Michael Shellenberger @shellenberger

The American Psych. Assoc. says therapy is “effective,” but Americans diagnosed with depression rose from 20% to 30% since 2015, while the number of Americans in therapy rose from 17 to 22 million. Victimhood ideology and the valuing of feelings over virtue are to blame.

The European Commission is planning a full-scale attack on press freedom and free elections: Through the European Democracy Shield, it aims to reshape the media landscape and eliminate new media from market. May thanks to @shellenberger for publishing my research on his website: public.news/p/eu-demands-s… The measures under the Democracy Shield would result in censorship and create a network of state-run media: ▶️ The EU plans to pump billions of euros of taxpayers’ money into selected media outlets, creating a network of state-run media to spread government narratives. ▶️ State-selected and state-funded media outlets are to act as fact-checkers, creating an „archive of truth“ and working directly for EU authorities, especially during elections. ▶️ With new laws, the EU aims to gain control over algorithms and decide what appears in feeds. ▶️ Unwelcome media outlets are to be demonetized while political influencers are to be regulated in the name of supposed child protection. All details of my research:

EU Demands Sweeping Censorship To Influence Elections by @Pauline__Voss 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... x.com/shellenberger/… Please subscribe now to support Public's defense of free speech and read the rest of the article! x.com/shellenberger/…

We have to shield democracy from disinformation, says @vonderleyen. In truth, her Orwellian "Democracy Shield" is about shielding the European Commission from democracy. And now, reveals @Pauline__Voss, the EU is financing "news" propaganda outfits to demand more censorship.

EDITORIAL DOUBLE STANDARD: When I was a senior investigative correspondent at CBS News (2019–2024) I was stunned by how little due diligence some colleagues did on Southern Poverty Law Center's claims.... Versus their “attack dog” mentality applied to right-leaning non-profits and think tanks. More for subscribers In this week's @X Article!

Senators Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders, Chuck Schumer, and others continue to support Democratic senatorial candidate Graham Platner, despite comments he made that offended feminist Democrats and an accusation of violence by a former girlfriend. “Look, he has apologized for that,” said Warren, referring to Platner’s comments on social media in 2013. 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 f----ed 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. Some may object that the charge against Kavanaugh was more serious, but it was no more credible than the ones against Platner. An ex-girlfriend, Lindsey Fifield, said Platner “regularly grabbed her by the shoulders,” reported the New York Times, “sometimes hard enough to leave marks — and, on one occasion, yanked her out of a cab by her wrist after an argument when she wanted to stay in the car. During one argument, she recalled, he twisted her arm behind her back, shoved her into a bedroom and held the door closed from the other side so she couldn’t get out, telling her to remain there until she was ‘calm.’” Fitfield’s accusation is difficult, if not impossible, to prove, and the same can be said of Ford’s. None of the individuals whom Ford said were at the party, including her lifelong friends, corroborated her account, and one told the Senate she had no memory of it. And a different man told Senate investigators that he was the man who assaulted Ford, not Kavanaugh. Moreover, there is evidence of Platner misrepresenting the truth. For example, he denied he had a serious relationship with his accuser, but the Times’ reporters said they saw a text he sent her in 2016, which read, “Lyndsey, I love you in a way I can’t even describe. “You are literally everything to me.” Platner denied knowing that a tattoo on his chest was the symbol of a Nazi death squad, but last August, “months before Mr. Platner acknowledged the tattoo himself,” noted the Times, “Ms. Fifield told friends that her ex-boyfriend-turned-Senate candidate ‘has a Nazi tattoo on his chest.’ ‘It’s a Totenkopf,’ she told them on Aug. 20, according to a screenshot she shared with The Times. ‘An actual one.’” And Platner said he was treated in 2016 for PTSD, one of whose symptoms is uncontrolled anger and “hyperarousal and reactivity,” which is the feeling of being constantly on the lookout for danger. Platner’s campaign team did not deny Fitfield’s accusation that he fantasized about someone breaking into his home so he could rape them. “Asked about those remarks, a Platner campaign official did not dispute them,” noted the Times. For years, Democrats have accused their political opponents, particularly Donald Trump, of being Nazis, rapists, or soft on Nazis and violence against women. And yet here Democrats are supporting a person facing credible accusations of being sympathetic to Nazism, and accusations of violence that are no less credible than the ones Sanders, Warren, Schumer, and others made against Kavanaugh. While one interpretation of the remarks and positions taken by Sanders, Warren, and Schumer toward Platner is that they are hypocrites putting ends-justify-the-means politics before principles. At the same time, the difference in reactions to Franken and Platner shows that accusations of sexual harassment have less salience today than in 2017. Back then, Senate Democrats did not defend Democratic Senator Al Franken after he was accused of sexual harassment, even though some progressives later said the evidence for it was weak, as they have done with Platner. Meanwhile, the accusations against Platner do not appear to have changed the minds of many Democrats on social media nor among many voters in Maine. And even a Republican strategist told Jesse Watters on Friday that the allegations were unlikely to change the minds of many swing voters. What changed? x.com/shellenberger/… Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning journalism, read the rest of the article, and watch the full video! x.com/shellenberger/…

In supporting Graham Platner, Democrats have abandoned #MeToo's "believe women" slogan. They should now take responsibility for the damage #MeToo caused, including false accusations, the demonization of male sexuality, and the crippling anxiety behind Gen Z's romantic recession.

Give me a break. I worked at Viacom/CBS (now Paramount) for over a decade. Of course, it was +90% Democrats. Everyone knows this. Everyone. And newsrooms in particular vote Democrat to a higher degree than Berkeley, California. And you know what? Fine. I have lots of friends with whom I disagree from my time there. It was a great place, actually. To act as if this claim about bias is controversial, let alone inaccurate, shows that he’s either a liar, an imbecile, or so deeply incurious and tunnel-visioned that you don’t belong anywhere near any job involving information discernment. But he’s got that familiar anchor voice, so we’re supposed to act like he’s not being a complete clown. Give me a break. You people are a mess.

Western Lensman @WesternLensman

4 days ago

Scott Pelley says Bari Weiss asked 60 Minutes staffers: “Why do you think the country thinks you’re biased?" Pelley: "Why do you think so? Do you have a poll? Is there market research? What are you talking about?" "Because we certainly didn't believe that." Incredible.

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@kevinnbass 🎯

Imagine spending your whole life becoming an academic expert. Then a random guy online tells you that you are wrong about your own field. And he's right. But you can never admit that. Because it would mean admitting that your life was a lie. That is the dilemma of many academics.

In early 2024, the world-renowned American Museum of Natural History in New York City closed two major halls of Native American objects covering roughly 10,000 square feet. Its president wrote that the halls were “vestiges of an era when museums such as ours did not respect the values, perspectives, and indeed shared humanity of Indigenous peoples.” Around the same time, the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, Harvard’s Peabody Museum, the Cleveland Museum of Art, and others covered or removed Native American displays. 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.”... x.com/shellenberger/… Please subscribe now to support Public's award-winning journalism, watch the full interview, and read the rest of the story! x.com/shellenberger/…

Western Lensman @WesternLensman

4 days ago

Scott Pelley says Bari Weiss asked 60 Minutes staffers: “Why do you think the country thinks you’re biased?" Pelley: "Why do you think so? Do you have a poll? Is there market research? What are you talking about?" "Because we certainly didn't believe that." Incredible.

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A 1990 law meant to protect Native American skeletons and sacred items has spiraled out of control, say anthropologists. Tribes are appropriating and burying non-indigenous items, including a Chinese vase, X-rays, and photographs. Now, the ransacking threatens medical science.