxiety and depression, reducing resiliency and risk-taking, and contributing to the coddling and closing of the American mind, Haidt, Twenge, and many other psychologists believe.
I spoke to Twenge recently to ask her about how entitlement, a key characteristic of narcissism, appears to be a key element in the rising demand for censorship. She agreed that it was. But Twenge also pointed out that “in most times and places in world history free speech has not really been a thing.”

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit public.substack.com

Anybody who has been canceled for holding disfavored views knows how lonely and depressing the experience can be. It often means watching trusted people in positions of authority turn into bullies and, worse, watching friends and colleagues turn into cowards.
That dark reality makes it all the more important to understand those people who do the right thing and stand up for what’s right. One of them is James Esses, a British attorney in his early thirties who was kicked out of a training school for therapists for raising concerns about the medical mistreatment of children confused about their gender.
As far as cancelations go, Esses’s wasn’t particularly dramatic or noteworthy. He wasn’t a famous actor, musician, or writer. He was just someone who, early in his career, decided he didn’t want to be a lawyer anymore and instead wanted to help people with mental health problems.
Given that protecting the institutions of civilization requires more ordinary people, without the resources of famous artists and authors, to stand up against bullies, we should seek to understand why they do it so that we might encourage more of it.
Esses’ journey began in 2020 when he was in his third and final year of getting his therapist’s degree from Metanoia Institute and volunteering for a charity to staff a mental health hotline.
“I was on the cusp of setting up my own private practice,” he says. “I had children coming through on this helpline saying they were trapped in the wrong bodies and that they wanted to use breast binders and take puberty blockers. They were younger and younger.”
The charity told Esses “to kind of just affirm” the pseudoscientific and dehumanizing idea that some children are born into the wrong bodies.
“Many had come across this stuff online,” he said. “Many of them were being taught it in school. Children have been taught from a very young age that it's possible to be born in the wrong body and that you can essentially change your sex.”
Esses started reading about children being medicalized and given drugs and surgeries. “I couldn't believe what I was reading. We were damaging, irreparably, children in the name of an ideology that isn't founded in evidence or fact. I couldn't believe it."
“The message from the training institutions and our regulatory bodies as therapists was, essentially, affirm,” Esses explained. “Don't explore. Don't challenge. Affirm transitioning, no matter what. And to me, that flew in the face of proper therapeutic ethics and the Hippocratic oath. So I couldn't simply abide by that. I felt compelled to start speaking out about it.”
Esses cofounded with some colleagues a new group, Thoughtful Therapists. “I wrote a petition to the UK government,” he said. “I started engaging on social media for the first time about this, doing some interviews, and writing some articles. And then, out of the blue, one day in May, I received an email from my institution telling me that they were expelling me with immediate effect.”
Esses says the experience was humiliating. “It was a two-paragraph email that simply said that there had been some complaints about my writing and my advocacy and that I had brought them into disrepute, and so they were expelling me with immediate effect.
“They blocked my email and my access to the university Intranet portal,” he said. “And they had, on Twitter, publicized the fact that they had expelled me.”
Esses was shattered. “I was in an awful state. In a single email, my entire future life plans went up in smoke. I hadn't done anything wrong. All I had done was raise concerns essentially about child safeguarding.”
Esses had done the right thing and was now paying a heavy price. “For the first for the first couple of days, I didn't want to get out of bed. You know, I was really that low.”

This is a free preview of a paid episode. To hear more, visit public.substack.com

A few weeks after the October 7 Hamas terrorist attacks in Israel, the Director of the FBI said, “Our most immediate concern is that violent extremists—individuals or small groups—will draw inspiration from the events in the Middle East to carry out attacks against Americans going about their daily lives. That includes not just homegrown violent extremists inspired by a foreign terrorist organization but also domestic violent extremists targeting Jewish or Muslim communities.”
And indeed, in the three months after October 7, the Anti-Defamation League recorded 3,291 anti-Jewish incidents, which was a 361-percent increase compared to the same period one year prior.
But the terrorist attacks the FBI Director warned about never arrived, and all but 56 of those 3,291 incidents were nonviolent, consisting of hate speech, vandalism, and rallies. And ADL has inflated its recorded number of nonviolent incidents by counting certain political speech as hate speech.
We should, of course, condemn those 56 violent incidents, all forms of hateful rhetoric, and all genuine expressions of support for terrorism. And we must remain vigilant against terrorist attacks like the kind committed on September 11 and in the 2019 terrorist attacks on two Muslim mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.
But fighting terrorism is different from hyping it. What led to the 9/11 terrorist attack was the failure of the US intelligence agencies to communicate with each other, not any downplaying of terrorism, according to the bipartisan 9/11 Commission.
The fact of the matter is that terrorism is incredibly rare and on the decline. Most of it is in the Middle East and South Asia, with tiny amounts in North America and countries like New Zealand.
In truth, most forms of violence have been declining in Western nations for centuries, even millennia.
To the extent governments and NGOs are recording more so-called “hate speech,” it’s because people today are far more likely to label speech “hateful” than were people just a few decades ago. By almost every measure, our tolerance of racial, sexual, and religious minorities is at an all-time high.
And we should also be very wary of governments hyping terrorism since it leads to abuses of power. After 9/11, the hyping of terrorism fears allowed the US to invade a country we never should have invaded, occupy a country we shouldn’t have occupied, use kidnapping and torture as standard operating procedures, and violate fundamental civil liberties.
Now, it appears that the US and other governments around the world are hyping hate in order to weaponize the government against their political enemies.