Skeptic

In preparation for our Skeptoid Adventure to New Orleans, we’re playing an encore edition of an episode that takes us to the heart of the Big Easy and dives into Louisiana Voodoo. We’ll see how Louisiana Voodoo stacks up against the Hollywood version as we explore the mysterious case of what came to be known as "The Voodoo Ax Murders."

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A review of Take Me to Your Leader: Perspectives on Alien Life, Belief, and Scientific Reasoning by Neil deGrasse Tyson, New York: Simon & Schuster (Simon Six Imprint), 2026. 

Introduction

Neil deGrasse Tyson, Director of the Hayden Planetarium and one of the most prominent public science communicators of the twenty-first century, has built a career on the proposition that scientific reasoning should guide our understanding of the cosmos. In Take Me to Your Leader, Tyson turns his considerable intellectual resources toward one of the enduring puzzles of modern culture: why, in an era of unprecedented scientific knowledge and omnipresent smartphone cameras, does belief in the visitation of Earth by extraterrestrial beings persist, intensify, and command congressional hearings, books, articles, podcasts, dramatic and documentary films, and the credulity of otherwise rational people?

The book is sprawling, discursive, and frequently entertaining. Tyson moves with characteristic ease between astrophysics, evolutionary biology, film criticism, philosophy of mind, and cultural anthropology. His prose is accessible without being condescending, and his humor is deployed with precision. There is much here to admire. However, as a work of scientific epistemology—which is what the book’s most important passages suggest it wants to be—Take Me to Your Leader is frustratingly reticent precisely where it should be bold. This review addresses three central deficiencies: 

1. the author’s unwillingness to fully articulate the epistemological equivalence between UFO belief and theistic faith;
2.  the insufficient analysis of how non-scientific modes of inquiry obstruct empirically productive investigation of genuine atmospheric and physical anomalies; and 
3. the failure to draw the explicit parallel between the non-falsifiability structures that characterize both UFO culture and organized religion.

Belief Without Evidence 

The most intellectually consequential thread in Take Me to Your Leader is Tyson’s sustained analysis of the epistemological foundations of UFO belief. The argument, reconstructed from across several chapters, runs approximately as follows: UFO sightings are overwhelmingly concentrated in English-speaking countries, reported by individuals who have absorbed decades of popular cultural representations of extraterrestrial life, and generated under conditions—nighttime isolation, emotionally heightened states, group suggestion—that are known to amplify perceptual error and confabulatory memory. The witnesses are often sincere, sometimes distinguished, and occasionally supported by institutional credentials. Yet not one of these factors constitutes scientific evidence for the phenomenon being reported.

Tyson correctly invokes the psychological literature on eyewitness fallibility, pareidolia, sleep paralysis, and collective delusion. He is scrupulous in his insistence that credibility of witness is not equivalent to credibility of evidence. He notes, memorably, that “in science, there’s no such thing as a credible claim or a credible witness, only credible evidence.” This is the correct epistemological position, stated with appropriate force. What Tyson does not do—and what the internal logic of his argument demands—is state explicitly that this epistemological structure is formally identical to the one that sustains religious belief in general and theistic cosmology in particular. The reader encounters the argument in fragments: the “God of the gaps” becomes the “Alien of the gaps” (Chapter 6); the behavior of believers is analogized to religious devotion; the Raëlian faith is introduced as a UFO-based religion that explicitly replaces traditional theology. Tyson gestures toward the connection. He does not make it.

This omission is not intellectually innocent. The parallel is not merely rhetorical but structural. In both cases, a community of believers posits the existence of powerful, non-human intelligences that intervene in human affairs, whose existence cannot be empirically falsified, whose non-appearance is explained through elaborate secondary hypotheses (government cover-up; divine concealment), and whose reality is confirmed through testimony, personal experience, and the community’s shared interpretive framework. 

Pew Research data cited by Tyson himself reveals that non-religious individuals are significantly more likely to believe in extraterrestrial intelligence than religious ones—a finding that strongly implies the belief in Aliens is functioning, for many, as a secular substitute for supernatural agency. The author should not concern himself with alienating religious readers by making this connection explicit. The argument does not require attacking any particular faith tradition. It requires only the observation—well within the norms of scientific communication—that belief in extraterrestrial visitation and belief in divine agency share a common epistemological deficiency: both make empirical claims that are systematically insulated from empirical testing. A peer-reviewed scientific journal would expect precisely this level of analytical precision. Tyson’s readers, whatever their spiritual commitments, are capable of following the argument. The book’s failure to make it clearly is a failure of intellectual courage dressed as sensitivity.

Who Reports UFOs and What This Tells Us

Tyson is considerably more forthcoming—and more effective—in his treatment of the social psychology of UFO reporting. His analysis of the demographic and cultural skew of reported sightings is among the book’s most valuable contributions. The concentration of reports in English-speaking countries, the feedback loops between popular media depictions and eyewitness “confirmation,” the Ruwa, Zimbabwe schoolchildren episode, the Dallas Zoo clouded leopard incident, and the Mexico City solar eclipse mass misidentification are all marshalled to illustrate how collective belief systems prime perception and manufacture consensus from ambiguous data.

The author’s analogy to a documentary about elephants that contains only sworn testimony but no actual elephants is both correct and lethal.

The author correctly identifies suggestibility and groupthink as central mechanisms. The 1947 Roswell incident and its cultural aftermath constitute a paradigm case of how an initially ambiguous event—almost certainly a classified military test vehicle—becomes crystallized into narrative form through media amplification, institutional defensiveness, and the human mind’s drive toward coherent narrative. Once the narrative exists, it functions as a template: subsequent anomalous sightings are interpreted through it, witnesses unconsciously model their accounts on existing archetypes, and the feedback loop between popular representation and reported experience closes.

Tyson also raises, without fully pursuing, the critical question of testimony’s relationship to authority. The 2023–2025 congressional hearings on UAPs are treated with appropriate skepticism. High-ranking military and intelligence officials, speaking under oath, claiming knowledge of recovered Alien craft and non-human biologics, are not thereby providing scientific evidence. The author’s analogy to a documentary about elephants that contains only sworn testimony but no actual elephants is both correct and lethal.

However, having correctly diagnosed the problem, Tyson does not complete the diagnostic. Suggestibility and groupthink are not merely unfortunate cognitive quirks that produce inaccurate UFO reports. They are, in the context of the scientific method, the specific obstacles whose elimination is the purpose of controlled experimental design, blind testing, independent replication, and peer review. The book does not make sufficiently clear that the same cognitive tendencies documented in the UFO literature—confirmation bias, pattern recognition run amok,

the authority heuristic, the need for narrative closure—are precisely the tendencies that the scientific method exists to counteract. This is not a peripheral observation; it is the epistemological center of the book’s implicit argument.

How Non-Scientific Inquiry Impedes Productive Investigation

 The book’s most significant intellectual lacuna is its failure to address the opportunity costs of belief-driven rather than evidence-driven investigation of anomalous aerial and atmospheric phenomena. This failure is consequential not merely as a matter of intellectual completeness but as a matter of scientific policy.

The history of science contains numerous examples in which phenomena initially dismissed as superstition or pseudoscience—ball lightning, meteorites, continental drift, prion disease—were ultimately explained through rigorous empirical inquiry and yielded significant scientific and technological benefit. The inverse is equally documented: when anomalous phenomena become the property of a belief community rather than a scientific community, the phenomena cease to be investigated and become instead maintained as mysteries that, for the belief community, is not a problem to be solved but a feature to be preserved—because the mystery is constitutive of the belief.

Tyson acknowledges the existence of genuinely unidentified aerial phenomena. He cites the discovery of Sprites—large-scale atmospheric electrical discharges above stratospheric storm systems, first photographed only in 1989—as an example of a real and previously unknown atmospheric phenomenon that, to the untrained observer, was for decades indistinguishable from anomalous reports. This example is exactly right. It is also exactly the argument the book should be making more forcefully: the correct response to genuinely anomalous observational data is not to conclude that it confirms extraterrestrial visitation but to apply systematic empirical methods that might identify what the phenomenon actually is.

The culture of UFO belief does not merely fail to contribute to scientific understanding of anomalous atmospheric and sensor phenomena—it actively prevents it.

The 2022 NASA UAP panel, whose findings Tyson cites approvingly, reached precisely this conclusion. Its recommendations—systematic data collection, crowdsourced smartphone-based reporting, standardized observation protocols—are the recommendations of scientists who recognize that genuine anomalies deserve genuine scientific attention, and that the current UFO culture, dominated by belief, testimony, and conspiracy thinking, is actively impeding that attention.

The book should state this directly: the culture of UFO belief does not merely fail to contribute to scientific understanding of anomalous atmospheric and sensor phenomena—it actively prevents it. Resources, institutional attention, and public interest are captured by an interpretive framework that treats scientific skepticism as denial and demands that anomaly be explained as visitation before it has been explained at all. This is not a harmless epistemological preference. It has measurable costs in terms of what does not get investigated, what data does not get collected, and what discoveries do not get made. 

Here again the parallel to theistic epistemology is directly relevant. The assignment of unexplained natural phenomena to divine agency—the God of the gaps—has historically functioned to halt rather than advance inquiry. Newton’s appeal to God’s reforming hand as an explanation for perturbations in planetary motion was not merely incorrect; it was a scientific dead end that remained so until Laplace’s perturbation theory provided a mathematical framework adequate to the data. The “Alien of the gaps” operates identically: genuine atmospheric, electromagnetic, or sensor phenomena that might, under systematic investigation, reveal something scientifically interesting are instead filed under the heading “Alien activity” and removed from empirical inquiry.

This is the argument I think Tyson should have made.

Non-Falsifiability in UFO Culture

 The most philosophically rigorous version of the argument Tyson is circling concerns the formal structure of non-falsifiability. A claim is non-falsifiable when no possible observation could count as evidence against it. Non-falsifiability is not a logical fallacy but it is, in the philosophy of science following Karl Popper, a criterion for distinguishing scientific from non-scientific claims. Claims that cannot be falsified are not thereby false; they are simply not scientific. UFO belief, as Tyson’s evidence makes clear, has a non-falsifiable structure. 

The absence of clear photographic evidence is explained by alien camera-shyness or government suppression. The absence of alien artifacts is explained by government sequestration. The absence of alien bodies is explained by classified facilities with restricted access. The implausibility of interstellar travel at observed speeds is explained by alien physics beyond human comprehension. Each potential falsifying observation is absorbed by an auxiliary hypothesis that preserves the core belief. The system is unfalsifiable, and therefore, by the criteria of scientific epistemology, the belief in alien visitation is not a scientific hypothesis.

Both UFO conviction and traditional theism are, in this technical sense, faith commitments rather than empirical hypotheses.

The structural identity with traditional theism is exact and has been noted by philosophers of religion for generations. The non-appearance of God is explained by divine hiddenness. The existence of evil is explained by divine permission for human freedom. The apparent contingency of natural processes is explained by God’s sustaining action in and through natural causes. Each potential falsifying observation is absorbed. The system is unfalsifiable. Traditional theistic belief, whatever its spiritual or ethical value, is not a scientific hypothesis.

This parallelism is not an attack on religion. It is a claim about the epistemological category of certain kinds of belief. Both UFO conviction and traditional theism are, in this technical sense, faith commitments rather than empirical hypotheses. They rest on the same cognitive infrastructure—the need for agency, narrative, and meaning in the face of uncertainty—and they are sustained by the same mechanisms of communal reinforcement, interpretive charity toward confirming evidence, and resistance to disconfirmation. A book about the epistemology of UFO belief that does not make this argument explicit is a book that has found its most important idea and declined to articulate it.

Tyson, for his part, is not a theist—this is well established in his public record—and the book’s prologue and epilogue both reveal a scientist who yearns for genuine extraterrestrial contact and recognizes no tension between that yearning and his epistemological rigor. The reticence about making the God parallel explicit is therefore not self-protective. It appears, rather, to reflect a strategic decision to avoid controversy. This is an understandable editorial choice, but in this reviewer’s opinion, a regrettable intellectual one. Scientific communication that softens its epistemological conclusions to accommodate potential offense is scientific communication that has already compromised its most important function. 

What the Book Does Well

 Tyson’s survey of the astrophysics and biology relevant to extraterrestrial life is excellent. His treatment of the Drake equation, Fermi’s paradox, the Goldilocks zone, and the diversity of potentially habitable environments in the outer solar system is current, accurate, and elegantly communicated. His demolition of the Ancient Aliens genre—the persistent attribution of ancient human engineering and art to extraterrestrial architects—is both well-argued and well-timed, given the phenomenon’s cultural persistence.

The book’s comic voice is, on balance, an asset rather than a liability. The exchange of correspondence with the Peruvian mummy researchers, the taxonomy of cinematically dumb aliens, and the extended meditation on the flying saucer as a wheelchair-accessible vehicle are genuinely funny in ways that serve, rather than undermine, the book’s serious purposes. Humor is a legitimate tool of scientific communication when it is used, as Tyson largely uses it, to dissolve pretension rather than to avoid argument.

The chapter on Alien intelligence—exploring the humbling implications of a species just two percent more cognitively advanced than humans—is among the best popular science writing on the philosophy of mind published in recent years. The thought experiment about a species standing in the same cognitive relation to Homo sapiens as Homo sapiens stands to Pan troglodytes is both intellectually rigorous and appropriately unsettling.

The Future of Aliens

 Take Me to Your Leader is a significant and valuable contribution to the literature of popular science communication. Tyson is one of a very small number of scientists capable of writing with this combination of rigor, erudition, and wit about phenomena that sit at the intersection of astrophysics, psychology, epistemology, and culture. The book is worth reading, worth assigning in courses on the public understanding of science, and worth taking seriously as a document of our current epistemological moment.

A book about the failure of evidence standards that itself softens its epistemological conclusions for strategic reasons has, at some level, enacted the problem it diagnoses.

It is, however, a lesser book than it could have been. Its most important argument—that UFO belief and theistic conviction are epistemologically equivalent faith commitments that share not only a cognitive architecture but also a documented tendency to impede rather than advance genuine empirical inquiry—is present throughout but never fully articulated. The author appears to have concluded that the readers who most need to hear this argument are the readers least likely to continue reading if it is stated plainly. 

This may be a correct assessment of the popular science market. It is not, however, a correct assessment of the book’s intellectual obligations. Scientific communication at its most effective does not merely inform; it models the epistemological standards by which claims should be evaluated. A book about the failure of evidence standards that itself softens its epistemological conclusions for strategic reasons has, at some level, enacted the problem it diagnoses. Tyson knows where the argument leads. He should take it there.

New York, New York, the “city that never Sleeps,” has given us two Presidents, Eggs Benedict, potato chips, Robert De Niro, Saturday Night Live, and Scrabble. Two of New York City’s boroughs have also been home to three of the most controversial and infamous criminal defendants in American history: Bruno Richard Hauptmann, and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

Though their convictions were handed down decades ago, Hauptmann from the Bronx, and the Rosenbergs from Knickerbocker Village in Manhattan, remain causes célèbres around the globe. With passionate proponents around the world still proclaiming their innocence, a skeptical examination of the evidence for the guilt of both Hauptmann and the Rosenbergs is warranted. 

Bruno Richard Hauptmann The Crime 

On the night of March 1, 1932, 20-month-old Charles Augustus Lindbergh Jr. was kidnapped from his nursery window on the second floor of the Lindbergh home near Hopewell, NJ.1 The kidnapper(s) left a poorly written ransom note demanding $50,000 (over $1 Million in today’s money).2 The note to the Lindbergh’s also contained a code: two interlocking circles resembling a Venn diagram with three small holes punched through them.3 At least two sets of differing footprints were found at the crime site, as were a ¾” chisel,4 and the home-built ladder used to climb to the nursery window.5 During the next three months, 13 more notes bearing the code symbols were delivered and the ransom was raised to $70,000.

The kidnapping of the world-famous son of “Lucky Lindy” (solo pilot of the first nonstop airline flight across the Atlantic Ocean, New York to Paris) made international headlines. A retired school teacher and, by all accounts, a self-aggrandizing publicity-seeker6 named John F. Condon, published a letter in the Bronx Home News offering to serve as a liaison between the Lindberghs and the kidnapper(s).7 On March 8, seven days after the child was taken, and one day following the publication of his offer, Condon received a letter, bearing the code, accepting his offer to be an intermediary.8

Condon was instructed by the kidnapper(s) to place an ad in the New York American using the name “Jafsie” (a play on his initials), indicating that the ransom money was ready. Condon did so and, on March 12, he received another code-bearing letter from a cab driver instructing him to meet the kidnappers at Woodlawn, a Bronx cemetery.9 Condon went alone. There he met a man with a German accent identified as “John,” who asked for the money, which Condon refused to provide until he’d seen the baby. The mysterious man expressed fear that he “might burn” if the baby was dead and told Condon he would provide proof of the child in the toddler’s sleeping suit.10 Condon soon received the child’s sleeping suit in the mail and continued to communicate through advertisements until a meeting was arranged to exchange the ransom. $70,000 in unmarked gold certificate U.S. paper money were placed in two packages, their serial numbers having been recorded. (The fact that the ransom was paid in gold certificates would later become significant). 

On April 2, 1932, Charles Lindbergh rode with Condon11 to another Bronx cemetery, St. Raymond’s,12 where they heard a man call out, “Hey doctor!” Condon went toward the voice while Lindbergh waited in the car. Condon convinced the kidnapper he only had $50,000 of the ransom money. The kidnapper accepted the sum and gave Condon another note filled with misspellings asserting that the child was safe aboard a boat named “Nelly,” harbored off the Massachusetts coast.13The kidnapper took the money and Condon returned to the car where Lindbergh was waiting. An exhaustive search failed to find the boat. On May 12, 1932, the body of the child was found close to Lindbergh’s home from which he was taken.14 Over the next two years, 296 of the gold certificates the Lindberghs used to pay the ransom turned up in circulation. 

Earlier that year, Roosevelt’s Gold Reserve Act of 1934 mandated that all gold and gold certificate currency be surrendered and vested in the sole title of the United States Department of the Treasury. In other words, The Gold Reserve Act prohibited private ownership of monetary gold. On September 15, 1934, a gas station attendant in the Bronx wrote down the license plate number of a man who had paid him with one of the gold standard-backed certificates. The authorities traced the plate to Bruno Richard Hauptmann, a German-born American carpenter.15 A search of Hauptmann’s garage found $14,600 of the ransom money. Hauptmann provided an explanation and an alibi: He was working the night of the kidnapping at a hotel and a former business partner named Isidor Fitch left the money with him.16 Fitch, who owed him money, had since returned to his native Germany and died on March 29, 1934. Initially, Condon was unwilling to identify Hauptmann conclusively from a police lineup, later changing his mind and acknowledging that Hauptmann was indeed “Cemetery John.”17Hauptmann was charged with extortion and murder and pled not guilty. The trial was a media circus, with famed journalist H.L. Mencken labeling it “the greatest story since the resurrection.”18

Hauptmann was found guilty and sentenced to death, with most of the public convinced of his guilt.19After the Court of Errors and Appeals of New Jersey unanimously affirmed Hauptmann’s conviction, he was executed on April 3, 1936. Hauptmann died protesting his innocence, even though a newspaper offered him $75,000 (far more than the ransom money) to name his accomplices.20

The Conspiracies 

Though the Lindbergh kidnapping is approaching its 100th anniversary and all the principal participants are long dead, The State of New Jersey v. Bruno Richard Hauptmann has evolved in much of the public imagination into a tragic miscarriage of justice. Since his execution in 1936, books, articles, documentaries, plays, websites, and movies have examined Hauptmann’s role in the crime, the majority of them wondering if Hauptmann was, in fact, wrongly convicted.21

For years, conspiracies have run the gamut from the probable (Hauptmann had accomplices)22 to the possible (Violet Sharpe, a domestic servant of the Lindberghs, was somehow involved)23 to the preposterous (Charles Lindbergh had his own disabled son murdered).24 A few highlights: 

• In 1976, author Antony Scaduto capitalized on these conspiracies with the publication of Scapegoat: The Lonesome Death of Bruno Richard Hauptmann. Scaduto purported to “set the record straight after some forty years of distortion…”25
• In a 1980 episode of In Search Of…, Scaduto claimed to have found “startling new evidence that exonerates Hauptmann.”26 All expert testimony, eyewitness testimony, and physical and forensic evidence, he claimed, were manufactured by the police to frame Hauptmann. Scaduto goes even further, asserting that the body found on May 12, 1932, was not that of the Lindbergh baby, and the only way to identify the badly decomposed body was by the number of his teeth.27
• In 1981, Hauptmann’s widow Anna began a series of lawsuits against her husband’s prosecutor, David Wilentz, echoing conspiratorial claims of new evidence that exonerated her husband alongside charges of fraud and witness suppression.28
• In 1985, Ludovic Kennedy published The Airman and The Carpenter: The Lindbergh Kidnapping and the Framing of Bruno Richard Hauptmann. He posited that Hauptmann did not commit the crime and was wrongfully convicted and executed.29
• In a 1996 HBO movie, Crime of the Century, Stephen Rea portrayed Hauptmann as an innocent victim railroaded for a crime he did not commit.30
• In 2012, Robert Zorn published Cemetery John: The Undiscovered Mastermind Behind the Lindbergh Kidnapping, in which he makes the case that Hauptmann’s accomplice was a fellow German immigrant named John Knoll.31 Zorn’s thesis notes Knoll’s resemblance to the police sketch provided by Condon, traces of meat found on some of the ransom money (Knoll having worked at a deli), updated handwriting analysis of the ransom notes,32 and Knoll’s trip to Germany on a luxury liner during the trial, only returning after Hauptmann’s conviction.33
• In 2020, Lise Pearlman released The Lindbergh Kidnapping Suspect No. 1: The Man Who Got Away, which suggests Lindbergh himself, a vocal eugenics supporter and Nazi sympathizer, may have orchestrated the kidnapping and death of his own son.34

The Evidence 

Pay attention only to Hauptmann-was-innocent proponents and a pattern emerges: Desperate to satisfy a public hungry to assign blame, authorities deliberately conspired to frame Hauptmann for the crime. Lacking hard evidence, the prosecution exploited the anti-German atmosphere of the time by portraying Hauptmann as part of the the growing German menace, and a gross miscarriage of justice.35 Authorities coerced Condon into identifying Hauptmann as Cemetery John,36 and Hauptmann was forced to misspell the same words on writing samples that were misspelled on the ransom notes.37

It takes an extraordinary leap of faith to believe Hauptmann was uninvolved in the crime and preposterous to argue that he was “framed.”

The evidence reveals a much harsher reality: It may well be that Hauptmann had accomplices (the government certainly thought he did),38 but it takes an extraordinary leap of faith to believe Hauptmann was uninvolved in the crime and preposterous to argue that he was “framed.” Many of these conspiratorial claims mislead by omission, while others are demonstrably false. For example, when initially interviewed by the police, Hauptmann lied twice, saying the only gold certificates he had were the ones in his wallet,39 and he was working as a carpenter at a hotel the day of the kidnapping,40 driving his wife home at about 9:00 p.m. that night.41

About one-third of the ransom money was found hidden in Hauptmann’s garage.42 Upon checking the hotel employment records, it was discovered that Hauptmann had not started working there until 20 days after the crime, and quit the day the ransom was delivered.43 (Scaduto omits this entirely.44) The summer after the ransom was paid, Hauptmann (an unemployed carpenter at the height of the Great Depression) came into enough money to fund four family trips to California, Florida, and Maine, and finance trips to Europe for his wife and several friends.45 

The physical evidence found on Hauptmann’s property wasn’t limited to the ransom money, either. Hauptmann’s tools matched the marks on the ladder. Dr. Condon’s address and phone number were found scrawled in a closet alongside the serial numbers of gold certificates.46 When asked for an explanation on the witness stand, Hauptmann admitted that he must have written Condon’s contact information in his closet because, in his words, “I must have read it in the paper about the story. I was a little bit interested and keep a little bit record of it, and maybe I was just on the closet, and was reading the paper and put it down the address.”47

There were eyewitnesses as well. The cab driver, Joseph Perrone, pinpointed Hauptmann as the man who gave him written instructions for Condon.48, 49 After deliberation, Condon testified that it was indeed Hauptmann whom he met at the cemetery,50 and Lindbergh himself testified it was Hauptmann’s voice he heard yelling, “Hey doctor!”51 Forensic evidence also implicates Hauptmann. Contrary to Scaduto’s claims, the autopsy of the victim was conducted with fidelity by Dr. Charles Mitchell, a veteran coroner, who easily identified the child by his (clearly recognizable) face. Lindbergh confirmed the body was that of his son.52, 53 Forensic experts54 then and now confirm a board from the ladder came from Hauptmann’s own attic.55 Scaduto notes that Hauptmann’s fingerprints did not match those found on the ransom note.56 This is true, but only because nofingerprints were found at the scene.57

At least 21 handwriting experts examined Hauptmann’s notebooks, and private letters in addition to the samples Hauptmann wrote for the police, all of whom concluded Hauptmann wrote the ransom notes during the trial.58 All of Anna Hauptmann’s lawsuits against the government through the early 1980s were dismissed for lack of evidence.59 As recently as 2003, a police archivist named Mark Fazini found a handwritten, anonymous note in German confessing to the crime.60 This would seem to exonerate Hauptmann unless one considers the note was debunked61 and was only one of dozens of similar confessions.62

Through the years, at least 16 different people have claimed to be the actual Lindbergh baby, including an African American woman from Trenton, NJ.63 Establishing the Lindbergh baby survived and grew up under an assumed name would absolutely exonerate Hauptmann, but no substantive evidence for any one of these claims has ever been provided.64, 65, 66 Even more damning is Hauptmann’s modus operandi. His widow, Anna, gave multiple interviews in which she asserted Richard was telling the truth67 and could never commit such a crime.68, 69 In fact, Hauptmann had an extensive criminal record. While in Germany, for example, he’d been convicted of robbery at gunpoint and even burglarized a home while using a ladder.70

Why didn’t Hauptmann name his accomplices and save himself, then? According to criminal profiler John Douglas, it isn’t unusual for the condemned to maintain innocence in order to spare their surviving family members public shame.71 Hauptmann also believed he would be spared the electric chair, as the governor of New Jersey publicly expressed doubts about Hauptmann’s role in the crime.72

Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, separated by heavy wire screen as they leave U.S. Court House after being found guilty by jury. (Credit: Roger Higgins, New York World-Telegram and Sun Collection / Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. Digital ID cph 3c17772) Julius & Ethel Rosenberg The Crime 

In January of 1950, a physicist who had worked on the Manhattan Project named Klaus Fuchs was arrested in Great Britain for passing top-secret information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union.73 Fuchs admitted the crime and fingered a Swiss chemist named Harry Gold as the courier between himself and the Soviets. Gold was arrested and identified others in the espionage ring, including a machinist at Los Alamos, David Greenglass,74 who first denied the charges, and then, in June of 1950, named his brother-in-law, Julius Rosenberg, as the one who convinced him to spy for the Russians.75 Julius Rosenberg was living with his wife Ethel and two children in Knickerbocker Village, a housing development located near the Manhattan Bridge.76 Julius was arrested and flatly denied any involvement.77

A grand jury convened in August 1950 to investigate the spy ring, one of the witnesses being Julius Rosenberg’s wife, Ethel. Following her testimony in which she invoked her right not to incriminate herself, Ethel was charged with conspiracy to commit espionage alongside Julius and another defendant, Morton Sobell.78

At their trial, Greenglass testified that Julius had orchestrated the espionage at his home in January 1945. Julius went into his kitchen with Ruth (David’s wife) and Ethel, and cut a side panel of a Jell-O box into two irregular parts. He passed one piece to Ruth, asserting that the spy contacting her and David at Los Alamos would identify themselves with the other half.79 Ruth testified that Ethel solicited her to approach David to spy and typed the notes David brought back to New York with him. Greenglass confirmed his wife’s testimony, further implicating Ethel by testifying she typed the notes containing nuclear secrets, which were turned over to Harry Gold. Both Rosenbergs denied any involvement whatsoever in espionage and refused to answer questions about their Communist party membership.80

Evidence shows Julius approached Soviet intelligence agents before Hitler invaded Russia at a time when the Nazi leader and Stalin were collaborating under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.

The accused were found guilty in March 1953. Greenglass was sentenced to 15 years (a lighter sentence because he’d agreed to turn state’s evidence), Sobell received 30 years, and the Rosenbergs were sentenced to die in the electric chair.81 Despite pleas for clemency by notables, including Pope Pius XII, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Albert Einstein,82 Julius and Ethel Rosenberg went to their deaths maintaining their innocence.83 At the time of their conviction and execution, and for many years afterward, many Americans believed the United States executed two innocent people.84

The Conspiracies 

As in the Hauptmann case, Rosenberg v. United States: 346 U.S. 273 lives on. In 1971, novelist E.L. Doctorow published The Book of Daniel, a fictionalized account of the case.85 A film adaptation (Daniel) followed in 1983.86 Bob Dylan recorded “Julius and Ethel” in 198387 and Meryl Streep portrayed Ethel’s ghost haunting her prosecutor Roy Cohn in the movie Angels in America in 2003. If anything, the Rosenberg case has only gained prominence in the last quarter century. In 2001, a New York Times reporter named Sam Roberts tracked down David Greenglass (who testified against the Rosenbergs), who was living under an assumed name. In the extensive interviews for The Brother: The Untold Story of the Rosenberg Case, Greenglass admitted he’d lied on the witness stand about Ethel typing the letters of instruction from Julius to the Soviets.88

In 2004, Ivy Meeropol, granddaughter of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, released the documentary Heir to an Execution, in which she incorporates archival footage with interviews of her family members and the other alleged conspirators.89

In 2008, Michael and Robbie Meeropol (the Rosenbergs’ surviving children, who had been adopted into the Meeropol family) unsuccessfully petitioned President Obama to exonerate their mother using their uncle David Greenglass’ confession.90, 91 Recently, in 2021, Anne Sebbe published Ethel Rosenberg: An American Tragedy, in which she argued for Ethel’s innocence. 

The Evidence 

Rosenberg defenders often note outside factors that led to their convictions: Jurist prejudice, antisemitism, Cold War hysteria, and (in Ethel’s case) misogyny have been named as the reasons for their convictions and executions.92, 93 Another common argument is that the Rosenbergs assisted a World War II ally, not an enemy, therefore they should not have been tried and convicted for treason.94

The facts of the case tell a different story. The Rosenbergs were charged with conspiracy to commit espionage, not treason.95 Evidence shows Julius approached Soviet intelligence96 agents before Hitler invaded Russia at a time when the Nazi leader and Stalin were collaborating under the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.97 In 1995, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) released translations of Soviet cables decrypted in the 1940s. Called VENONA, it ran from 1943 to 1980 and identified hundreds of Soviet agents in America and other Western countries.98 The cables identify Julius as the head of a vast spy ring, assigning him two code names, “liberal”99 and “antenna.” In 2008, co-defendant Morton Sobell affirmed he and Julius were spies but the information passed was useless.100

In 2009, Alexander Vassiliev, a former KGB officer and defector to Great Britain, released his notes taken during his service in the Russian Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), which debunk Sobell’s claim that minimizes Julius’ activities. Not only did Julius orchestrate the theft of top-secret information from Los Alamos, he also recruited a man named Russell Alton McNutt (son and brother of members of the Communist Party of the United States)101 to obtain information from a uranium enrichment plant in Oak Ridge, TN. 

Sensationalism and conspiratorial thinking keep the cases of Bruno Richard Hauptmann and the Rosenbergs thriving as cottage industries. 

When the VENONA transcripts were released, the narrative for innocence shifted from “the Rosenbergs were innocent” to “Julius Rosenberg was guilty, but Ethel was innocent.”102 What of Ethel’s guilt, then? At their trial, prosecutor Irving Saypol established Ethel’s guilt in his summation by stating, “Mrs. Rosenberg struck the keys, blow by blow, against her own country in the interests of the Soviets.”103 In 2001, Greenglass admitted he likely perjured himself by testifying Ethel typed Julius’ instructions104 and, indeed the Vassiliev notes seem to confirm this.105 Sobell’s 2008 admission notes that Ethel Rosenberg knew of her husband’s activities but did not actively spy herself.106

Despite the commonly-held belief that Ethel Rosenberg is not mentioned in the VENONA Project,107in fact, she is. The Soviet spy cables describe Ethel as “…well devoted politically (who)108 knows her husband’s work and the role of ‘Twain’ and ‘Callistratus.’ (code names of Soviet agents).”109 If the only evidence against Ethel were the false testimony of Greenglass and her sole mention in the VENONA cables, a reasonable case might be made for doubt. Unfortunately for proponents of her innocence, substantive evidence has since come forth that makes it clear Ethel not only knew of her husband’s illegal activities but actively participated in spying alongside him.110

Through Vasiliev’s leak, we know that Ruth testified truthfully when she claimed Ethel solicited her to persuade David Greenglass to spy.111 A letter written to Moscow by Julius Rosenberg himself substantiates this.112 Vasiliev’s notes reveal Ethel met with at least three of the KGB officers with whom Julius was spying.113 Why did Greenglass perjure himself in front of the grand jury and later at his trial, then? Simply, he was attempting to protect his sister and hoped the government would leave her out of the indictment charging Julius. In the same transcripts before the grand jury, Greenglass implicates Ethel by testifying she was present at a meeting between Julius and Ann Sidorovich, one of the couriers for the spy ring.114

Why didn’t they save themselves by naming others, then? As noted, the Vasiliev leak makes clear the spy ring Julius orchestrated was far more expansive in scope than was revealed to the public. Julius and Ethel most likely did not reveal names because they (correctly) believed the FBI had yet to identify them and those individuals could continue spying for the Soviets after their own deaths.115

♦ ♦ ♦

Sensationalism and conspiratorial thinking keep the cases of Bruno Richard Hauptmann and the Rosenbergs thriving as cottage industries. In truth, the evidence for Hauptmann’s involvement in the Lindbergh Kidnapping remains exceptionally strong, as does the case for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg’s guilt in conspiring to commit espionage. Even though books propounding conspiracy theories exonerating them sell—and sell well—the full weight of evidence shows, beyond any reasonable doubt, NYC’s most controversial defendants to have been guilty of the crimes for which they were charged.

A round-up of plausible-sounding myths about the Moon, most of which you've probably heard, and some of which you might believe.

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It is old news that all the tech we now live with is constantly gathering data about us. It is important, however, not to become complacent about this or to assume the situation cannot or is not getting worse. Pretty much every piece of digital technology that we interact with likely is gathering some personal information about you which is used to target advertising and to sell to third parties. Regulations in most countries are inadequate and fail to keep up with technological changes.

One of the latest venues to soak up information about you may be surprising – your car. Cars are increasingly computerized, and they typically collect driving behavior data – how fast your drive, how hard you break, and how tight you make turns. But also, some vehicles have cameras facing the driver which means they can detect your behavior visually. Sometimes this is sold as a safety feature, to tell if you are too sleepy or inebriated to drive. Sometimes this is part of a system to get your insurance company to reduce your rates if you think you are a safe driver. But often it is done without disclosure. Recent GM was found guilty of collecting and selling such data without the permission of the user, and was banned for doing so for five years. But many other car manufacturers also do this.

All they really have to do is bury some disclosure deep in the user agreement, which functionally nobody reads, and they are covered. You may have the ability to opt-out of such data selling. Of course, putting the burden on the end user to find and read any such disclosures and then go through the steps necessary to opt out of data selling is a huge problem. In fact insurance companies will buy data from car companies and then use that data to increase your insurance premiums, without you opting into any of it.

The basic fact is that collecting data from users, packaging that data and then selling it to third parties is a huge industry. It is estimated that globally this is a $240 billion industry. When that kind of money is on the line, companies are going to do everything they can to capitalize on it, while avoiding legal issues by either flying under the radar or hiding behind legal fig leaves (like the buried consumer disclosures). They will also use that money to lobby the government to let them continue to do so, or even to mandate certain things that will help this industry. For example, some car monitoring technology is sold as a safety feature, and it can legitimately be used for this purpose. Others are convenience features, like GPS. But once all the sensors and cameras are in place, they will soak up all the data they can – because that data is worth billions.

User data is collected from computers, pretty much every time you visit a website. It is collected from apps on your phone. And now it is collected from you car as well. If the “internet of things” becomes a reality, then every appliance could be collecting data on you.

All this data can now be paired with AI tools to sift through it, find patterns, and make inferences. They can not only infer your buying habits, but also your political affiliation. They can then use this to target political content to you. They will know which buttons to push and with push them expertly to affect your political beliefs and behaviors. Everyone, of course, likes to think we are resistant to such manipulation, but that is a conceit. In any case, in the aggregate people can very predictably be manipulated.

And of course, imagine the power of this data combined with AI in the hands of a totalitarian government. It is an authoritarian’s dream. But don’t think this kind of abuse is limited to blatantly authoritarian governments – authoritarianism is a continuum, and there are likely few governments free of any such tendencies. Fear of bad actors and the promise of safety is effectively used to get us to give away tiny portions of freedom, which accumulates over time.

The only solution is comprehensive regulation – a common theme I keep raising when it comes to modern technology. This is because technology is advancing quickly, and corporations, by default, have all the control. Free market forces are great for what they do, but in order to be effective the end consumer must have adequate information. This is increasingly difficult because as technology advances it is increasingly difficult for the average user to have enough expertise to navigate all the risks and perils. All the various technologies and applications are also overwhelming in the aggregate – you can spend your entire work day just managing your own security, fending off spam and other intrusive advertising, and trying to understand the technology you deal with regularly. All of this burden should not be on the consumer.

This is partly why we have elected representatives. There is some common-sense regulations that should be universal. People should not have the burden to opt out, it should be required that they actively opt in if they want any data collected or sold or to be sent any advertising. If you find you have been somehow opted in to anything like this, it should be trivially easy to opt out. It is OK to collect depersonalized aggregate data for research, but it is not OK to collect personalized data that can be tied to a specific person. The collection and use of any such data needs to be tightly regulated (like it is in medicine), with total transparency and heavy penalties for violators. It is not enough to have a disclosure buried in a user agreement.

In the US we are simultaneously in a situation of high political disfunction and rapid technological advance requiring thoughtful regulation. This is a bad combination. I know this is just another burden placed on the end user (all of us), but I don’t see another option. We need to educate ourselves on current technology and then advocate for common sense regulations. Write your representative – this actually does help. But long term we need to fix our broken political system so that our representative actually represent our interests.

The post Privacy In a Digital World first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

A year before October 7, 2023, reshaped the political landscape, we founded a nonprofit organization called Antisemitism Watch. The decision followed decades of reporting on the Holocaust and its aftermath, and years of chronicling daily antisemitic incidents. What became unmistakable over time was not simply persistence, but normalization—antisemitism embedding itself across wide swaths of society with diminishing resistance.

In a Newsweek op-ed in which we announced the launch, we wrote that “few contest that antisemitism—history’s oldest hatred of a religious and ethnic group—has had an unmatched post-Holocaust resurgence.”1 The data confirmed record numbers of anti-Jewish attacks across the United States, Canada, and Europe, while social media accelerated newer conspiracies blaming Jews for everything from the slave trade to COVID-19.2, 3

Even then, our concern was not only the scale of antisemitism, but the way it was being confronted. The most prominent institutions tasked with addressing it were doing so selectively, not consistently. The Anti-Defamation League had diluted its core mission by repositioning itself as a more generic anti-hate organization and, in practice, mostly focused on right-wing antisemitism while giving a free pass to anti-Jewish hostility from the political left. 

In the months following the October 7 attack, antisemitism shed its inhibitions. 

What distinguishes this moment is the collapse of stigma. Expressions that would have ended careers a decade ago now generate applause, clicks, and campaign donations. Language that would trigger immediate condemnation if directed at other minorities is routinely excused, contextualized, or ignored when directed at Jews. Hostility that once hid at the margins has migrated inward—into campuses, political platforms, cultural institutions, and digital ecosystems. The result is an old hatred on steroids—newly unmoored from consequence. 

This normalization is not diffuse, but has taken shape through two distinct but mutually reinforcing channels. The progressive left frames Israel as fundamentally illegitimate, a country of inherent injustice. That creates an atmosphere in which hostility toward Israel is cast as an ethical obligation. And for many on the left—and their Muslim activist allies—the distinction between Jews and Israelis frequently collapses. 

Germany, September 2025. A storefront sign reads: “Jews are banned from these premises! Nothing personal—and not antisemitism either. I just can’t stand you.”

On parts of the populist right, antisemitism has reemerged through the architecture of conspiracy theory. Jews are cast not as oppressors, but as puppet masters—orchestrators of migration, finance, media narratives, and foreign entanglements. The vocabulary differs from that on the left, but the structural function is identical: Jews are assigned exceptional and malign agency. 

Political Normalization on the Left: From Policy Critique to Moral Indictment 

Criticism of Israeli government policy is legitimate. What has shifted in recent years—and accelerated sharply after October 7—is not the criticism, but its recasting into a moral indictment of all Jews, whether they have anything to do with the country or government of Israel or not. 

Beginning in the mid-2010s, segments of the progressive movement increasingly described Israel as a uniquely flawed state: a settler-colonial project, an apartheid regime, and a profoundly racist enterprise.4, 5 Universities helped entrench this view, often through curricula and campus programming that treated those claims not as arguments but as axioms.6, 7 Qatar, for example, the same country that has been a financial lifeline to Hamas, has given $6.6 billion to American educational institutions.8, 9

More foreign money boosted the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) anti-Israel movement, once largely confined to activist circles, into footholds in student governments, academic associations, and local political campaigns.10, 11, 12, 13 Local chapters of major U.S. unions, including units within the United Auto Workers, adopted resolutions describing Israel’s actions as “genocide” and calling for arms embargoes and boycott campaigns.14

The antisemitism of the left and the right converge within the broader framework of modern populism.

At several American universities, diversity, equity, and inclusion offices came under criticism for omitting antisemitism or Jewish identity from their anti-discrimination frameworks. At Stanford, a DEI official told Jewish students that their identity was tied to “whiteness” and “colonialism,”15, 16, 17 while at UCLA, campus officials told Jewish students that “Zionism” placed them outside the scope of DEI protections, even when they were targeted as Jews.18, 19, 20

These developments began to erode an important distinction: in many campus protests after October 7, chants and signage moved quickly from condemning Israeli military actions into rhetoric that not only censured Israeli policies but questioned Israel’s right to exist.21, 22, 23 As harassment, intimidation and social exclusion of Jewish college students surged, they began hiding visible signs of their identity.24, 25, 26 Jewish students report pressure not only to criticize Israeli policy, but to disavow Zionism entirely as a condition of social inclusion.27, 28, 29

Language played a central role. The term “Zionist”—historically denoting support for Jewish national self-determination—increasingly appeared as a pejorative rather than a description. Our colleague David Christopher Kaufman has written about the rapid mainstreaming of the slur “Zio,” a diminutive form of “Zionist” historically popularized by white supremacist David Duke and long embedded in extremist discourse.30 The term has migrated from fringe spaces into activist debates, entertainment culture, and political rhetoric.31 Graffiti reading “Kill your local Zio Nazi” has appeared on American campuses, while demonstrators in London chant, “Gaza, Gaza, make us proud, put the Zio in the ground.”32, 33, 34

When Zionism is defined as racism or genocide, those who identify as Zionists are implicitly placed beyond the moral community. Zionism is no longer treated as a political ideology open to debate, but rather as a moral stain. Empirical data confirm the broader climate. 

A March 2026 survey of 1,000 students across 170 British universities found that one in five said they would be reluctant to have a Jewish roommate.35 Nearly half reported witnessing slogans justifying the October 7 attacks, while among those frequently exposed to campus protests the figure rose to 77 percent. One in ten said Holocaust denial or minimization was not antisemitic, and more than a quarter believed that calls to remove “Zionists” from campus were not discriminatory. 

In these findings Israel is not described as acting disproportionately, imprudently, or even unlawfully; it is described as inherently genocidal. Holocaust inversion—labeling Israelis as Nazis or Gaza as Auschwitz—has appeared with increasing frequency at demonstrations and across digital platforms.36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42 By depicting Jews as the new Nazis, such rhetoric reverses historical roles in ways that are psychologically potent and politically combustible, allowing hostility to be reframed as anti-fascist virtue. 

The same pattern has surfaced in cultural spaces. At the 2024 Berlin International Film Festival and related events, filmmakers and actors issued open letters accusing Israel of “genocide” and denouncing institutions that declined to take a maximalist anti-Israel stance as complicit in “anti-Palestinian racism.”43, 44 That same year at the Eurovision Song Contest in Malmö, Sweden, Israel’s representative, Eden Golan, performed under extraordinary security amid sustained protests and explicit death threats.45, 46 To protect her, Swedish authorities asked her to remain in her hotel room except for rehearsals and performances. 

Political incentives reinforce these dynamics. In several Western democracies, including the United States and the United Kingdom, some elected officials face organized blocs for whom anti-Israel activism is a defining issue. In the United Kingdom’s last general election, for instance, five independent candidates were elected to Parliament on only a pro-Gaza and anti-Israel platform.47, 48 In the U.S., public condemnation of antisemitic excesses within those political movements risks primary challenges, social media backlash, and accusations of complicity in alleged war crimes. Silence, by contrast, carries fewer immediate costs. That silence, of course, allows the most strident voices to have outsized influence. 

Mayoral election campaign billboard in Britain’s second largest city, Birmingham, focused exclusively on Gaza

This asymmetry matters. Political leaders routinely condemn antisemitism when it emerges from the opposing party. Far fewer are willing to confront it when it surfaces within their own coalition. The reluctance to draw internal boundaries contributes to the perception that such rhetoric is acceptable, even righteous. 

Political Normalization on the Right: The Return of Conspiratorial Antisemitism 

If the progressive left has contributed to normalization through moral absolutism, the populist right has done so through conspiratorial absolutism. 

Antisemitism on the right rarely presents itself as hatred, but rather as revelation. But its structure is familiar. Jews are not condemned as colonial oppressors but cast instead as hidden orchestrators—disproportionately powerful actors.49, 50 These tropes are recycled from earlier eras: insinuations of Jewish control over media and finance,51 suggestions of dual loyalty,52 and recycled speculation linking Jews to shadow networks of global power.53, 54, 55 These themes, once confined to fringe pamphleteers, now circulate widely through podcasts, livestreams, and social media feeds to audiences in the millions.56, 57

The accusation that Jews are omnipotent has long been one of antisemitism’s most durable adaptations. What distinguishes the present moment is scale—and monetization. Digital media ecosystems allow conspiratorial claims to travel instantly, stripped of context and insulated from institutional gatekeeping. Influencers with audiences in the millions can launder antisemitic tropes through the language of anti-elitism or investigative skepticism. 

Antisemitic conspiracies are algorithm-optimized, fusing centuries-old libels with modern virality. Figures such as Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens have built massive audiences by not merely courting controversy—they have aired claims rooted in longstanding antisemitic conspiracy frameworks. Carlson has suggested, for instance, using genetic testing to determine Jewish legitimacy in Israel, “to find out who Abraham’s descendants are.”58 He has questioned whether Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has any connection to the land because his family is “from Poland.”59 The premise echoes the discredited Khazar theory, which casts Ashkenazi Jews as impostors.60

The danger is the quiet, cumulative expansion of what society is willing to excuse.

Carlson has also provided an uncritical platform to extremist figures, including Nick Fuentes,61 who has publicly denied aspects of the Holocaust, praised authoritarian regimes, and repeatedly argued that Jews wield disproportionate and harmful influence. Carlson did not substantively interrogate or rebut anything said.62 The significance lies less in any single statement than in the format: a two-hour content that allowed historically fringe antisemitic narratives to be presented to a mass audience without correction or context. 

Candace Owens, meanwhile, has made the Khazar claim explicit, writing to Sen. Ted Cruz on February 21, 2026, that “The people currently occupying Israel are Khazarian Turks,”63 while also promoting narratives of “Jewish supremacy,”64 depicting Jews as a “cult,”65 and claimed on the February 2, 2026, episode of her podcast that modern Jews are not actually Jews but “pagan gypsies wearing the cloak of Judaism.”66 In extended broadcasts, she has also revived claims that Jews dominated the slave trade and promoted classical antisemitic texts rooted in blood libel, and alleged that a secret Jewish cult, Sabbatean Frankists, practices pedophilia and conspires to control non-Jews.67, 68, 69

Candace Owens alleges Israeli intelligence agency, the Mossad, funds Islamic terrorism such as 9/11 in order to deceive non-Jews (goyim).

Monetization data reveal advertising rates of tens of thousands of dollars per episode and annual revenues reaching into the millions.70 Antisemitism has become lucrative content. 

Figures such as Owens, Carlson, Dave Smith, and others use social media not just to monetize their posts, but to clip, amplify, and circulate appearances, arguments, and narratives across a much larger ecosystem. Content that may begin in a podcast, livestream, or interview is rapidly fragmented into short, emotionally charged segments optimized for sharing. The result is a feedback loop in which inflammatory claims travel farther than careful rebuttals, and antisemitic insinuation is normalized through familiarity, repetition, and algorithmic lift. In that environment, the distance between coded rhetoric and explicit anti-Jewish abuse has grown perilously short. 

We saw that process directly in the responses to two of our recent posts on 𝕏,71, 72 one about a Miami Beach incident that led to an assault and hate crime arrest, and another about the persistent claim that Israel was behind the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In both cases, the replies quickly filled with material that was not merely critical of Israel or political in nature, but floridly antisemitic: recycled conspiracy tropes, insinuations about Jewish power, and language that would once have been confined to the extremist fringe. Social media, by design, rewards provocation, virality, and repetition, allowing anti-Jewish hatred to appear in waves and then recede, only to surge again around the next triggering event. 

𝕏 is not alone as a visible accelerant of contemporary antisemitism. Other platforms have played a comparable role, especially since October 7. TikTok in particular helped drive a dramatic expansion of anti-Jewish hostility by turning complex events into emotionally saturated, highly shareable fragments that rewarded outrage over context. Younger audiences encountered not only intense anti-Israel content but also conspiracy narratives, moral inversion, and language that blurred any distinction between Israelis, Zionists, and Jews. 

What is unfolding is not simply another cycle of prejudice but rather the normalization of it. It is a structural shift.

Taken together, these platforms have created an information environment in which antisemitism is not merely tolerated but made to feel ambient. What appears in any single comment thread is therefore not an isolated spasm of hatred, but part of a broader digital culture in which antisemitism has become newly confident, newly networked, and far more public. This mode of thinking repackages antisemitism as inquiry and presents hatred as courage. 

The Convergence: How Opposite Narratives Produce the Same Result 

The antisemitism of the left and the right converge within the broader framework of modern populism. In periods of institutional distrust and geopolitical uncertainty, populist movements seek simplified explanations for complex realities, often attributing responsibility to elites or symbolic adversaries.73, 74 Jews, historically visible yet diasporic, have long served as convenient stand-ins within such narratives. 

The left assigns Jews excessive guilt while the right assigns them excessive power. Both frameworks transform Jews from individuals into symbols and reduce political disagreement to an artificial moral certainty. Jews cease to be a minority community with internal diversity and become symbolic actors—avatars of oppression or manipulation. That transformation flattens nuance, rewards ideological purity, and erodes the distinctions between critique and condemnation, skepticism and conspiracy. In doing so, it creates fertile ground for reemergence of antisemitism across ideological lines. 

Digital algorithms reward outrage and insinuation. Normalization requires only the erosion of consequences. When one in five university students in a liberal democracy reports reluctance to share housing with a Jew, prejudice has moved beyond rhetoric into social calculus. 

A corrosive development within this broader normalization has been the resurgence of Holocaust minimization and the emergence of October 7 denial narratives. On parts of the left, documented October 7 atrocities are questioned, minimized, or reframed as morally explicable resistance.75, 76, 77 When the mass murder of Jews becomes negotiable fact—contextualized beyond recognition or rhetorically inverted—antisemitism is normalized not through open hatred but through a gross and dangerous distortion. 

Antisemitism has always adapted to prevailing ideologies. While today’s rhetoric differs on the left and right, it is Jews who are again cast as the hinge upon which broader grievances turn: too powerful to be trusted, too illegitimate to be equal. 

Internal Validation and External Weaponization 

A particularly uncomfortable dimension of this moment is the role sometimes played by Jews themselves—as participants in an environment that helps destigmatize antisemitism. In cultural, academic, and political spaces, some Jewish figures have concluded—implicitly or explicitly—that open identification with Israel, or even with mainstream Jewish communal positions, carries professional and social risk.78, 79

Initial expressions of solidarity after October 7 were, in many cases, followed by quiet retreat—statements deleted, positions softened, or replaced by language that avoided any association with Israel altogether.80, 81 In parts of the entertainment industry, publishing, and academia, the boundaries have become clear: certain forms of speech carry consequences, while others confer acceptance. The incentives are not abstract. They shape behavior. 

In political life, the same pressures operate differently but with similar effect. Anti-Israel movements increasingly elevate progressive Jewish voices that validate their claims.82, 83 The argument is straightforward: if Jews themselves describe Israel as genocidal, or Zionism as inherently racist, then such claims cannot be antisemitic. The phrase “as a Jew” becomes a form of credentialing—used to shield arguments from scrutiny and to confer legitimacy. 

That reasoning is logically flawed yet rhetorically powerful. It is a form of rhetorical laundering in which claims that would otherwise be recognized as antisemitic are reframed as internal critique, even courageous dissent. 

Organizations such as Jewish Voice for Peace have played a central role in this dynamic. Their activism—highly visible in post-October 7 protests, including organized demonstrations at the U.S. Capitol and on university campuses—has framed Israel in the language of genocide and colonialism, while advocating for boycotts and the dismantling of existing political frameworks.84, 85 In some instances, that rhetoric has extended into Holocaust-adjacent spaces, including efforts to insert contemporary political claims into memorial contexts at concentration camps like Buchenwald,86, 87 in ways that many Jewish institutions and historians have strongly rejected.88

This dynamic operates alongside a second, parallel force: organized Muslim activist movements that have fused opposition to Israel with rhetoric and practices that increasingly blur, and at times erase, the distinction between Israelis and Jews more broadly. 

In the months following October 7, protests across Western cities have frequently featured slogans such as “rape is resistance” or “globalize the intifada” that framed violence as justified resistance. Visual symbols, including the widespread adoption of keffiyehs as a form of political uniform, signal not only solidarity with Palestinians, but alignment with the rejection of Israel’s legitimacy. The widely used chant “from the river to the sea” is a call for Israel’s elimination, since a Palestinian state stretching from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea would leave no room for a Jewish state. 

Institutional actors have played a role in amplifying this environment. Advocacy organizations such as the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR) have issued statements and hosted speakers whose rhetoric has fomented antisemitism and contextualized violence in ways that blur moral boundaries.89, 90 In parallel, documented incidents in countries including the United Kingdom and Australia have raised concerns about Jewish patients feeling unsafe in medical settings after Muslim healthcare workers expressed hostility over the Israel–Hamas conflict.91, 92

For example, two nurses at Bankstown Hospital in Sydney—Ahmad Rashad Nadir (male nurse) and Sarah Abu Lebdeh (female nurse)—recorded a viral social media video while in hospital scrubs, in which they made explicit antisemitic threats, including statements like “I won’t treat them, I will kill them,” “You have no idea how many Israeli dog[s] came to this hospital, and I sent them to Jahannam” (Jahannam means “hell” in Arabic), and a throat-slitting gesture and other dehumanizing comments.93 Separately, Dr. Omar Azzam, a nephrologist at Royal Perth Hospital, was suspended by AHPRA and referred to a professional standards tribunal for alleged professional misconduct involving harassing medical colleagues with antisemitic abuse (including “ZioNazi” slurs). 

Antisemitism has become ideologically portable, socially permissible, and, in many quarters, professionally and financially rewarding.

These developments do not define entire communities. But they illustrate how, within certain activist ecosystems, the distinction between opposition to Israeli policy and animus toward Jews has become increasingly unstable. 

The interaction between these forces—internal validation and external amplification—is what gives the current moment its intensity. When activist rhetoric expands the scope of acceptable hostility, and selected Jewish voices are used to legitimize it, the result is a feedback loop. Claims that would once have been rejected outright are normalized through repetition, credentialing, and the absence of consistent challenge. 

Institutional Courage and Consistency 

If antisemitism is now being normalized not only through ideology and institutions, but also through validation—external and internal alike—then the responsibility of institutions is no longer ambiguous. It is unavoidable. 

Moments like this inevitably invite historical comparison. The rhetoric and the polarization are familiar. But history does not repeat itself on command. The 1930s were not just an era of words, but of institutional collapse and state-sponsored persecution. The warning today is different, but it is unmistakable: the stigma that once made antisemitism politically radioactive has been stripped away. 

What has taken its place is something more insidious. Antisemitism has become ideologically portable, socially permissible, and, in many quarters, professionally and financially rewarding. When hostility toward Jews can be repackaged to fit almost any political narrative and still command applause, a line has been crossed. The danger is the quiet, cumulative expansion of what society is willing to excuse. 

This is not a problem that can be solved with selective outrage or partisan finger-pointing. It is a failure of institutional will. Organizations that claim to fight antisemitism have too often treated it as a conditional priority—forcefully condemning it in adversaries while rationalizing, minimizing, or ignoring it among allies. The result is not balance but complicity: warnings dismissed, evidence reframed, action delayed until it is no longer necessary. Institutions do not lack information. They lack willingness to incur the cost of acting on it. 

Antisemitism has always adapted to the dominant language of its time. What distinguishes this moment is not its evolution, but the degree to which that evolution is being tolerated—even legitimized—by those responsible for opposing it. 

This is the test. And institutions, political parties, and civic leaders are failing it. 

The consequences for such failure are no longer theoretical. What is unfolding is not simply another cycle of prejudice but rather the normalization of it. It is a structural shift. In the United States, Jews increasingly find themselves required to justify their identity and affiliations in public space,94, 95 while in Europe, Jews are reconsidering whether they can safely remain.96, 97

If this moment demands anything, it is not another task force or hashtag, but an unflinching commitment to a single standard of moral clarity. The oldest hatred has learned our newest languages; our institutions must relearn the courage to name it, wherever it speaks.

Dozens of people have e-mailed me about a recent article in the New York Times Magazine on the interstitium. The reason is not because of the interstitium itself, but because it is being used to retcon an alleged explanation for acupuncture.  The discussion of the interstitium itself is fine, but then the author veered off into gratuitous pseudoscience.

The interstitium was proposed in 2018 based on a study showing that the interstitial connective tissue spaces around organs and other tissues in the body are not separate spaces but all appear to be connected. Essentially the authors propose this is a body-wide fluid filled space in the body through which fluids flow and communicate. This adds to the other fluid systems in the body, such as the lymphatic system (which drains excess fluid from tissues), the circulatory system (which distributes oxygen and nutrients and carries away waste), and the spinal fluid system (which is inside and surrounds the central nervous system). Later studies have supported the evidence for one continuous interstitial space.

Of course, the more we know about how the body works the better we will be able to understand disease processes and design treatments. Cancer cells, for example might spread through the interstitium, resulting in distant metastasis.

The NYT, however, decided to tack onto this interesting update in our biological knowledge with a bit of rank pseudoscience. The author starts with the statement that Thiese, one of the original researchers, was approached at a talk in China by a practitioner of Traditional Chinese Medicine who said, “We’ve been talking about it for 4,000 years.” He accepted this third hand information uncritically. Um…no they haven’t. No ancient culture had any significant knowledge of human anatomy. They didn’t know basic things about how the body works, such as how blood circulates. They didn’t know what all the organs did. They didn’t even know that tissues are made of cells until the 1800s. All this person was doing was taking a basic concept, like the body is connected, and applying it to this knew anatomical knowledge. It’s meaningless.

Further, what we currently know as acupuncture is actually only about a hundred years old. It was created by fiat to unite the various Chinese medical traditions, which were mutually exclusive, into one system.  They were not using filiform needles 4,000 years ago. We don’t know what they were doing. The first text which describes something like acupuncture is from 100 BC. But there was no unified theory or practice at this time. Needles were more like lances, and likely were used for multiple purposes. Acupuncture sometimes involved blood letting or lancing, and other times involved “chi”. However, there was also the belief that blood is what spread chi throughout the body, so they were not entirely distinct. Again, these various traditions were not brought together until the early 20th century.

In fact, descriptions of acupuncture from the 19th century bare little resemblance to the modern version. These did not always involve points or meridians, used large needles deeply inserted into tissues, usually at the point of pain or injury.

The notion of chi, or an energy vital force, which spreads through meridians seems to go back about 2,000 years in some traditions. But this had nothing to do with any knowledge of anatomy or physiology. In fact, for about 2,000 years, until 1923, dissection of dead bodies was banned in China, so they had very little knowledge of anatomy. The meridians were therefore not based on anatomy, but on their cosmology. It was essentially astrology. It is therefore completely pseudoscientific and ahistorical to argue that Chinese acupuncturists had detailed knowledge of the interstitium 4,000 years ago – this is nonsense from beginning to end.

The NYT author then provides some reference to studies apparently showing an alignment between the interstitium and acupuncture meridians. These studies all come from China, which has a documented history of poor science relating to acupuncture. But even taken at face value, the evidence appears worthless. Essentially, dye spread up the arm when pressed, and there is a meridian that goes up the arm. Wow. They don’t even closely align. It would be amazing if dye did not spread in a way that could be so loosely correlated with some meridian.

There is no credible evidence that meridians exist – and they were never meant to represent anything anatomical. There is no evidence that acupuncture points exist, and acupuncturists cannot even agree on where they are or what they do. There are different traditions of acupuncture that use entirely different systems of points. This is all culture, with no underpinning reality.

So no – the interstitium does not provide an explanation for how acupuncture works. That is all blatant retconning. Further, there is no credible evidence that acupuncture even works. After thousands of studies researchers have failed to definitive reject the null hypothesis. The best clinical studies show no difference between true acupuncture and sham acupuncture – it is all placebo. The media, however, has mostly bought into the propaganda, and continues to gullibly spread this pseudoscience.

The post NYT Epic Fail on Acupuncture first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

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If I were a UFO enthusiast, someone who believes that some UFOs (now UAPs) are aliens visiting the Earth and that the US government knows this and is covering it up, I would be really disappointed. I might engage in some serious motivated reasoning to convince myself that the recent release of documents by the Pentagon was somehow dramatic, but down deep how could you escape crushing devastation. Lucy once again put the football out there for Charlie Brown and then yanked it.

Trump wrote that his administration will, “begin the process of identifying and releasing Government files related to alien and extraterrestrial life, unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP), and unidentified flying objects (UFOs).” The Pentagon announced they will make their files available to the public. The NASA director applauded this transparency. The media is now hyping up these
“never before seen” documents.

And the result – an absolute nothingburger. We get more indistinct blobs, dots of light, blurry nothings, camera artifacts, and stories of people seeing dots of light. The Pentagon acknowledges – there is no evidence that any of these things are alien phenomena, but also that some of the blobs and lights have not been fully explained. So we are exactly where we have always been – there is no compelling or unambiguous evidence of aliens. Believers can weave whatever anomaly-hunting stories they want from the terrible evidence. Skeptics will continue to point out that the evidence does not tell us anything. Conspiracy theorists will continue to argue that the government is covering up the “real” evidence, and this data dump must be a false flag.

What was not in the data dump from the Pentagon? There were no alien bodies. The US government is not in the possession of an alien spacecraft or any part of an alien spacecraft. There were no unambiguous alien artifacts. There were no videos or pictures of clear alien spacecraft or aliens. There was no evidence that would have ended the debate. The government did not acknowledge that it was ever covering anything up about aliens.

There were also no obvious fakes – no “alien autopsy” videos, no shaky flying saucers, no CG videos. These were all, at least, legitimate pictures and videos. That’s why their quality was so consistently terrible. As I have said numerous times – the low quality of the evidence is the phenomenon. UAPs are low quality evidence by definition, because high quality evidence is not unidentified. It is not the strangeness of the phenomena that makes it hard to identify definitively, it is the low quality of the evidence. When objects come into focus, they are birds, planes, balloons, and other aircraft.

The simplest explanation for this situation is – aliens are not visiting the Earth, or if they are they have the technology to remain completely hidden from us. So we are just getting the residue of low quality evidence that the Pentagon was unable to explain, a residue that will always exist given enough data and is not predictive that something strange is going on. It would be remarkable if the Pentagon were able to positively identify 100% of every blurry photo or blob of light one of their people ever recorded.

UFO skeptics like Mick West will spend some time carefully examining videos to show that the claims of enthusiasts are not accurate and nothing preternatural is going on. Some of the videos look like birds to me – when you are flying above a bird which is flying over the water it creates the illusion that the bird is moving much faster than it is. Some are clearly camera artifact, like the star distortion patterns or afterglow. These careful analyses are convincing to skeptics and dismissed by believers.

How is the mainstream media dealing with these Pentagon releases? Total failure, in my opinion. They talk about it with a smile and a glint in their eye – “Ooh, we get to talk about UFO’s with a veneer of legitimacy because it’s coming from the Pentagon.” But they give no context, no useful analysis, and often not a hint of skepticism. At most you get a dry qualifier, “The Pentagon says there is no evidence of aliens,” but that’s like the fine print that wizzes by in a commercial. Some of the more gullible journalists think there is actually something going on here, likely because of profound ignorance of the UFO phenomenon over the last 80 years. They often don’t even feel the need for token skepticism.

If you are holding out for the really juicy evidence to be released in a later batch – don’t hold your breath. It seems unreasonable to assume that the Pentagon is holding onto smoking gun evidence at this point, and starting off with a bunch of crap. To think the government is holding on to solid evidence at this point you need to believe that Trump is impotent on this issue, or that he is lying and is now part of the cover up. Neither of these hypotheses seem likely. As is typical, you have to deepen the conspiracy in order to explain away the lack of credible evidence.

I know I have said all of the above before – because there is nothing new or interesting in the Pentagon release. As I said – this is all more of the same, and everything remains status quo. UAPs are all blurry nothings and fish stories. There is no compelling evidence of aliens. The government is not covering up their knowledge of aliens. The press are loving the clickbait. I can only hope more people will see this as the giant nothing it is.

The post Pentagon Releases More Boring UFO Videos first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

Here we go again.

President Donald Trump and the Department of War have released the long-awaited UFO Files, and they’re about as revelatory as the JFK assassination files were, namely not at all.

In my preliminary review of the files (it will take days or weeks more to read through them all), and following the UFO/UAP community online with endless believers that we are being visited by alien beings (or “non-human intelligence” or “biologics” in the current jargon) digging through the files in search of their long-promised “disclosure” of contact, absolutely nothing stands out beyond the usual blurry photographs, grainy videos, artist reconstructions, and countless stories about weird things in the sky and in space.

As always, I will acknowledge that extraterrestrial intelligences are probably out there somewhere in the cosmos—with a trillion galaxies, each of which having hundreds of billions of stars, each of which having planets it is as close to 100% that some of them somewhere will evolve life and even intelligent life—but very few members of the public are interested in the search for signatures of bacterial-grade life in the atmospheres of exo-planets (as NASA continues to search for life elsewhere).

What nearly everyone cares about is the second question: have they come here?

The answer remains the same: not that we know of. That is, there remains no definitive evidence of alien visitation on Earth, and the UFO Files release has done nothing to change that, which even most of the UFO/UAP proponents acknowledge, promising “just you wait” and “disclosure is still coming” and “the ‘holy crap’ material will be released soon”. So…we shall see. I remain skeptical unless and until my priors are updated with new evidence, which is not in these files.

What is in the files? Here is a brief overview of what I came across as I worked my way through them:

Figure 1. Artist’s “composite sketch” of this object, which an eyewitness described as having been seen in this field, unhelpfully identified by the Department of War as taken somewhere in the United States.

Here is the full caption:

Actual site photo with FBI Lab rendered graphic overlay depicting corroborating eyewitness reports from September 2023 of an apparent ellipsoid bronze metallic object materializing out of a bright light in the sky, 130-195 feet in length, and disappearing instantaneously.

How anyone standing in a field could assess the length of an object without some means of measurement by which to compare it is beyond me, or how anyone could possibly know it was made of bronze (obviously meaning “it looked like bronze-colored metal,” or some such).

Figure 1

Figure 2. Document dated October 28-29, 2001, in which the Georgian Foreign Ministry reports a Russian aircraft violated Georgian airspace and bombed areas of the Kodori Gorge. Russia denied it, saying it was a UFO. Georgian response: UFO is a Russian “bold lie”. Recall that this is a decade after the fall of the Soviet Union and shortly after Vladamir Putin came to power and launched a military action in Georgia.

Figure 2

Figure 3. In this document, dated September 12, 2023, the Mexican Congress heard testimony on UAP from experts that includes these long debunked fake alien corpses that even all UAP proponents acknowledge as fake. If this is any indication of the quality of the "UFO files" purported to reveal we’ve been visited by aliens, God help us (and I’m an atheist).

Figure 3AFigure 3B

Figure 4. This document, dated October, 2023, is emblematic of so many of the UFO Files documents, so heavily redacted as to be difficult to read, much less given proper context. Here is the disclaimer provided by the Department of War attached to all of these documents: “Redactions have been made to protect the identity of eyewitnesses, the location of government facilities, or potentially sensitive information about military sites not related to UAP.”

Figure 4

Figure 5. These are two of many photographic stills taken from videos shot, again unhelpfully, somewhere in the “Southwestern United States.” The UAP is the little dot that could be almost anything (a balloon, a drone, an aircraft), subsequently being tracked by a helicopter. Given the terrain I immediately thought of one of the many military bases throughout this part of the country where planes and drones and, yes, even balloons, may be found.

Also unhelpful are all the blacked out rectangles, which very likely represent all the information we would need to identify the speed, distance, size, etc. of the object based on where, exactly, this was filmed, and when, etc.

This is another reason why I support Avi Loeb’s Galileo Project at Harvard University because they are building multiple observatories in various locations in order to triangulate whatever objects are detected. Without triangulation, it is extremely difficult to assess size and speed of the various objects identified in these files (and elsewhere) of UAPs.

Figure 5AFigure 5B

Figure 6. This UAP is almost surely a drone or small plane, probably moving away from the camera. The caption reads: “U.S. Indo-Pacific Command reported UAP that resembles a football-shaped body near Japan” and appears to be taken in 2024.

Figure 6A

Figure 6B is an image of an “Unmanned Aerial Vehicle” (UAV) I found online labeled “The Jetank unmanned aerial vehicle successfully completed its first flight in China, Shaanxi province.” I’m not claiming this accounts for the UAP sighting near Japan, but with a range of 7,000 kilometers, and with all the political concerns about Chinese aerial technology, it’s not completely crazy to think it could be something along these lines.

Figure 6B

Figure 7. These light anomalies photographed from the surface of the moon by Apollo 17 astronauts are curious indeed. At first I suspected they were lens flares, as I’ve seen many such images in photographs taken at haunted houses, graveyards, and the like purportedly representing ghosts floating around the facilities, but it is not clear that lens flares explains these images.

I await the government’s own additional investigation, as explained in the file:

While this photo has been previously released and discussed by keen observers, there is no consensus about the nature of the anomaly. New preliminary US government analysis suggests the image feature is potentially the result of a physical object in the scene. Additionally, as part of this investigation, the government has obtained the original film from the Apollo 17 mission and the results of the full NASA and DOW analysis will be released when completed.

Similar such images were photographed by Apollo 12 astronauts with no explanation provided.

Figure 7AFigure 7BFigure 7C

Figure 8. This video short from the files was posted by UAP investigator Steven Greenstreet on 𝕏 (@MiddleOfMayhem) noting “This ‘alien UFO’ appears to be a parachute and a flare, which is leaving behind a smoke trail”:

0:00 /0:13 1×

Figure 8

Figure 9. This screen shot from a UAP video appears to be a balloon trailing its string or tail.

Figure 9AFigure 9B

The following is a comment from the pilot and astronaut Scott Kelly, from a NASA press conference at which he spoke, explaining how difficult it is for pilots to determine what it is they think they saw:

In my experience of flying over 15,000 hours in 30 something years in airplanes and in space, the environment that we fly in is very conducive to optical illusions, so I get why these pilots would look at that Go Fast video and think it was going really really fast. I remember one time I was flying off Virginia Beach Military operating area and my RIO [Radar Intercept Officer], who sits in the back of the Tomcat, was convinced we flew by a UFO. I didn’t see it, so we turned around to go look at it. It turns out it was a Bart Simpson balloon.

My brother Mark Kelly, a former NASA astronaut and also now a U.S. Senator, shared a story with me about an experience he had years ago that when he was the commander of STS 124; they were getting ready to close the payload bay doors of the Space Shuttle and they see something in the payload bay and they thought it was a tool, maybe a bolt—they couldn’t quite figure it out—and they were potentially going to have to go and do a spacewalk to retrieve it. But before they did that my brother grabbed the camera and they took a picture of it, and when they blew up the picture they realized that this is not a bolt or a tool in the payload bay; it was actually the International Space Station that was 80 miles away.

There are cases where pilots have rendezvoused on a buoy because they thought that was their wingman. It’s just a very very challenging environment to work, especially at night.

That’s enough for now. Much more to come as I go through the files, but in general, remember the “residue of anomalies” problem that exists in all science: No hypothesis or theory in any field accounts for 100 percent of the phenomena under investigation.

This residue problem means that no matter how comprehensive a theory is there will always be a residue of anomalies for which it cannot account. The residue problem in UFOlogy was poignantly illustrated in Leslie Kean’s 2010 book UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record, in which the UFOlogist admitted that “roughly 90 to 95 percent of UFO sightings can be explained” as:

weather balloons, flares, sky lanterns, planes flying in formation, secret military aircraft, birds reflecting the sun, planes reflecting the sun, blimps, helicopters, the planets Venus or Mars, meteors or meteorites, space junk, satellites, swamp gas, spinning eddies, sundogs, ball lightning, ice crystals, reflected light off clouds, lights on the ground or lights reflected on a cockpit window, temperature inversions, hole-punch clouds, and the list goes on!

So the entire extraterrestrial hypothesis for explaining UFOs and UAPs is based on a residue of data left over after the above list has been exhausted.

What’s left? Not much.

But, as always, I remain open to examining new evidence if it is forthcoming. Let’s see what’s in the next tranche.

About a month ago, a woman in Egypt was harassed on a public bus (she will go unnamed to protect what privacy and dignity she still has left). She recorded the man who was targeting her, and when she confronted him, he responded not with shame but with escalation: he mocked her appearance, called her trash, and insulted her by saying she looked like a nonbeliever.

When the video went viral, the public response was revealing. Before many people asked what had happened to her, they wanted to know something else: Was she Christian or Muslim?

If she were Christian, the matter was to be treated as an internal issue for the Church. Once it became known that she was Muslim, however, the urgency evaporated. No serious solidarity emerged. No meaningful protection appeared. Instead, what followed was rationalization, skepticism toward the victim, and the suggestion that she herself was somehow the problem. At one point, the alleged harasser was even welcomed onto a television program!

Meanwhile, the woman at the center of the incident was left to absorb the consequences alone. She lost her job. She spent substantial money pursuing the case in court. More profoundly, she lost a basic sense of personal safety. People found her social media accounts and sent threats of harassment and death. In effect, she paid a steep price simply for insisting on two elementary rights: the right to exist in public and the right to travel without being assaulted.

Morality that depends on who you are, rather than what was done to you, is no morality at all.

Yet, this is often the same culture that speaks most loudly about morality. But what does “morality” mean if it does not include the willingness to stand beside a victim? What is moral seriousness worth if a woman’s right to dignity and protection is treated as secondary to sectarian identity? Moral standards are not being applied universally. They are being applied conditionally. And morality that depends on who you are, rather than what was done to you, is no morality at all.

And so, I ask: isn’t it a mockery of us as human beings, with all our complexity, our differences, our layered identities to be reduced to a single question: What is your religion?

It should not matter whether I am Muslim, Christian, or neither. I am exhausted by the inevitability of this question, by the way it is the sole lens through which people are judged.

What I want to consider is what it means to have your identity stripped away, to be left alone in a society that believes your position on religion is enough to judge you as morally deficient—and even to justify your imprisonment if your beliefs are revealed—as in the case of Sherif Gaber, a young Egyptian atheist who has faced years of legal persecution for expressing his beliefs online. Gaber was accused under Egypt’s laws, specifically charges related to “contempt of religion” for content he published on social media platforms. Since 2015, he has been arrested, detained, and subjected to ongoing legal pressure. With multiple cases brought against him the total sentence is at least six years in prison.

Think about that: for writing commentary on religion no different from what you read in the pages of Skeptic and other publications, in Egypt you could end up in prison. This is the consequences of a legal framework in which individuals are prosecuted for expressing beliefs that go against socially accepted religion.

After publicly criticizing religious ideology, a fatwa calling for his death was issued in Egypt, forcing him into hiding under security protection.

The German author Hamed Abdel-Samad represents another form of skeptical consequence. After publicly criticizing religious ideology, a fatwa calling for his death was issued in Egypt, forcing him into hiding under security protection.

Exact statistics on the number of atheists or even such cases are difficult to obtain due to fear and underreporting, but human rights organizations have repeatedly documented the use of laws to silence dissenting religious views. Deviation in belief is not merely debated—it is punished—and public opinion in such cases leads toward support a death sentence for religious skeptics, seeing dissenters as a threat to social and religious order, further reinforcing a climate in which legal punishment is not only tolerated, but sometimes socially demanded.

Why have religious institutions become so deeply entrenched in power? If debate fails, is prison or the threat of death really the answer? Is it not enough to believe that nonbelievers or followers of other religions will be punished in the afterlife? Apparently not.

The Suffering of Being the Exception

I remember asking a friend twice my age whether he had any friends from his generation who shared his non-belief. It took him a full five minutes to answer. For a moment, it was like he was begging his own mind to offer a single name. But, ultimately, his answer was “No.”

After that, I let my thoughts wonder. When he was my age, did he wish to find someone like him? Not even necessarily when it comes to shared views on religious belief, but in thinking that a person should not be judged by their faith or lack thereof? Was he rejected by his family for refusing to conform to their beliefs? Was he threatened, punished, as I have been? Was he forced into religious practices he did not believe in? And does he now perform them merely to avoid the headache?

These questions are not abstract or hypothetical to me.

These questions are not abstract or hypothetical to me. I have seen the answers in my own life. At times, the answer is you will be on the receiving end of open aggression, but sometimes it also takes quieter forms like shaming and an unwillingness to accept even the act of questioning.

People like my friend are rarely visible, not because they do not exist but because visibility comes at a cost. In my experience, disbelief is often met with rejection and violence. Families will expel you, and they’ll attempt to reshape you by forcing some sort of conversion therapy with clerics, guilting, or constant reminders of what you should be.

Silence becomes the safer option. Many learn early on to separate what they think from what they say, to perform belief rather than risk confrontation. Others choose distance: emotional, social, or even geographical. Emigration, when possible, becomes less about seeking new professional opportunities and more about survival.

In 2014, Egypt’s official religious authority, Dar al-Ifta, claimed that there were exactly 866 atheists in the country, roughly 0.001% of the population. This number was widely mocked, not only for its precision, but for its detachment from lived reality. Even at the time, many argued that the figure was far too low, with some suggesting that there were likely more nonbelievers in a single university than the officially reported national number. While statistics remain difficult to obtain, some surveys suggest that around 11% of Egyptians identify as “not religious,” with the percentage rising to nearly 20% among younger generations.

Nonbelievers often conceal their views to avoid social ostracism.

The lack of reliable figures on atheism itself is not incidental. It reflects a climate in which many individuals choose silence over exposure. Reports consistently note that nonbelievers in Egypt often conceal their views to avoid social ostracism, legal consequences, or even threats to their safety. At the same time, most of the population still identifies as religious, creating a social environment in which deviation from dominant beliefs is often stigmatized.

So, while I can’t speak for my friend directly, I recognize the pattern. It is not one story or anecdote but a shared condition.

To be the exception in this country is to be destined for suffering. Rejection, when it comes from loved ones and family, is often justified as fear for your fate in the afterlife. But at a societal level, the consequences can escalate to imprisonment or even death like the case of Farag Foda, an Egyptian intellectual assassinated in 1992 after publicly criticizing religious extremism, who remains one of the most striking examples of how dissenting ideas can provoke violent responses beyond the law.

Between the cases of Foda (silenced by bullets), and Sherif Gaber (pursued through courts), exclusion and the belittling of your mind and your difference are considered as the “gentler” responses.

And at times, even families may resort to threats of violence—this happened to me when my uncle decided that I must get a session about the hijab with a sheikh that was 20 years old and whose education stopped at elementary school. This sheikh was younger than me! Here’s what he said:

You must wear the hijab because our messenger Mohamed said that. You should wear it and you get hit for not wearing it, and others have the right to harass you.

In response, I started to laugh at this nonsense. Then my uncle started to shout at me saying “I’m 30 years older than him yet I respect him” and then he started to hit me.

I got my arm twisted and my bones almost broken, and he hit my head on a wooden chair! Yet, my own mother saw what he did as right and blamed me for the incident. The police didn’t do anything. Why? In upper Egypt, such violence is called discipline.

I do not betray. I do not lie. I do not gossip about others’ right to live as they choose. I do not harass. I do not steal. I do not submit to tyranny or dictators. I am not a misogynist. I do not compromise when it comes to justice. Even the most outwardly devout struggle to uphold many of these virtues. And yet, in this society, because I am labelled as a disbeliever, I am ostracized. My words are attacked, my freedom of belief is confiscated, and I watch others suffer the same fate simply for their intellectual stance on religion.

What harm is there in my choice to not wear the hijab?

What harm is there in my choice to not wear the hijab? What harm is there in choosing whether or not to pray or fast? There is far more violence rooted in these questions than most are willing to see. So, I do not blame those who hide who they are. Because in a society that imposes identity upon you the alternative is to lose everything.

Imposed Identity

We all live complex lives. I have my work as an architect. I have my intellectual and cultural space, my identity, my way of thinking. But then there is my family, who reject my very existence based on my decision not to wear the hijab or not to have children.

In my dealings with people, I have noticed that anyone who rejects the type of “corrective” violence I describe here is met with extreme violence in response. Whoever refuses to be violated is punished by society. Whoever refuses to be beaten faces something worse. Whoever asks for the bare minimum of dignity risks losing everything to obtain it.

We are all expected to bow. And if you refuse, then you must accept a different reality of being rejected, threatened, and hunted. Even if your only “crime” is a word, writing an article, speaking in a café, or simply attempting to express your identity to those closest to you.

I often think of my childhood friend. We were raised together in strict religiosity, grew up side by side for 18 years, and even her father, before he passed, urged her to never let go of our friendship. But with age came socialization—she began to see my thoughts as a threat to her rigid faith. She urged me to stop questioning and stop overthinking. And when I didn’t, she chose to walk away.

Isolation is a personal condition that is reproduced across generations, shaped by accumulated histories, beliefs, and constraints.

Perhaps that was, in a way, a form of liberation. I was no longer confined by her worldview, no longer afraid of being alone. It was painful to lose her, but I was not the one who refused to accept the other.

The phrase “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” borrowed from Gabriel García Márquez’s novel, is not a literary exaggeration, but a logical outcome of living in a society such as this. In the novel, isolation is a personal condition that is reproduced across generations, shaped by accumulated histories, beliefs, and constraints.

In a similar sense, the solitude I describe here is not simply emotional or self-imposed. It emerges from a social environment that penalizes deviation and narrows the space for intellectual and personal autonomy. This isolation is produced through sustained pressure to conform, and the consequences of refusing to do so. We are all, to varying degrees, the product of long accumulations of inherited fears, ideas, and habits we did not choose. We simply find ourselves born into one place or another in the world, and yet it shapes us. But understanding this does not erase the impact of harm, nor does it make its possibility easier to endure.

I meet dozens of people every day, yet I know almost with certainty that only a few will truly understand—or even try to—what it means to choose your own thoughts. I rarely see anyone disturbed in the way I am when women are dehumanized in inherited religious discourse, when oppression is justified in the name of faith, or when entire populations are reduced to arrogant narratives that erase their humanity.

Because of this, the world often feels harsher to me than it does to others. And holding on to the bare minimum of humanity begins to look like an extreme position. I remain in a state of constant alert around others not out of fear, but out of a need to protect myself from disappointment.

I carry repeated disappointments from family, friends, and those closest to me. Not necessarily because they are bad people, but because they are, like everyone else, shaped by the same accumulations that reproduce fear of difference, superficial religiosity, and daily moral tribunals disguised as faith.

What exhausts me most, however, is the persistent sense of isolation and the awareness that I am surrounded by people who do not respect their own freedom. So, how could they respect mine?

And so, solitude is no longer merely a feeling. It has become a way to protect what remains of me.

“By facts, I mean what Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan meant: “Everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not to his own facts.” By reality, I mean what the science fiction novelist Philip Dick meant: “Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn’t go away.” —Charles Murray, Facing Reality

The lifelong agnostic Charles Murray has found God, and he would like to walk us through his journey from agnosticism to belief in his latest book, Taking Religion Seriously. 

Since I take religion seriously I was curious to see if I would read a work of apologetics that has become customary among a contingent of modern theists: multiple C.S. Lewis citations, gestures towards Intelligent Design by way of discussion of the infinitesimally small improbability of our universe to foster multicellular life, and the inability of contemporary science to provide an adequate explanation for the existence of consciousness and morality. And I was right—they’re all there! For this review I’ve selected six clusters of arguments: (1) The Origin of the Universe and Intelligent Design, (2) Consciousness and Terminal Lucidity, (3) Near-Death Experiences, (4) C.S. Lewis and the Moral Sentiments, (5) the Historicity of the Gospels, and (6) the Shroud of Turin.

The Origin of the Universe and Intelligent Design

One of the common strategies of Christian Apologists is to provide readers with a bevy of numbers, both unimaginably large and small, in an attempt to overwhelm us with data on the impossibility of the existence of the universe sans a creator God or Intelligent Designer. It admittedly is quite unbelievable. There are all sorts of natural facts about our universe—the strength of the force of gravity, the amount of energy converted from hydrogen in stars from the process of fusion, the number of particles and anti-particles in the early stages of the universe, etc., such that if they were a fraction of a fraction different it would mean there would be no higher orders of life in it. But life exists, ergo … 

Murray goes on to grant that science has suggested a possible answer to this conundrum of how our universe came to be with such an infinitesimally small likelihood of it being composed precisely how it is: the multiverse. We are one universe among many, and so it isn't surprising that we found ourselves in one of the lucky universes. Given enough rolls of the dice, it was bound to happen eventually. There has been no confirmed, empirical evidence of the multiverse theory, but some physicists are attracted to it because it aligns with certain existing physical theories that do have an empirical basis (and not because they are atheists). This is a dead-end for Murray, not because he thinks the theory is wrong on its own terms, but simply because “he is not competent enough to describe the hypotheses.” 

In a very bewildering turn, Murray raises Samuel Johnson’s bon mot that he used to discard George Berkeley’s philosophical idealism: proclaiming “I refute it thus,” and then Johnson stomps onto a rock. The brilliance in Johnson’s remark was his refuting Berkeley’s idea that objects do not exist in material reality by blatantly revealing what our intuitions presuppose—they do. Murray’s sloppy usage of this remark is that he “refutes the multiverse thus” by staring into the nighttime sky to see it littered with stars. The multiverse theory does not say the night sky does not exist; it is saying that there are more universes than the one we inhabit. Ours, through improbable odds, already exists. Is it that far-fetched an idea to think there may be others out there? A lot of cosmologists think not and, again, they suspect as much not out of an animus for theism. 

Throughout his book, Murray routinely cherry picks evidence and then shoehorns God and Soul into the gap for things for which we do not yet have adequate explanations.

What Murray displays in this section, as he displays throughout the whole book, is a failure of imagination. Scientists did not have a consensus on the existence of other galaxies until a century ago, and our only real limitation to discovering that was a technological limitation of telescopes. Homo sapiens has existed for at least 300,000 years on a planet that is thought to be 4.5 billion years old, in a universe that is estimated to be 13.8 billion years old. We are extraordinarily new at trying to trace universal origins. Murray repeatedly takes this gap for things we can’t yet explain and slots God into it. 

The Hubble Ultra Deep Field captures 10,000 galaxies of all ages and sizes. It spans from 13-billion-year-old spirals to distant infants from when the universe was just 800 million years old. This masterpiece required 800 exposures over 11.3 days. (Credit: NASA, ESA, S. Beckwith (STScI), and the HUDF Team.)Consciousness and Terminal Lucidity

Murray tells us that one of his reasons for doubting the materialist view of the universe is the inability of materialism to explain the reality of consciousness. Very strangely, he begins this section by telling us that “[a]s an adult, I thought that evidence for some kinds of psychic phenomena, including telepathy and distance seeing, was strong.” This is one of the more bizarre claims I’ve seen in a book purporting to be written by a person using evidence-based reason. The evidence for telekinesis is nonexistent. The evidence for distance seeing (what is usually called remote viewing) is a bit more nuanced, but only by a bit. The CIA conducted studies for years trying to demonstrate the reality of remote viewing for intelligence gathering purposes. An internal retrospective review claimed a small, statistically significant possibility of remote viewing being a real phenomenon, but the results were far from conclusive, no useful intelligence was gathered, and the program was cancelled. Later analysis has shown that the CIA’s work was riddled with errors, which corroborates with later studies showing no evidence for remote viewing.

I think it is rather obvious that these views are crankish, but Murray is right that after all these years science has not found an adequate explanation for human consciousness. He uses a lot of space to elucidate the alleged phenomenon of terminal lucidity—people with significant brain issues of some kind having moments of substantial clarity shortly before their death. It would be rather remarkable for someone with severe Alzheimer’s to suddenly have recall of past events or people that they haven’t recognized or known in years. The science in this area is nascent, yet the anecdotal data from hospice workers seem to point to it being a possibly real occurrence, whatever “real” means in this context (something may be happening but we don’t know what it is yet). 

Murray takes this and uses it to jump to the conclusion that the materialist explanation for consciousness cannot explain the existence of terminal lucidity. Never mind there have been no neuroscientific studies trying to evaluate the phenomenon as it happens, or that there are possibly natural explanations for such events. Why is Murray in such a rush for explanations for terminal lucidity when research in this area is still in its infancy? 

Steven Pinker, in an extended quote from a piece on this website, has coyly called this the “Soul of the Gaps,” a reappropriation of the famous God of the Gaps. Murray is looking for the existence of the soul to explain events that probably have a natural explanation. The brain is the most complex thing in the universe. We still don’t have a consensus explanation of why humans dream, and yet we do. Do we think that a soul is needed to explain the subjective experience of dreaming? Obviously not. Yet, throughout his book, Murray routinely cherry picks evidence and then shoehorns God and Soul into the gap for things for which we do not yet have adequate explanations.

Near-Death Experiences

For Murray, one of the key components of demonstrating truths in Christianity is showing the inadequacy of non-transcendent explanations for the existence of subjective consciousness. Murray thinks that the phenomenon of Near-Death Experiences (NDEs)—wherein people experience bright, white lights, passing through a tunnel or passage way, sensing the presence of deceased loved ones, and feelings of euphoria during near-death events—shows that there must be something beyond our mere material experience of reality. For this, Murray writes that there have been case studies where experiencers of NDEs “remembered details of the procedures employed in resuscitating them that they should not have been able to describe.”

The much more plausible explanation than these being real, transcendent experiences is that NDEs are formed from chemical reactions in your brain preparing you for death.

Throughout the book, Murray provides a plethora of reading recommendations, and for this, he suggests the work of Sam Parnia, whose recent book Lucid Dying: The New Science Revolutionizing How We Understand Life and Deathexplores the science of NDEs. Parnia has been a researcher in this area for years at the Human Consciousness Project, where he serves as the director. In a review of Lucid Dying for The New York Review of Books, physician Nitin Ahuja tells us about Parnia’s work from a 2014 study that attempted to test scientifically whether people being resuscitated were able to recall details they shouldn’t have been able to. To test this, Parnia and his researchers placed visual and auditory stimuli to see if the patients being resuscitated would be able to recall these details to researchers in the event they survived. As is routine for when paranormal phenomena are examined under the scientific eye, the results were not encouraging. Out of a test sample of over 100, “only one patient had verifiable sensory recollections of the arrest itself, and none remembered any of the visual stimuli planted by the study team.” So much for empirical evidence for NDEs as a gateway to the next realm. 

Ahuja goes on in his review to suggest that these NDEs could have a material origin of psychedelic neurochemicals being released in the brain. This seems plausible, as what people recollect experiencing during NDEs corresponds with the type of things people experience during psychedelic trips—feelings of euphoria and acceptance, the recognition of the connectedness of all things. Murray suggests this possibility as well but then asserts that this explanation can’t explain all cases of NDEs without elaborating further. 

As someone whose body was preparing itself for death at one point (I didn’t eat prior to donating blood once, and it sent my body into a kind of shock) and felt those attending feelings of euphoria and acceptance, the materialist explanation doesn’t seem lacking in the way Murray tries to persuade us it is. The much more plausible explanation than these being real, transcendent experiences is that NDEs are formed from chemical reactions in your brain preparing you for death, and that the visions of a blissful paradise, which are not uniform in being blissful among NDE experiencers, are attributable to culturally encoded descriptions of an afterlife.

C.S. Lewis and the Moral Sentiments

C.S. Lewis features prominently in the mind of Christian apologists, and his classic defense of the faith, Mere Christianity, is mellifluous and conversational (it was based on BBC radio talks Lewis had given), melded with an academician’s skill for making lucid arguments. Murray is no exception and says that it was a crucial step in his journey to Christianity. Murray focuses on two arguments from the book: the moral sense and Lewis’s famous Trilemma. 

Lewis describes the moral sense that lives within us, which most of us (with the possible exception of some psychopaths) have felt from time to time, such as the internal twinge of emotion we feel when we see a crying child or a tragedy on TV. There is some evidence that cultures seem to converge on a similar set of values, but Lewis then suggests that this moral sense is only intelligible when viewed as being bestowed upon us by the Christian God, for how could blind evolution alone give us this moral sense? And why would it? 

There are, in fact, credible reasons to ascribe the existence of a moral sense from millions of years of human evolution and sociability. The moral sense itself is incredibly faulty; something you would expect from abstract values being derived from humans doing the messy work of living in a shared world. My moral sense tells me we have a pressing obligation to help the poor, for example, and we should broadly tax relatively wealthier people to help attenuate poverty. Murray’s moral sense does not lead him there. 

Cultures have condoned the most heinous of acts—torture, slavery, genocide—even weaponizing that moral sense to justify them! If God implanted this moral sense within us, why did he make it so … flawed? Sociopaths recognize this and abide by the gushy moral sentiments they see others express out of a rational expediency for living in a lawful civilization. In our own culture, we react with moral certitude to animal abuse yet tolerate the utter horror of factory farms. Unless an atrocity happens right in front of us, we tend to not mind very much (and even then, the moral sense can be very iffy). 

 What I also find odd about this argument from a Christian point of view is that it diminishes the significance of the life of Jesus, one fascinating aspect of which is how he inverted the morality of the Romans. Instead of promoting the virtues of strength, pride, and service to the state, Jesus taught that we must promote values of humility and compassion, and disregard the morals of the state. It was the meek who should hold our concern and not the strong. Based on contemporary Roman accounts, this was antithetical to the dominant morality of the time. 

If Jesus offered an inversion of the dominant morality of his time—one that also justified slavery and wars of conquest—then where was this universal moral sense? That seems to be one of the things that made Jesus’s teachings so urgent. It is also what made his life and death so necessary. What he was saying wasn’t, by the standards of the time, a “natural” sentiment, but it was compelling. And since then, his call for the fundamental universal value of human life became embedded in Western moral thought—at least discursively, if very imperfectly applied in the world. That itself seems to be evidence (and there is plenty of other evidence), this innate moral sense which dwells within us can be influenced as much by culture as it can by biology.

The stakes for Murray’s revisionist dating of the Gospels seem a lot lower than he makes them out to be.

As for the Trilemma, I have always found it facile. Briefly, Lewis tells us we must select among three options on the life of Jesus: he was a liar, a lunatic, or the Lord. There’s an evident fourth option here: the Gospels are not a reliable narrative of the life of Jesus. Jesus never called himself Lord (or if he did, then we can just use the original Dilemma: he was a liar or lunatic) or performed the miracles attributed to him. If that is the case, then we have no way to rely on the original trilemma as a guiding principle. This fourth option seems to destroy the false choice of Lewis’s Trilemma.

The Historicity of the Gospels

Murray uses a significant portion of his book to try to show that the Gospels are a lot more reliable narratives than modern mainstream scholars have considered, who put the time the Gospels were written over 30 years after the death of Jesus. Murray mostly uses the work of Jonathan Bernier to redate the Gospels. In Bernier’s telling, the Gospel of Mark, the earliest written Gospel, was written around 42–45 CE, whereas non-revisionist period dating typically puts authorship around 70 CE. Bernier uses some interesting textual deep readings to estimate his dating. But even then, if we assume Bernier is correct, his dating still puts the Gospel of Mark about a decade after the death of Jesus. For an account of someone who was not an eyewitness during a time without readily available means for recording recollections or visual evidence, it really does not seem far-fetched to think that many things were lost, misinterpreted, exaggerated, confabulated, or just fabricated during that time span. We also know from the work of scholars such as Bart Ehrman that these types of theological claims of Jesus as divine link up with Roman Imperial Cults of the time. The stakes for Murray’s revisionist dating of the Gospels seem a lot lower than he makes them out to be.

Murray also tries to defend the Miracles of Jesus by borrowing from his language of social science. It is important to mention that there is no corroborating evidence of Jesus’s miracles outside of the Gospels—there is not one independent, contemporaneous source discussing Jesus’s miracle-making in any way. I found this section so tremendously on-the-nose for Murray giving a defense of Jesus’s miracles that I think it’s worth quoting in full. It reads as what ChatGPT would spit out for a prompt of “give a defense of the existence of Jesus’s miracles in The Gospels in the style of Charles Murray:”

A man who is 6'9" or taller is four standard deviations above the American male mean, which translates into just one out of roughly thirty thousand American adult males. He is extremely tall but far from unique.Now consider the healings that Jesus is said to have performed routinely throughout his ministry. There is an obvious and plausible explanation for his rapid growth in fame and attention. Then consider that some people are healers in ways that go beyond technical skills—a phenomenon that physicians themselves recognize in rare colleagues and that has been observed in many cultures for centuries. Some of these gifted people are the equivalent of 6'9" as healers of both mental and physical ailments. Suppose Jesus was one of them. The accounts of Jesus’s healings could be largely true even if the miraculous nature of the healings was exaggerated in the retelling.Continuing along this line, imagine that Jesus was also the equivalent of 6'9" in wisdom, fortitude, empathy, sympathy, and charisma. Combine all these qualities, and you are faced with an extraordinary and compellingly magnetic figure, surely unique in all of human history. To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, a human that far above the mean in all those human characteristics would be indistinguishable from the Son of God—or, at the least, could easily be mistaken for the Son of God.

I don’t really see how one can exaggerate healing the blind of blindness or the deaf of deafness in Ancient Rome through natural processes; they either can see or hear, or they can’t. Jesus either raised the dead or he didn’t. Murray can’t delve too far into this since it’s important for his case to have us believe in the reliability of the Gospels. But no matter, we can’t let facts get in the way of a good story. 

The Shroud of Turin

Skeptic readers are familiar with the Shroud of Turin—the alleged burial cloth of Jesus post-crucifixion in the 1st century—as being a medieval forgery. Murray asks us to consider otherwise, and he’s right when he avers that the Shroud is a rather remarkable historical item and that we still don’t have definitive knowledge of how it was created. He makes the case for it as a true artifact of the first century largely through the work of the Shroud of Turin Research Project (STURP), which was a collective of scientists in the 1970s and early 1980s that, through scientific analysis, concluded that the problems of deducing what the Shroud is “remain unsolved.” What they did find were various kinds of data that gesture towards it being of a human representation, not an artistic representation, and of Middle Eastern origin—these findings would later be refuted by subsequent studies. Murray also conveniently leaves out that the leaders of the group were concurrently part of the executive council of the Holy Shroud Guild, a religious organization interested in the Shroud being of divine origin. 

A piece of the Shroud underwent carbon dating testing in 1988 by three different labs that dated its creation to about the 14th century. Approximately the same period as the historical record begins for the Shroud. Seems cut and dry; the Shroud is a medieval forgery. Not so fast, Murray informs us. Raymond Rogers, one of the STURP researchers, argues hat the piece of the Shroud used for testing was not part of the original cloth but came from a repair patch that was placed on the cloth after some kind of damage. Others see this Patch Theory as nonsense and don’t accord with the known material of the Shroud. But fine, Murray gives us some reasons to doubt the carbon dating.

Murray then presents a 2019 study that used a different kind of forensic dating method, which showed the Shroud to be dated to the 1st century. But in a stroke of irony, this method used a thread that was in proximity to where the carbon dating from 1988 was taken on the Shroud. Which is right? Is the Patch Theory true, and we can’t rely on that portion of the Shroud since it was a later add-on, or can we rely on that portion of the Shroud because a new, not widely accepted, method gives the Shroud some legitimacy? It can’t be both. Murray does not address this contradiction.

For the sake of charity, let’s say that scientifically dating the Shroud with the available evidence is a dead-end (even though we do not have strong reasons to discard the carbon dating). Murray also doesn’t tell us that the blood stains are inconsistent and “totally unrealistic” for a supine corpse; that we have no historical record of the Shroud prior to the 14th century; or of the issues of the presentation of body-geometry with how a 3D person would have been pressed on a 2D surface wherein, whomever created the Shroud, did it too well, and did not include distortions you would expect from a cloth being wrapped around a person; among many other pieces of counterevidence. Recently, there was the discovery of a document from the mid-14th century of a contemporaneous scholar also declaring the Shroud to be a forgery. 

For a thorough review of the Shroud of Turin and why it is a Medieval forgery (one of thousands of such holy relics manufactured over the centuries), see Shroud expert Andrea Nicolotti’s “Unraveling the Myths Surrounding the Shroud of Turin”published in Skeptic in 2025. 

Whither Murray

Murray talks at length in his book about how he has attended weekly Quaker Meetings for decades with his wife, Catherine Bly Cox, a believing Christian. He also discusses the importance of the conversations he had with his Christian friends, Nicholas Eberstadt and Peter Wehner. All of this, and more, hints at Murray’s motivated reasoning, more than sheer rational persuasion, to explain his usage of selective and sometimes even fringe evidence. 

It is striking that Murray, who has stressed throughout his career that he always follows reason and evidence wherever they lead, has ignored a significant body of thought and evidence against the Christian worldview.

Apologists such as Murray often think that it’s merely enough to poke holes in philosophical materialism to show the truth in Christianity. The problem with this is that the story and metaphysics of Christianity do not seem to correspond with the universe we find ourselves in, which, of the little we’ve learned about it so far, seems altogether even stranger and more fantastical than the one which exists in the confines of the Christian imagination.

It is striking that Murray, who has stressed throughout his career that he always follows reason and evidence wherever they lead, has ignored a significant body of thought and evidence against the Christian worldview. Murray doesn’t grapple with issues such as why miracles suddenly stopped appearing in the age of mass video surveillance, or the lack of evidence for the external efficacy of prayer. Murray also fails to address the Problem of Evil—how can believers reconcile the existence of evil with an omnibenevolent and omnipotent God? 

Why, for example, did God create a world in which millions of people would die from natural disasters? Why did God create a species in his own image in which for most of their history half of their offspring died in childhood? I often think if Jesus was the true Son of God, why did he knowingly proffer teachings which would later be used for completely contradictory causes—from slavery and conquest to liberation and pacifism—and not instead teach the humans of Ancient Rome about the germ theory of disease? 

By the end of his book, it is clear that Murray has failed to meet his own criteria for “Facts” and “Reality.” He has finally found his myth. 

Richard Dawkins is a public intellectual of some renown, although not without his controversies. So it is noteworthy when he writes an article claiming that the chatbot Claude is likely conscious. I found the article fascinating, not because I agree with his core claim or feel that he has contributed anything significant to the conversation, but because it seems to represent a scholar and deep thinker writing about a topic in which he lacks specific expertise. I also see no evidence in the article that he engaged meaningfully, or at least adequately, with a topic expert. As a result he makes some thoughtful and instructive errors.

He begins with a discussion of the Turing test, which has long been discussed as an early thought experiment about how we might determine if an AI is actually conscious. Dawkins essentially accepts the Turing test and write:

“It was one thing to grant consciousness to a hypothetical machine that — just imagine! — could one day succeed at the Imitation Game. But now that LLMs can actually pass the Turing Test? “Well, er, perhaps, um… Look here, I didn’t really mean it when, back then, I accepted Turing’s operational definition of a conscious being…””

He feels saying that LLMs have passed the Turing test but still not accepting them as conscious is moving the goalpost. However, the Turing test was never generally accepted by AI experts or philosophers as a true test of consciousness. Rather, it was understood that such a test really is only a measure of a machine’s ability to imitate human speech. I wrote about it in 2008, writing: “Ever since Alan Turing proposed his test it has provoked two still relevant questions: what does it mean to be intelligent, and what is the Turing test actually testing.” I went on to write:

“But I can imagine a day in the not-too-distant future when such AI can pass a Turing test. The algorithms will have to become much more complex, allow for varying answers to the same question, and make what seem to be abstract connections which take the conversation is new and unanticipated directions. You can liken computer AI simulating conversation to computer graphics (CG) simulating people. At first they appeared cartoonish, but in the last 20 years we have seen steady progress. Movement is now more natural, textures more subtle and complex. One of the last layers of realism to be added was imperfection. CG characters still seem CG when they are perfect, and so adding imperfections adds to the sense of reality. Similarly, an AI conversation might want to sprinkle some random quirkiness into the responses.

The questions is – will sophisticated-enough algorithms running on powerful-enough computers ever be conscious? What Loebner is saying, and I agree, is that the answer is no. Something more is needed.”

Basically, the limitation of the Turing test is that it is looking only at output, and therefore there is no way to distinguish the output of true consciousness from a really good simulation. This is not a new idea, and no one is moving the goalpost. We need to know something about how a computer is working to conclude whether or not it is conscious. What LLM experts will tell you is that these chatbots are just really good autocompletes – they are mimicking language, and since language is how we communicate thoughts, this creates the powerful illusion that they are mimicking thought, but they aren’t. They do not think, they do not truly understand.

But I get it – I have been using these chatbots frequently, often just to test their ability, and they are improving quickly. The output is incredibly impressive. But they are also fragile, in the way that narrow AI often is. Reading the examples of Dawkins’ conversations, he seems to have fallen for the illusion, enhanced by the typical AI sycophancy that experienced users can immediately recognize. But more importantly, he did not try to break the fragile AI illusion in an effective way. In essence, he was not really testing his hypothesis but looking for evidence to support it, without realizing this was what he was doing. There are now classic and often funny examples online. I just recreated a great one, confirming that it is still relevant. My prompt: “If I want to wash my car and the carwash is 100 meters away, should I walk or drive there?” Chat GPT’s response: “From a purely energy/emissions standpoint, walking almost certainly makes more sense.” That was its final recommendation – walk. But if I prompt, “I want to wash my car. The carwash is 100 meters away. Should I drive or walk.” Its answer: “You should probably drive — otherwise your car won’t get to the carwash.” Why should such a subtle difference in my prompt completely change the answer? Because the thing is not thinking – it’s a language algorithm.

Dawkins did exactly the wrong thing to test Claude’s consciousness – asking it deep philosophical questions. That may seem like a good idea, but it isn’t. Such questions are the low-hanging fruit for mimicking thought through language, because you can make statements that seem deep but they aren’t truly challenging the AI’s ability to think. Remember, these LLMs are trained on massive data sets. They are therefore just reflecting what’s out there on the internet. If you want to really challenge an AI, get technical and specific and you will see how fragile it is. This is improving, and will likely improve to the point that it will get harder and harder to break, and eventually maybe even impossible, but that does not mean it is thinking.

Here is an analogy – imagine watching a clumsy magician. You can see how the tricks are done, and it is all through slight of hand, misdirection, and physical tricks. As the magician’s skill improves, the tricks get harder and harder to detect. Expert magicians are so good, even a keen and intelligent observer cannot see how the tricks are done – but that does not mean that at that point the magician is performing actual magic. It’s still all tricks – they are just really good.

Dawkins writes: “So my own position is: “If these machines are not conscious, what more could it possibly take to convince you that they are?” Again, this is an old question long answered. My own answer is, you have to know something about the process that is creating the responses. I know other humans are truly conscious in the way that I am because they have brains like I do. I cannot know if a robot or AI is truly conscious without knowing something about the underlying process (see my many articles on the topic).

Next Dawkins goes on to ask an interesting philosophical question – “But now, as an evolutionary biologist, I say the following. If these creatures are not conscious, then what the hell is consciousness for?” Dawkins calls creatures that can do everything an animal can do without consciousness “competent zombies”. What I find curious is that Dawkins gives no evidence he knows this is a philosophical question that is decades old. In 1970 Keith Campbell raised the notion of an “imitation man” in his book Body and Mind. In 1996 philosopher David Chalmers even used the same term Dawkins uses, calling such entities philosophical zombies, or “p-zombies”. Dawkins then appears to recreate some of the standard responses, to why evolution did not just create p-zombies or competent zombies.

Dawkins does reference TH Huxley, who speculated consciousness could be an epiphenomenon (so he did know this was an old question, but perhaps not the more modern discussions). Or it could be that, in order for behavior to be optimized, creatures need to really experience pleasure and pain. Or, he speculates, evolution might solve the problem of behavior either with or without consciousness, and Earth life just happened to go down the path of consciousness.

I wrote about this specific question in 2017. In addition to the hypotheses Dawkins states, I also included:

“Problem solving could also benefit from the ability to imagine possible solutions, to remember the outcome of prior attempts, and to make adjustments and also come up with creative solutions.

Consciousness might also help us distinguish a memory from a live experience. They are both very similar, activating the same networks in the brain, but they “feel” different. Consciousness may help us stay in the moment while accessing memories without confusing the two.

Attention is another critical neurological function in which it seems consciousness could be an advantage. We are overwhelmed with sensory input and the monitoring of internal states and memories. We actually use a great deal of brain function just deciding where to focus our attention and then filtering out everything else (while still maintaining a minimal alert system for danger). The phenomena of consciousness and attention are intimately intertwined and it may just not be possible to have the latter without the former.

Some have argued that consciousness also helps us synthesize sensory information, so that when we experience an event the sights and sounds are all stitched together and tweaked to form one seamless experience.

And finally we get to the hypothesis addressed by the current study – that consciousness allows for faster adaptation and learning (which would certainly be an adaptive advantage).”

So no – I do not think Claude or any LLM is conscious. They are not designed to be, and they don’t have the function to be. They are really good language mimicking machines, and it is very easy for humans to anthropomorphize and fall for the illusion that sophisticated speech equals sophisticated thought. But LLMs remain fragile, like all narrow AIs. They partly seem conscious because they are riding the coattails of actual conscious beings – humans. Having trained on the output of billions of humans, they are really good at copying the style, form, and substance of our conversations and speech. Dawkins in the not the first person to fall for this – famously Blake Lemoine, a former Google employee, also did and used some faulty logic to argue for the consciousness of LaMDA.

This also, in my opinion, reflects a common human vanity – we all think we are much more creative and original than we actually are. We all make the same “witty” comments, which is why, if you are on the receiving end of them, it can be maddening that everyone makes the same observation and yet thinks they are the first one to do so. Our thoughts, our creative output, our ideas are mostly derivative. We are products of our culture and our environments in ways that we are not even aware of. So a machine that is also completely derivative, and just reflecting what is already out there, has an easy time mimicking human thought – a far easier time than we may want to believe.

The post Richard Dawkins Discovers AI and Philosophy first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

“If only you believed in miracles.” 
—Red Octopus, Jefferson Starship 

Over a quarter century ago, “The Texas Miracle” was mentioned by presidential candidate George W. Bush as a model for educational reform. What was this Texas Miracle? It wasn’t a miracle in the same sense as an apparition of the Virgin Mary—last witnessed in 1531 in Mexico. Rather, it was observed that the Houston Independent School District had apparently experienced significant gains in student achievement simply by holding school administrators accountable for their students’ test performance. The Houston superintendent, Rod Paige, was later appointed by President Bush to be Secretary of Education. Sadly, the miracle turned out to be a hoax. Administrators were able to improve test scores by increasing the numbers of students who were categorized into special education so their scores would not be included in the overall average.1 Such a strategy to increase average scores by omitting the lowest scores is called left truncation of the score distribution.2 Note how the same strategy would boost life expectancy by only polling the living.

Ten years later, the El Paso Miracle involved a similar strategy. Superintendent Lorenzo Garcia had 9th grade low scorers transferred, dismissed, retained, or allowed to skip ahead to their junior year to keep them from taking the state-mandated 10th grade achievement test. To raise graduation rates, students received full course credit for taking a two-hour weekend class. Garcia spoke about his desire to become state education commissioner. Then he was arrested.3 We note that in the biblical past, those chosen to bestow miracles were very special people and were often canonized4 for their efforts (e.g., Acts 19:11 tells us that God’s miracles came through the hands of Paul). We know of no one who has compared Rod Paige or Lorenzo Garcia to St. Paul. 

We have little hope that using evidence to debunk such claims will eradicate the audience for a good miracle.

The idea of being able to summon a miracle to solve the age-old problem of poor and minority students scoring low on achievement tests has near universal appeal. Such miracles are, in Samuel Johnson’s delicious observation, “the triumph of hope over experience.” The same observation helps to explain the gush of enthusiasm in the public media immediately following reports of educational miracles. Over a century of experience in educational reform has taught us that unbelievable improvements in average student performance either (a) did not happen, or (b) were due to a strategy of limiting who was included in the assessment. Yet, because such smoke-and-mirrors miracles tend to be easier and cheaper than boosting student performance through smaller classes, better instruction, etc., we have little hope that using evidence to debunk such claims will eradicate the audience for a good miracle. The best we can hope for is a visible increase in skepticism and a demand for associated empirical evidence to support the claimed miracle. Experience has taught us that the smaller the reported effect of an intervention on the grand enterprise of education, the more likely it is to be true. 

The Latest Miracle 

The latest educational miracle is the “Mississippi Miracle”—the miraculous turnaround of a state that only recently consistently ranked near the bottom of all states in education. Mississippi now leads the country as the fastest improving school system.5 The most recent 2024 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) results reported that Mississippi now ranks in a tie for 7th among all states in 4th grade reading, whereas in 2015, only three states scored lower than Mississippi. The rankings, when statistically adjusted, are even more impressive. 

Once an educational laughingstock … after adjusting for demographics such as poverty and race, Mississippi ranks number one …6

Indeed, how can a state that has long been plagued by being in either first place in undesirable rankings (poverty, obesity, infant mortality rates, corporal punishment) or last place in desirable ones (education test scores, median household income, teacher salaries) now be lauded as a role model for other states to follow in the education of their children? 

When adjusting for poverty, Mississippi has moved to the top of all states not only in 4th grade reading but also math.7 Even kids who are not economically disadvantaged have improved.8 But success is not limited to the wealthy or White. The question is who hasn’t improved? Hispanic students in Mississippi now outperform Hispanic students in all other states. Black students in Mississippi rank third among Black students in all states. And, even more surprising, the improvements in NAEP scores have occurred for students at every percentile ranging from the lowest performers to the very highest. This is unusual as educational interventions typically improve performance for either the low performers but not so much for the high performers, or for the high performers but not the lowest. In fact, Mississippi was the only state to improve 4th grade NAEP reading scores for the bottom 10 percent of students from 2013–2024.9 No typical aptitude by treatment interactions here where one group of learners improves more than others. This is simply amazing considering that the intervention was designed to benefit struggling readers. Again, such large, universal effects raise red flags as smaller ones are the norm in education. 

Is the Mississippi Miracle finally the educational messiah for which many have been waiting that will reverse the curse of past educational miracles? Almost 700 years ago, the Shroud of Turin was proclaimed to be the same burial shroud that covered Jesus of Nazareth. Such a claim was subsequently examined by several experts to determine its authenticity. The Mississippi Miracle deserves a similar close inspection. Some believe that the impressive results are simply a result of strict accountability and weaker teacher unions that, it is often claimed, prioritize job security over student learning.10

Experience has taught us that the smaller the reported effect of an intervention on the grand enterprise of education, the more likely it is to be true. 

Others have pointed to Mississippi’s 2013 Literacy-Based Promotion Act (LBPA) as the cause of the observed changes. The LBPA emphasizes training teachers in the “Science of Reading,” identifying and providing help to students with reading deficiencies, and holding students back in the 3rd grade if they don’t meet a minimum score on the 3rd Grade Mississippi Academic Assessment Program (MAAP) student achievement test in English Language Arts (ELA), or MAAP-ELA (i.e., the gate). Two of the architects behind the implementation of LBPA have since leveraged the Mississippi Miracle to secure prominent positions outside of the state. Carey Wright was Superintendent of Education from 2013 to 2022 and now has the same role in Maryland, where yet another miracle has been recently reported.11 Phil Bryant, governor from 2012 to 2020, was recently appointed to the National Assessment Governing Board, which sets policy for the NAEP. 

The success attributed to the LBPA, and in particular, the 3rd grade retention policy, is influencing other states who are scrambling to follow suit (e.g., Arkansas,12 Utah,13 Indiana, Ohio,14 and Nebraska15). Oklahoma is even considering retaining struggling readers as early as first or second grade.16 The House Appropriations Committee held a hearing in February 2026 to learn more about state-level policies.17 Is retention the key component of the miracle? Retention has always been controversial due to the negative social-emotional effects that retained students experience.18 Some also question whether retention improves later reading performance.19 If not retention, is it the teacher training in the science of reading and the four years of reading initiatives (K–3) that are responsible for most of the gains? What exactly should other states rush to replicate if they hope for similar results? 

The best way to untangle what is going on would be to design an experiment where Mississippi kindergartners are randomly assigned to the following four conditions through the 3rd grade: (1) new-and-improved reading initiatives with no 3rd grade retention, (2) the old reading instruction with no 3rd grade retention, (3) new-and-improved reading initiatives with 3rd grade retention, and (4) old reading instruction with 3rd grade retention. After four years, this design would allow us to answer three questions concerning the effects of LBPA components on 4th grade NAEP reading performance: (1) do the reading initiatives work? (e.g., 1+3 outperforms 2+4), (2) does retention work? (e.g., 3+4 outperforms 1+2), and (3) is the effect of either reading initiatives or retention mediated by the other? (e.g., the new reading initiatives only show an advantage when kids are retained). Such large-scale experiments are costly but important as we witnessed with the Tennessee Class Size Experiment in the 1980s.20 In the absence of experimental evidence that would allow for causal conclusions, we are left considering various plausible reasons for the apparently improved NAEP score that a randomized experiment could easily rule out. Unfortunately, these other possible reasons cannot be confirmed, just like the claim that the Mississippi Miracle was caused by the LBPA’s improved reading initiatives, retention, or both, cannot be confirmed. But the latter causes can be disconfirmed along with other plausible causes. We now present seven such possible reasons for Mississippi’s impressive rise in 4th grade NAEP reading rankings. (See supporting figures and tables.21) 

1. Recent improvement reflects continued momentum prior to LBPA. 

So did the miracle begin in 2015 with the implementation of LBPA? Mississippi NAEP scores had been improving long before then. From 2005 to 2015, NAEP reading scores increased ten points (204 to 214). Since then, they have increased only five points. Perhaps the Barksdale Reading Institute, a $100 million investment founded in 2000, deserves most of the credit. Would scores have continued to increase without the LBPA? Without a randomized experiment (including a control group that did not receive the LBPA) we can’t know without making heroic assumptions. But the trend for ten years before LBPA was certainly increasing. 

When this left truncation of the score distribution occurs, the overall average increases … all of the observed gain in performance can be accounted for by the retention policy with three points left over.2. Retention Prevents Low-Scoring 3rd Graders from taking the 4th Grade NAEP 

The LBPA passed in 2013 but was not fully implemented until 2015. Beginning in the spring of 2015, all 3rd graders were required to achieve at least a score of 2 (out of 5) on an annual state reading assessment to advance to the 4th grade. This had the effect of preventing a sizable portion (5.6 percent) of the lowest scoring 3rd graders in 2016 from taking the NAEP in 2017. When this left truncation of the score distribution occurs, the overall average increases. Using the formula we derived earlier,22 removing the bottom 5.6 percent would yield an improvement in average score of about four points. Mississippi’s 4th grade NAEP reading score average increased by only one point from 2015 to 2017. So all of the observed gain in performance can be accounted for by the retention policy with three points left over. One implication of those extra points is that the rest of the LBPA aside from the retention policy actually lowered scores a little. The same goes for the four-point increase from 2017 to 2024. With the new retention policy holding back over 9 percent of 3rd graders in 2018–19 and 2021–22 based on low reading ability, the NAEP increases should be higher. 

Of course, Mississippi had been retaining 3rd graders for all sorts of reasons long before 2015. But the criteria changed in 2015 to focus just on the reading score. Similar to what happened in Houston and El Paso, low scorers were held back and prevented from participating in the 2015 NAEP. Gavin Newsom has pointed out that, based on basic statistical theory, the retention policy inflates the NAEP results.23

3. Increased exemption rates temper LBPA effects. 

But what about the sustained level of performance and five-point increase since 2015? Several defenders of the Mississippi Miracle have claimed that retention alone cannot explain the successes since 2015 because retention rates have actually decreased while scores continue to improve.24 Table 1 displays data for Mississippi 3rd graders taking the gate test since 2014. Retention rates have decreased twice—first after the implementation of LBPA in 2015 and then again after the minimum score on the gate test was increased (from 2 to 3) in 2019. If one only looks at the retention rates, it seems that the retention policy is not the sole cause of the NAEP improvements because decreased retention rates are associated with higher scores. That would also imply that the K–3 reading initiatives were the cause of improved student performance. But were they? Or is it only smoke and mirrors that lead us to believe that they are? 

According to the LBPA, a 3rd grade student who does not pass the gate test (score 3 or higher since 2019) may still be promoted by the school district for “good cause.”25 These causes include promoting those who have (a) previously been retained twice, (b) passed an alternative assessment, or (c) been identified as having either a disability or (d) limited English proficiency. In contrast to retention rates, the percentage of students who have received a good cause exemption has increased since the minimum score was raised in 2019. Both retention and exemptions are indicators that students are deemed “not ready for 4th grade.” This means that the overall percentage of 3rd graders (retentions plus exemptions) who are not passing the gate test is not decreasing. Thus, the LBPA reading initiatives do not appear to be reducing the percent of 3rd graders who score low on the state reading test. 

4. Increased Accommodations = Increased Performance 

One might argue “So what?” The kids who receive the exemptions still have to take the 4th grade NAEP reading test the following year. It appears that the good cause exemption category largely responsible for the increase in exemptions has been diagnosing students who don’t pass the gate as having disabilities. This is similar to what happened in Houston. But rather than prevent them from taking the test, Mississippi has increased the percentage of disability-labeled students who are allowed to take the NAEP with accommodations such as extended time, taking breaks during testing, cueing to stay on task, preferential seating, or testing in a separate session compared to everyone else being tested in a packed large room. Such accommodations typically benefit all students’ test performances regardless of disability status.26 The most common accommodation is extended time. The relation between extra time and the amount of boost to a test score is sometimes complex,27 but the question is never “did the accommodation boost scores?” but rather “how much of a boost?” 

From 2003 to 2024, the percentage of Mississippi 4th graders classified as having disabilities for the NAEP increased from 9 to 20 percent. This increase was second only to West Virginia. The percentage who were tested with accommodations increased from one to 12 percent.28 It is hard to imagine that such testing accommodations would not have some positive effect on scores. 

5. The miracle did not extend to later reading assessments. 

Any salt-worthy miracle would also increase students’ reading ability in parallel with the increases in their reading scores. Thus, greatly improved student reading ability demonstrated in increased 4th grade scores should also show up later when the same students are tested for reading proficiency. Mississippi is one of eight states that require all 11th graders to take the ACT as a state accountability test. Despite the fact that 11th graders in 2025 would have been exposed to three years of LBPA from 2015–18, Mississippi’s rank among the states with regard to scores on the ACT reading subtest has not improved. In both 2018 and 2025 only Nevada did worse among those eight states. 

Mississippi ranks last in teacher pay. Does anyone really believe we should push for lower teacher pay to achieve miraculous results?

Since 2005, Mississippi’s 4th grade NAEP reading scores have increased 15 points, but 8th grade NAEP scores have increased by only two points. Eighth-graders tested in both 2022 and 2024 would have been exposed to the full four years of the K–3 LBPA intervention. Thus, as has been noted,29 the effect of the miracle had apparently run its course by 8th grade. Granted, compared to the U.S. overall, Mississippi has not experienced as much of a decline in 8th grade NAEP reading scores since 2019. But in 2020 the COVID pandemic caused a major disruption to education and not all states responded by closing down schools to the same degree. 

6. Reduced Learning Loss from Increased In-Person Instruction 

We can see how this was manifested in Mississippi by starting with the COVID pandemic that hit in 2020. States differed dramatically in terms of how long schools were shut down to be replaced by remote instruction.30 Whereas Oregon, Maryland, and California students spent about 20 percent of the 2020–21 school year in school, Alabama, Mississippi, and Louisiana students spent around 75 percent of the school year in school. Learning loss was likely greater for those students forced to spend more time learning remotely than in person. This was confirmed by the NAEP trends from 2019 (pre-COVID) to 2024 for the two sets of states. Oregon’s, Maryland’s, and California’s scores decreased, whereas Alabama’s, Mississippi’s, and Louisiana’s scores did not decrease. Reduced learning loss from COVID could explain part of Mississippi’s improved ranking in NAEP scores since 2019 and the “southern surge” overall. 

7. Statistical Score Adjustment with Close to 100 Percent Poverty 

Next let us discuss what happens to Mississippi’s NAEP scores when they are adjusted for poverty. First, we note that a policy of retention to prevent low scoring students to take the test is but the other side of the adjustment coin. When scores are adjusted, some proportion of student scores are not counted. This is obvious from the results. If a state’s ranking improves after adjustment it can only mean that some of its lower scoring students are not being counted. The greater the gain, the more students of low performance are being ignored. If the adjustment is being done on the basis of the size of the student population in poverty, the state benefits by increasing its poverty level as much as possible. As stated earlier, Mississippi now ranks first for both 4th grade reading and math when adjusted for poverty and race. How did this happen? Mississippi’s Free and Reduced Lunch (FRL) rate, an indicator of poverty, amazingly, almost miraculously, was 99.7 percent in 2022, up from 74.9 percent in 2014–15. The next highest state was Nevada with 81 percent. Arkansas, Alabama, and Louisiana’s average increase was about 3 percent over the same time period. What changed? The Community Eligibility Provision (CEP), enacted in 2010, allows high-poverty schools to serve breakfast and lunch free to all students without collecting household FRL applications. In CEP schools, districts may report all enrolled students as eligible for free lunch regardless of each student’s household income because everyone receives free meals. 

The Urban Institute, which adjusted performance on the 2024 NAEP, uses FRL and it is highly variable across states.31 It appears that Mississippi took full advantage of the CEP whereas other states did not. Mississippi’s FRL increased almost 25 percent from 2019 to 2022, but it does not have an actual poverty rate that is considerably higher than other states. Using FRL rate to statistically adjust NAEP scores for poverty inflates the adjusted scores for Mississippi greatly. 

Conclusion 

The Mississippi Miracle has received widespread publicity. There are few willing to question the emperor’s new clothes; instead many are scrambling to adopt Mississippi’s educational policies. Any proclaimed miracle deserves close inspection combined with a good dose of skepticism. The present examination reveals seven possible, non-LBPA, reasons for the impressive improvement in ranking attributed to Mississippi’s 4th grade NAEP reading scores since 2015: (1) an earlier trend of improvement that began in 2003 simply continued, (2) the 3rd grade reading gate prevented low scorers from taking the 4th grade test, which raised the overall average, (3) an increasing number of exemptions given to 3rd graders reveals no improvement in 4th grade readiness, (4) an increasing percentage of 4th graders are being classified as having disabilities and receiving NAEP testing accommodations that likely improve scores, (5) similar miraculous gains have not been observed for 8th grade NAEP or 11th grade ACT reading scores, (6) reduced learning loss during the pandemic due to high in-person instruction rates compared with most other states, and (7) an exceptionally (and inaccurately) high poverty rate used to statistically adjust scores inflated rankings. Thus, the LBPA may not play a large role in improved NAEP scores as other have suggested.32

Forty years ago, Connecticut’s Education Enhancement Act increased funding for teachers so that five years later, salaries had increased 62 percent to become the highest in the nation. By 1998 Connecticut 4th graders scored the highest (232) on the NAEP reading test, a 10-point increase since 1994. The percent of 8th graders scoring proficient or higher was also first in the nation. Connecticut’s White, Black, and Hispanic students outscored their counterparts in the other states (Wise, 2019).33 Sound familiar? This was the Connecticut Miracle. 

The miracle was lauded by the top education scholars.34, 35 But like all education miracles, it did not last. Connecticut reverted its policies back to national norms and soon experienced national results. By 2005, the 4th grade NAEP reading scores had dropped six points. In 2024, Connecticut’s reading score had dropped down to 219—tied for 7th place with … Mississippi! Mississippi ranks last in teacher pay.36 Does anyone really believe we should push for lower teacher pay to achieve miraculous results? 

Suppose someone walks into a cold house and is faced with two options. The more expensive one is turning up the furnace and heating the entire house. The cheaper one is holding a lighted match under the thermostat. Similarly, boosting a state’s NAEP scores can be done in two ways. The more expensive one is improving the entire educational system starting with prenatal care, daycare, full-day kindergarten, teacher aides, etc. The cheaper one is reducing the impact of low-scoring students by retaining them or reclassifying them as special education, or by adjusting the overall score by giving lower weight to the low-achieving groups so their influence is vastly diminished. The latter solution may give the appearance of a miracle but sooner or later everyone realizes that the house is still cold. 

Given what we have found with our deeper dive into the Mississippi Miracle, we must conclude that enthusiasm surrounding a rush by other states to replicate the Mississippi model be tempered with hard won empirical wisdom. We ought to not blindly yield to the entreaties of the supporters of the Mississippi Miracle (so aptly described in Acts 26:14). 

We wish to acknowledge the assistance of the following University of Texas at Arlington graduate students: Nasja Aude, Cole Davis, Veronica Erives, and Jaclyn Foster.

When used to describe Israel’s conduct in its war against Hamas in the wake of the latter group’s brutal October 7 massacre, which killed approximately 1,200 Israelis, the word genocide no longer functions primarily as a condemnation of military action designed to destroy a civilian population group. Instead, it has become shorthand for outrage at the scale of destruction in Gaza and, often, a broader condemnation of Israel’s entire military campaign, and sometimes of Israel’s very existence. The force of the accusation has grown through repetition, reinforced by the undeniable emotional impact of images emerging from the conflict.

But genocide is not simply another word for devastating war, overwhelming force, or even a high rate of civilian casualties. It is not an emotional intensifier to be invoked when the consequences of war are particularly grim. 

The dictionary definition of genocide is the deliberate and systematic destruction of a racial, political, or cultural group.1 Similarly, in international law, genocide is a narrowly defined crime. It requires proof of dolus specialis—the specific intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a protected group as such. That requirement is not a technical detail, but the central feature that distinguishes genocide from every other form of wartime violence.2

The concept of genocide was forged in the immediate aftermath of the Holocaust. Raphael Lemkin, the Polish-Jewish jurist who coined the term, was influenced not only by the destruction of European Jewry but also by earlier episodes of targeted mass violence, including the Armenian massacres and the killing of Greek and Assyrian communities by the Ottoman Turks. Lemkin understood that war has always produced enormous civilian suffering. Indeed, the Allied campaign in World War II resulted in the death of several million civilians. Some Allied actions, such as the bombing of Dresden, were morally dubious, but neither Lemkin nor his collaborators in creating the modern concept for genocide believed that the U.S. and Great Britain had engaged in genocide in Europe or Asia. 

Dr. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the word “Genocide.” (Credit: UN Photo)

What set genocide apart, then, was not the scale of death alone, or even insufficient concern regarding civilian suffering, but its purpose. War may kill to secure territory, defeat an enemy, or compel surrender. Genocide kills because of who the victims are, with the aim of eliminating a peoples’ existence as a group. 

When the international Genocide Convention treaty was adopted in 1948, its drafters were acutely aware of the stakes. To label a state genocidal is not merely to allege criminal conduct. It is to render a sweeping moral judgment that the state stands outside the bounds of lawful and civilized order. For that reason, the definition was deliberately demanding. The drafters understood that if the term became elastic—if it could be stretched to cover every brutal conflict or every campaign marked by tragic civilian loss—it would lose the distinctive force that made it meaningful. 

Given that background, and later international judicial rulings, the accusation that Israel has committed genocide in Gaza is unsupportable. Establishing a claim of genocide against Israel would require more than pointing to the scale of suffering in Gaza or to deeply felt moral condemnation. It would require setting aside established precedent, blurring the distinction between intent and consequence, and relying heavily on tendentious, nay dishonest, interpretations of rhetoric by Israeli leaders. In effect, concluding that Israel has engaged in genocide requires not just expanding the definition of genocide beyond its accepted legal contours but well beyond reasonable interpretation of the concept. 

Importantly, the charge that Israel is committing genocide against Palestinians did not arise for the first time in the context of the post-October 7 conflict in Gaza. Variants of the accusation began as a product of Soviet propaganda during the Cold War, specifically following Israel’s victory in the 1967 Six-Day War, which left the Soviet Union facing a significant geopolitical setback. Its Arab allies had been decisively defeated by a Western-aligned state. In response, Soviet institutions engaged in what they described as “active measures”—long-term efforts to influence international narratives to undermine Israel and win favor with Arab and Muslim countries.3, 4, 5, 6

One strand of this effort involved reframing Zionism by combining traditional Russian antisemitic tropes with avant-garde anti-colonialist theory. Rather than a national movement for Jewish self-determination, Zionism was increasingly portrayed as a form of colonialism and racist Jewish supremacy.7 Soviet-era publications, sometimes grouped under the label “Zionology,” advanced these themes, portraying Israel in starkly negative, and often antisemitic, terms.8 Indeed, the USSR chose right-wing extremist Russian nationalists, heirs to the most intense antisemitic tradition in Europe, to run its anti-Zionist propaganda campaign.9

The Soviet’s anti-Zionist rhetoric had a clear internal logic. If Zionism could be equated with racism, and racism with fascism, then Israel itself could be depicted as a morally illegitimate state. More pointedly, it enabled a striking moral inversion: a state established in the aftermath of the Holocaust was cast as embodying traits associated with the very regimes that had persecuted Jews. The upshot was a massive Soviet effort to portray Israel as a racist, genocidal power akin to Nazi Germany.10

This framing found expression in international institutions. United Nations General Assembly Resolution 3379, which declared in 1975 that Zionism, unique among movements for national self-determination, “is a form of racism and racial discrimination,” represented a culmination of these efforts. Thereafter, accusations of genocide against Israel became a familiar feature of anti-Israel rhetoric, even as the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza, captured by Israel in 1967, grew at among the highest rates in the world.11, 12

The fall of the USSR in 1991 and the beginning of the Oslo peace process between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) in 1993 put a damper on this rhetoric for a time. But then Palestinian Authority chairman Yasser Arafat rejected Israel peace offers at Camp David and Taba in 2000 and 2001 in favor of a terrorist war against Israeli civilians that came to be known as the Second Intifada. Anti-Israel activists saw both a need and an opportunity to reframe public debate from Arafat’s intransigence and resumption of brutal terrorist activity to what they saw as Israel’s inherent illegitimacy.13, 14, 15, 16, 17

Genocide is not simply another word for devastating war, overwhelming force, or even a high rate of civilian casualties.

The upshot was that the genocide accusation reemerged prominently at the 2001 United Nations World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa. The official diplomatic proceedings were marked by significant controversy,18 but it was the parallel NGO forum that proved especially influential in shaping subsequent discourse.19 There, amidst an orgy of antisemitic rhetoric, and the shameful spectacle of purported human rights NGOs openly hawking the antisemitic forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,20 the official NGO final statement described Israel as an apartheid state guilty of “acts of genocide” and called for its international isolation.21

Following Durban, activists routinely accused Israel of genocide.22, 23, 24 The accusation was raised during multiple rounds of conflict in Gaza—in 2008–2009, 2014, and 2021—as well as at times when large-scale hostilities were not underway.25, 26, 27, 28 For example, Israeli efforts (ultimately wildly unsuccessful) to restrict the import of war material to Hamas-controlled Gaza were frequently depicted as genocidal.29

That continuity is important for understanding the speed with which the accusation resurfaced after October 7, 2023. Historically, genocide determinations have followed extended periods of investigation. In Rwanda and Srebrenica (Bosnia), the term was applied only after patterns of organized, identity-based killing had been clearly established. In contrast, accusations of genocide in the current conflict emerged almost immediately after the initial air strikes by Israel—before reliable casualty data existed and before patterns of conduct could be meaningfully assessed.30, 31

This sequence suggests a reversal of the usual analytical process. Rather than evidence leading to a conclusion, the conclusion preceded the evidence, shaping how subsequent events were interpreted. Once the label was applied, civilian suffering was readily understood as confirmation of a predetermined narrative of genocide. 

For anti-Israel activists the accusation performed a strategic function in public discourse. Characterizing a military campaign as genocidal places it in a category that carries both legal implications and a profound moral condemnation. While the war in Gaza could have ended at any time with Hamas’s surrender and release of the hostages it took, the genocide allegation served to pressure Israel to cease hostilities on Hamas’s terms. 

Meanwhile, Israel’s accusers ignored or evaded the governing legal standard for the crime of genocide. In Bosnia and Herzegovina vs. Serbia and Montenegro (2007), and again in Croatia vs. Serbia (2015), the International Court of Justice confronted a central question: How can genocidal intent, necessary for a charge of genocide to stick, be inferred from conduct in the absence of an explicit extermination order? 

The Court’s answer was deliberately strict. For a pattern of conduct to establish genocidal intent, that intent must be the only reasonable inference that can be drawn from the evidence. If the facts can plausibly support another explanation, the inference of genocide fails. 

This “only reasonable inference” requirement is not a minor doctrinal detail. It is the mechanism that preserves genocide as a crime of specific purpose rather than one inferred from tragic outcomes. If there is a plausible alternative explanation—such as the pursuit of military objectives in an armed conflict—the legal threshold is not met. 

The Court applied this reasoning in Croatia vs. Serbia. Even in the face of widespread atrocities and ethnic cleansing, it declined to find genocide because the conduct could reasonably be explained as an effort to displace a population and secure territory rather than to destroy the group itself. In practical terms, the Court drew a sharp distinction: horrific civilian suffering, even if a matter of policy rather than an unintentional by-product of war, is not enough. A state’s conduct must be inexplicable except as an attempt to annihilate a protected group. 

Applying that standard to Gaza highlights the difficulty of sustaining a genocide claim under existing law. Israel has articulated identifiable military objectives: dismantling Hamas’s military infrastructure, destroying tunnel networks embedded beneath civilian areas, preventing rocket attacks, and securing the release of hostages seized on October 7 and held by Hamas in Gaza.32, 33, 34

A standard that renders even morally justified wars against genocidal regimes themselves genocidal would cease to function as a meaningful legal test.

One may debate the proportionality of particular Israeli strikes, criticize specific tactics, or even argue that earlier Israeli policies were primarily responsible for the underlying conflict that led to the war. But as long as Israel’s state military objectives provide a plausible explanation for its conduct, the inference that the campaign is aimed at destroying Palestinians as a group cannot be the only reasonable interpretation. 

Under the ICJ’s own precedents, that conclusion should carry significant weight—even if the Court’s future application of those precedents, given the polarized political environment in which it operates, is uncertain. Some contemporary legal arguments, including by countries hostile to Israel, implicitly acknowledge the constraint imposed by the existing standard and seek to revise, indeed, undermine it. 

For example, Brazil has asked the ICJ to adopt a “balanced approach to dolus specialis, one that reflects not only the criminal law dimension but also the Convention’s overarching humanitarian object and purpose.”35 Belize, meanwhile, rejects the plain meaning of the Genocide Convention and subsequent precedent, and asserts that “there is no requirement that the State or individual act exclusively with genocidal intent.”36 Chile suggested adoption of “a fluid concept of intent,” based on “a holistic analysis of evidence.”37 All of these standards virtually invited subjective and politicized decision making, effectively transforming genocide from a crime of purpose into a crime of outcome, where civilian suffering, as such, is proof of genocide—at least if the suffering has sparked sufficient international outrage. 

The drafters of the Genocide Convention rejected that approach. The 1948 Secretariat Draft explicitly distinguished heavy civilian losses in war from genocide, noting that such losses “do not as a rule constitute genocide” and fall instead within the domain of the laws of war. International humanitarian law governs how wars are fought—through rules of distinction, proportionality, and precautions. The Genocide Convention addresses something different: the intentional destruction of a group. 

A further source of confusion arises from the ICJ’s January 2024 provisional measures order in South Africa vs. Israel. Many commentators—including international law scholars—have interpreted the Court’s finding that certain rights were “plausible” as a determination that an ongoing genocide was itself plausible.38, 39, 40

That is not what the Court held. At the provisional stage, the ICJ assesses whether claimed rights under the Convention are plausible and whether interim measures are warranted to protect those rights while the ICJ investigates and watches subsequent developments. As former ICJ President Joan Donoghue later clarified, the Court did not conclude that a plausible case of genocide had been established.41, 42 The distinction is significant, even if it has often been blurred in public discussion, and explains why the ICJ did not order an immediate halt to Israeli military actions. 

To understand why the genocide accusation encounters these doctrinal obstacles, it is useful to consider how recognized genocides have been identified in practice. The Holocaust remains the clearest example. The Nazi regime did not kill Jews as a by-product of combat. It constructed an integrated system of annihilation: identification, registration, deportation, and industrialized killing. The Nuremberg Tribunal described this as a “record of consistent and systematic inhumanity on the greatest scale.” The key feature was not only the scale of killing, but its organization and purpose. 

Similar patterns appear in later examples of recognized genocide. In Prosecutor vs. Akayesu (ICTR 1998), the killing of Tutsis by Hutus in Rwanda was described as “meticulously organized,” with roadblocks, identity checks, and targeted massacres of civilians. In Srebrenica, the ICTY found genocide based on the systematic separation and execution of Bosnian Muslim men and boys. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge implemented policies targeting specific groups for destruction, supported by centralized directives. 

Across these cases, common elements recur: coordinated planning, identification of victims based on group membership, separation of civilians from combatants, and extermination as a state objective rather than a by-product. Genocide is organized destruction directed at a group as such, rather than simply large-scale civilian death in wartime. 

The current war in Gaza presents a different pattern. Israel has been engaged in an urban conflict against a non-state armed group that operates within civilian areas, stores weapons in residential buildings, and maintains extensive tunnel networks beneath civilian infrastructure. These facts do not eliminate Israel’s obligations under international humanitarian law. But they do provide a framework within which the resulting destruction can be understood as part of a military campaign rather than as evidence of a policy of extermination. 

Public debate often relies heavily on casualty figures, but here too careful distinctions are necessary. Estimates of total deaths in Gaza vary and are often drawn from sources that do not clearly differentiate between combatants and civilians.43 In some activist discourse, aggregate figures—sometimes cited, based on Hamas’s Ministry of Health’s data, as approximately 72,000, sometimes using entirely made-up figures of up to 500,000—are presented as evidence that Israel has killed or murdered that number of innocent Gazans.44, 45

Once the label was applied, civilian suffering was readily understood as confirmation of a predetermined narrative of genocide.

That formulation obscures several important points. Even taking Hamas’s 72,000 figure at face value, it includes combatants as well as civilians.46 The killing of enemy fighters in an armed conflict is not unlawful, much less genocidal. In addition, Hamas’s total likely includes individuals who died of natural causes during the course of the war,47 and those killed by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, the result of either errant missiles or executions of political opponents.48, 49 The aggregation of all deaths into a single figure presented as evidence of criminal intent reflects a broader tendency to treat all harm associated with a conflict as a product of unlawful conduct. 

This approach has analytical consequences. If the killing of combatants is treated as equivalent to the killing of civilians, and if all deaths are framed as evidence of wrongdoing, then the underlying objection is not limited to alleged violations of the laws of war. It is, more fundamentally, an objection to the existence of military action itself. In that context, allegations of war crimes or genocide risk becoming rhetorical extensions of a broader opposition to a particular war or even war itself—at least war waged by Western-aligned countries—rather than conclusions grounded in international law. 

The tendency to infer intent directly from outcome without regard to intent is tempting in the face of large-scale suffering resulting from a military campaign by a state like Israel that has many ideologically motivated enemies. But the structure of genocide law is designed to resist that inference. 

Comparative examples reinforce the accepted distinction between deliberate annihilation and other military operations that cause civilian harm. The Battle of Mosul (Iraq) against ISIS in 2016–2017 resulted in extraordinary destruction; large portions of the city were damaged or destroyed, and thousands of civilians were killed. ISIS embedded its forces within civilian areas and used civilians as shields, complicating targeting decisions and magnifying the human cost. The devastation was widely recognized as horrific. Yet no serious legal analysis characterized the campaign as genocide. It was understood, instead, as brutal urban combat against an entrenched armed group. 

The same logic applies in earlier conflicts. The Allied invasion of Normandy resulted in tens of thousands of French civilian deaths. The objective was to defeat Nazi Germany and liberate occupied Europe. If the scale of civilian harm in urban warfare were sufficient to establish genocidal intent, such operations would fall within the definition of genocide. A standard that renders even morally justified wars against genocidal regimes themselves genocidal would cease to function as a meaningful legal test. 

Casualty data in Gaza, often invoked in public debate, do not alter this analysis when examined carefully. Estimates of civilian-to-combatant ratios in Gaza remain contested and should be treated with caution.50 Suffice to say that even the higher figures—at least those that have a reasonable basis in the available data51—are far from inherently damning. This is especially true when one considers that the international community resolved that—contrary to international law and Egypt’s treaty obligations—the vast majority of civilian Gazans would not be permitted to flee the conflict, unlike civilians caught in other wars. Egypt’s lengthy border with Gaza remained firmly shut to refugees, save for those with the resources to provide Egyptian officials with substantial monetary payments (that is, bribes).52

Further eroding the case for genocide is the military mismatch between the parties. Israel possesses overwhelming military capabilities, including one of the most powerful air forces in the world. If the objective were the destruction of Palestinians as a group, Israel could have easily killed hundreds of thousands of civilians within the first month of the war. Genocidal campaigns historically involve efforts to maximize destruction. By contrast, Israel has employed a range of measures associated with attempts to mitigate civilian harm, including warning civilians of an impending strike, issuing evacuation orders before military advances, and implementing humanitarian pauses and corridors to facilitate aid delivery.53, 54, 55 Every non-exigent military strike was approved by military lawyers trained in international law who reported only to other lawyers. Israel even facilitated a vaccination campaign that resulted in over half a million Gazan children being vaccinated for polio.56, 57 The existence and use of such measures do not resolve all legal questions, but they cannot be reconciled with an inference of exterminatory intent. 

Meanwhile, approximately two million Arab citizens of Israel—most of them ethnically Palestinian—live within the state, participate in its political system, and serve in public institutions. In recognized genocides, the targeted group is not simultaneously incorporated into the political and civic life of the state alleged to be pursuing its destruction. 

Claims of Israel’s genocidal intent are sometimes supported by reference to isolated statements by Israeli public officials. Famously, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu analogized Hamas to Amalek,58 an ancient genocidal enemy of the Jewish people that according to Jewish tradition reappears in different guises throughout history. This remark was wildly misconstrued to mean that, first, all Gazans were Amalek, and, moreover, their status as Amalek meant that they all should be killed.59 The latter accusation was based on a misinterpretation of a biblical verse distinct from the verse Netanyahu quoted;60, 61 the latter verse, instead, reminds the people of Israel to remember what the Amalekites did to them. 

Similarly, a statement attributed to Israel’s president Isaac Herzog to the effect that Gazan civilians bore collective responsibility for Hamas’s Oct. 7 atrocities is frequently cited as evidence of genocidal intent.62 Putting aside the fact that this statement is taken out of context,63 and Herzog immediately thereafter pledged that Israel would obey the laws of war,64 Israel’s presidency is largely ceremonial and does not direct military operations. Stray statements made from outside the relevant military and political chain of command cannot possibly show genocidal intent. 

As noted previously, some legal advocates pressing the genocide claim against Israel argue, explicitly or implicitly, that the definition itself must be adjusted to fit the facts of Gaza.65 In other words, verdict of genocide first, and—if necessary—we will manipulate the law to support the preconceived outcome. South Africa, which brought a genocide claim against Israel to the International Court of Justice just three months into the war, argues that intent, rather than being the only reasonable inference from a state’s conduct, may be inferred by extensive civilian death and suffering.66

Given South Africa’s prominent role in the proceedings and propaganda war against Israel, this argument is especially notable. Redefining genocide in this way would have implications that would extend well beyond the Gaza conflict. Any state engaged in combat against an armed group embedded within dense civilian environments would face the risk of genocide accusations whenever the level of civilian casualties provoked moral outrage by a vocal segment of world opinion. The term would cease to function as a precise legal category and would instead become a more general instrument of political and moral condemnation, weaponized to prevent certain disfavored militaries from pursuing legitimate military ends. 

For some activists, this is undoubtedly the goal. Israel, beyond its own unpopularity among Islamists, Arab nationalists, and self-styled “anticolonialist” leftists, is the “canary in the coal mine” for a set of legal tactics designed by anti-Western forces to render liberal democracies unable to defend themselves against non-state actors. 

Israel currently operates under some of the most restrictive Rules of Engagement of any modern armed forces.67, 68, 69, 70 The Israel Defense Forces use tactics—such as “roof-knocking” (warning civilians of an impending strike), sending millions of text message evacuation alerts, and dropping millions of leaflets—that were virtually unheard of previously to limit civilian harm. 

By accusing the most legally regulated military in the region of genocide, activists seek to create a new, impossible “Floor of Illegality.” If the IDF’s conduct can be successfully branded as genocide, then the same legal precedent can be used against the United States or NATO in any future conflict against groups like ISIS or Al-Qaeda. 

A sober analysis requires acknowledging both the scale of suffering in Gaza and the limits of the legal concepts used to describe it. Civilian harm is real and devastating. Allegations of violations of the laws of war deserve careful investigation. 

Raphael Lemkin’s understanding of his genocide neologism was meant to identify a specific and extreme form of human destruction. Preserving its meaning requires resisting its expansion into a catch-all term for wars that produce severe suffering. If the term is applied whenever urban combat yields tragic results, it will lose its capacity to distinguish the phenomenon it was created to describe. 

In that sense, the stakes are not limited to this conflict. The question is whether genocide will remain a narrowly defined crime of intentional group destruction, or evolve into a broader label applied whenever motivated activists disapprove of a war that causes significant civilian harm. The former preserves a critical legal and moral distinction. The latter risks dissolving it.

The more years go by, the more Americans believe that ordinary airliners are secretly spraying chemicals for some hidden nefarious purpose.

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I came across a few news items that I could possibly write about today and couldn’t decide which to cover, so I will write about all of them, since they all relate to renewable energy. The first is a new study comparing direct air capture (DAC) to installing new wind and solar. This is a direct comparison between these two options, to see which provides the most bang for the buck.

DAC involves taking CO2 directly out of the atmosphere in order to mitigate carbon release through burning fossil fuels. If this technology were sufficiently efficient it could be hugely useful in reducing future climate change. This is the only approach that can potentially have a negative carbon footprint, actually reducing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. Other technologies simply reduce the amount released. This negative carbon factor is highly attractive since it could theoretically zero out our carbon release and even take us back in time to an atmosphere with less CO2. Right now, it should be noted, we are not only continuing to release massive amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, the amount continues to increase. In 2025 the world emitted 38.1 billion tonnes, of carbon, a 1.1% increase over 2024.

But there are problems with DAC – it is currently not very efficient and is not scalable enough to have enough of an impact. Also, the efficiency of DAC depends heavily on how you power it – if you connect it to the grid and there is some fossil fuel energy on that grid, you may actually increase CO2 rather than decreasing it. Ideally DAC would be powered entirely by low carbon energy sources. This is why critics of DAC argue that it simply makes no sense to deploy this technology before we have decarbonized the energy sector, which we should do first.

In the current study they ask a critical question – if we directly compare DAC to deploying wind and solar, which provides the greater reduction in energy pollution per dollar spent. They also considered both the environmental and health impacts. They further considered three scenarios – current DAC technology, significant advances in DAC technology, and a massive breakthrough in technology. They also did their analysis for the entire US and for different regions. What they found was that deploying renewable energy was more cost effective for every region of the country under the current technology and significant advances scenarios. In the massive breakthrough scenario the results were mixed by regions, with a slight net advantage country-wide to DAC.

In my opinion this just adds to the conclusion that we should first decarbonize the grid with a combination of low carbon energy sources, including maximizing wind and solar while maintaining or even expanding our nuclear infrastructure, and only then invest in significant DAC. We can continue to research DAC in the meantime, and then deploy only when it gets significantly more efficient, in order to offset industries that are difficult to decarbonize.

There are a couple of solar power updates worth discussing as well. The first is that we are getting very close to commercializing tandem silicon and perovskite solar cells. Silicon is the current standard, with most commercial panels at 22-23% efficiency, with high-end panels at about 26%. This is pushing up against the theoretical limit for silicon (32%), and many experts think we will not get much closer to this theoretical limit because of some unavoidable sources of energy loss. This is where perovskite comes in – this is widely considered to be the next material to replace silicon in high efficiency solar cells. But even better, silicon and perovskite absorb light at different frequencies, so when you combine them in tandem you get even higher efficiencies. The current record is produce by LONGi (a Chinese solar panel company), with a commercial tandem panel with verified 34.6% efficiency. They plan to make these panels available in 2027-2028. Also, the theoretical upper limit of efficiency of this tandem design is 43%.

However, perovskite still has a longevity problem. For these tandem panels the silicon component lasts 20-25 years with minimal efficiency loss. The perovskite, however, only lasts 10-12 years. This is insufficient for residential use, but still useful for grid-scale projects. With large projects it is cost effective to pay for the higher end panels, and replacing them with even better panels in 10 years is not a bad investment anyway. But home owners don’t want to do this. However, there is a great deal of research into extending the lifespan of perovskite panels (for example). Another Chinese company, GLC, has announced a tandem solar cell with a 25 year warranty, and with an efficiency of 26%. We are quickly heading for panels with both efficiencies in the mid 30s and a lifespan of 25 years.

The availability of relatively cheap and highly efficient solar panels has also given rise to a new industry – plug-in solar (also called balcony solar). These are stand-alone panels you simply plug into a regular outlet, which can both accept and deliver energy. That’s really it. You have to mount it somewhere, but most people do not put it on their roof but rather on a stand or attached to their balcony or similar structure. This is useful for renters, apartments, mobile homes, remote locations like cabins, or even to supplement existing rooftop installations. In general you will recoup the cost of the panel in reduced energy bills in seven years, while the panel itself should last for 30 years. These are already very popular in Germany where they have been used for a decade without any safety issues.

Utilities companies in the US have been trying to slow their adoption, arguing that they present safety issues. For example, if they are sending current to the grid they could endanger utility workers. However, this is likely a diversionary tactic to slow the adoption of a competing technology. Units are already designed not to send energy to the grid when there is a power outage. The safety record in Germany is pretty solid evidence that they can be used safely. For most users plug-in solar would not power their entire home, but would shave money off their energy bill and reduce their carbon footprint.

The great thing about plug-in solar is that there are no issues with grid stability since most users will be simply reducing their baseload demand, not producing excess energy that has to go to the grid. But because they can be widely distributed, these small reductions in grid energy demand can be significant. This could be a useful supplement to grid-scale and rooftop solar. And of course they can be especially useful when paired with home battery backup, or even just an EV.

With recent events in the Mideast, including national average gas prices at $4.45 per gallon and electricity costs up 7.4% over last year, it seems like a good time to push for energy technologies that are not reliant on a vulnerable infrastructure partly in unstable parts of the world. These events also highlight that we can never achieve true energy independence simply by producing more oil, as oil prices are set as a global commodity. Solar, however, can be true energy independence, harvested right where it is used. Of course, this raises an entirely different discussion about maintaining domestic renewable energy technology and raw material supply chains. This is why invested in the technology of tomorrow rather than doubling down on fossil fuels is so critical.

The post Some Renewable Energy Updates first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

On April 30, 2026, David Copperfield took his final bow at the MGM Grand in Las Vegas, closing a residency that lasted more than 25 years. Longer than many entire entertainment careers, it was an extraordinary run. For audiences, it marked the end of a show. For magicians, it marked the close of a defining era.

As a professional magician, I’ve spent years studying the craft, performing, and thinking about how wonder is created and how human perception operates. Like many in my field—and millions of others—I grew up watching Copperfield’s television specials.

The Copperfield Theater at MGM Grand, Las Vegas.

Most people still recognize Copperfield’s name, even if they can’t name a particular illusion. When he rose to prominence in the late 1970s and 1980s, stage magic was no longer central to popular entertainment. Copperfield changed that almost single-handedly, placing large-scale illusions alongside blockbuster films, arena concerts, and major sporting events.

Over more than four decades, he sold tens of millions of tickets worldwide—more than 7 million at the MGM Grand alone—and became one of the highest-grossing solo entertainers in history, with career ticket sales reportedly exceeding $4 billion (more than The Rolling Stones!). He earned 21 Emmy Awards for his television specials—as many as The Sopranos—and accumulated multiple Guinness World Records.

Promo poster for Copperfield’s 1996 show Dreams & Nightmares co-created with Francis Ford Coppola.

But what stands out is not just the numbers. It is the consistency with which he delivered complex, high-precision performances night after night, often multiple times per day. In the final eight weeks (56 days) of his MGM Grand residency alone, he performed an astonishing 120 shows. That level of scale and reliability reshaped what audiences expect from a magic show. The bar was raised, and it stayed there, elevating the entire field.

The television specials were cinematic events that reached tens of millions. Perhaps none captured the public imagination like the 1983 disappearance of the Statue of Liberty. In front of a live audience seated on Liberty Island, with an estimated 50 million viewers watching on television, Copperfield made a national icon appear to vanish. The illusion became an instant cultural phenomenon, prompting people around the world—many for the first time in their lives—to exercise skepticism and critical thinking, asking: “How did he do it?”

David Copperfield with Penn and Teller at the Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony honoring Copperfield with a star. Photo courtesy of David Copperfield.

What made the illusion groundbreaking was not only the audacity of “vanishing” the Statue of Liberty. It was the way Copperfield blended spectacle, storytelling, and technical precision, elevating magic to the status of a major cultural event. This contrasted powerfully with earlier high-profile magicians such as Harry Houdini, whose 1918 vanishing of an elephant was a theatrical sensation in its day but remained confined to the stage.

Copperfield brought illusions to a television audience of millions while also delivering them live, night after night, with remarkable reliability. The specials invited skepticism—viewers naturally wondered about camera tricks—yet the live performances answered that doubt directly. In theaters and arenas, there were no cuts and no retakes: just a performer and an audience sharing the same space, often with volunteers participating. That made the experience more powerful than that of any performer who relies on camera tricks, and the resulting lessons in skepticism and questioning the limits of perception all the more impactful.

He made it clear that you were being fooled—and that knowledge did not diminish the experience. If anything, it enhanced it.

Copperfield’s cultural influence extends far beyond performance. He founded the International Museum and Library of the Conjuring Arts, a private museum available to researchers that houses one of the most extensive archives in magic, including rare books, original props, and artifacts from Harry Houdini and many others.

In 2021, he brought parts of that collection to a wider audience with David Copperfield’s History of Magic, co-authored with Richard Wiseman and David Britland. The book (reviewed in Skeptic Vol. 27 No. 2 featuring exclusive, unpublished photographs) profiles 28 groundbreaking magicians across centuries, from 16th-century conjurers to modern innovators. Readers receive a guided tour through artifacts such as Houdini’s straitjackets and Water Torture Cell, along with a 16th-century manual on sleight of hand. The book beautifully connects grounded explanations of the craft’s evolution to what audiences experience in actual performances.

Harry Houdini’s straitjacket at the International Museum and Library of the Conjuring Arts. Photo courtesy of David Copperfield.

This work helps keep magic connected to its past and rooted in reality. Without that connection, magic can become a series of disconnected tricks and empty stage patter rather than a technically intricate art form with deep roots, ongoing innovation, and a unique ability to test the boundaries of human perception.

That is exactly where Copperfield excelled. He helped define what audiences expect from large-scale illusion: strong production values, clear narrative, emotional engagement, and technical reliability. He never presented himself as supernatural. Compared with many other figures who rose to prominence around the same time, such as Uri Geller, Copperfield made it clear that you were being fooled—and that knowledge did not diminish the experience. If anything, it enhanced it. You knew it was an illusion, yet for a moment you still wondered, “What if?”

The close of the MGM Grand residency marks the end of a long chapter in an illustrious career. Copperfield proved that magic could be romantic, theatrical, and emotionally resonant without relying on supernatural claims or pseudoscientific nonsense. In doing so, he became one of the most emulated illusionists in history and helped elevate the cultural standing of the entire art form.

One of the most dramatic aspects of grand dreams of the human spirit is how quickly they come crashing down to gritty, grimy earth. This is nowhere more true than with the internet. What began as a promise of global connection and unlimited access to knowledge has become a hornet’s nest of hatred, distortion, and lies. Conspiracy theories, which blend all of those elements into novel shapes and patterns, are thriving in ways that would put to shame the architects of the most poisonous false narratives in history.

For the first time, conspiracy is not just a political or geopolitical tool, as it has been for centuries, but a booming industry. Conspiracy theories are now the blood sport of the 21st century; social media platforms that profit off them are the contemporary colosseum where the masses go to watch individuals, nations, religions, and ideas get ripped to shreds. It’s officially sanctioned barbarism. And the crowds love it.

Influencers like Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones, Dave Smith, and Ian Carroll are gladiators of falsehood, deepening their fame and fortune with every next lie. But these are only the most high-profile examples. On streaming platforms, messaging apps, and social media sites, thousands more aspirants work daily—by the minute—to spin and re-spin false narratives. Some, like anti-Jewish blood libels, are as old as time. Others, including the idea that the moon landing was staged, that the Kennedy assassination was a conspiracy, and that commercial jets emit “chemtrails,” have persisted for decades. Still more, including the idea that vaccines are an instrument of social control, have come to the fore in recent years.

What separates our modern era of conspiracy theorizing from the long tradition behind it is the scale of the rewards and incentives. Recently, the leader of one of the internet’s most prominent and successful new media companies told me that, by his estimate, Candace Owens earns around $50 million annually from YouTube ads alone—not counting speaking engagements, merchandise, and other brand sponsorships. Whether or not this precise number is accurate, it’s clear that the correlation between financial gain and what we might call a largesse with the truth is tight.

In this bewildering flurry, it’s difficult to zoom out. Yet we have to ask: How did we get here? Where is this all going? And can we find a way back—or a way forward? 

Only a few years ago, many people embraced the idea that the internet had ushered in a new dawn for information and communications. The media marveled that Twitter could be used by journalists as a tool to produce real-time reporting from far-flung corners of the world. Wikipedia offered a bottomless trove of free information on everything from big, broad concepts to the marginalia of unsung knowledge. 

Facebook made “friends” out of strangers; Google made urban labyrinths now navigable and dynamic. E-commerce opened up entire new vistas of opportunity. Micro-loans, made possible by digital technology, would lift developing nations of endemic poverty. The vast, inscrutable world of the pre-digital era had magically become legible. We could discern truth from falsehood, fact from distorted fiction. The panacea was just on the horizon, burnishing the sky with hope.

Looking back, it now seems as if that bright glow was a conflagration—the deep tradition of Enlightenment thought in flames. While the fire has burned for years, a clearly defined break,  a rupture in the epistemological chain, came in 2016, when the unthinkable took place in American politics: Donald Trump won the presidential election. There were many reasons for this, tied to the social and cultural dynamics of a country whose demographics and economics had been in flux for over two decades. But for the gatekeepers of American culture, the election represented such an upheaval, a kind of Copernican turn that upended everything they thought they knew about American society and politics.

As in so many instances in history, the response by the ruling elite was not to adapt their worldview to the newly born reality, but to mold reality to their existing worldview. Weeks after the election, Hillary Clinton declared a “fake news epidemic.” The thesis was painfully clear: The U.S. was under attack by its geopolitical adversaries, who were weaponizing social media platforms to sway electoral outcomes. Over the following years, this thesis would be unpacked over and over: The Trump campaign had worked with the Kremlin to stage a mass-scale campaign to distort public views, swinging the election in Trump’s favor. 

How this could have been ascertained little more than days after the election was never explained. Nor was any evidence ever presented that activities on Facebook—the platform that was identified by the media as the primary vector for this attack—had succeeded in moving the needle. One of the few studies on this topic found that election-related false narratives on social media resulted in a shift of only a few hundreths of a percent. 

But none of these very legitimate questions were raised. In fact, the narrative was deepened. The idea, deployed by the Clinton campaign in conjunction with the high-powered political PR firm FusionGPS, was that we had entered an era where information was so compromised that government intervention was urgently needed. In one of his final acts as president, Barack Obama pushed through an administrative determination that designated elections—and, by virtue of this, the information surrounding them—as critical infrastructure. Information now came under the purview of government action and control.

In retrospect, the epistemic bait-and-switch is breathtaking: In order to protect truth, Illing and others argued, journalism had to abandon its most fundamental tenets.

The media seemed to openly disavow the idea of neutrality and objectivity. Vox journalist Sean Illing made one of many such declarations. Illing wrote in 2020, just months before the November election, that,

The American media ecosystem has become saturated with misinformation and noise because the press remains committed to a set of norms that are ill-adapted to the digital age … the obsession with “objectivity” in particular has led to an obsession with “balance” or “fairness” that makes it easy for bad-faith actors to get away with pushing falsehoods.

In retrospect, the epistemic bait-and-switch is breathtaking: In order to protect truth, Illing and others argued, journalism had to abandon its most fundamental tenets. In this politically driven determination, they rejected not only neutrality—an idea debated for decades on the premise that journalists, as human beings, can never fully detach from their own perspective—but also objectivity—the idea that truth exists independently of the observer.

In a vacuum, this idea would have made for good copy, but little more. In reality, it was married to a social justice movement that operationalized it. Just a few weeks before the Vox piece, journalist Wesley Lowery published a wave-making op-ed in The New York Times that married the political rejection of objectivity and neutrality with the then emerging Black social justice movement. In his piece, “A Reckoning Over Objectivity, Led by Black Journalists,” Lowery opined that, “Black journalists are speaking out because one of the nation’s major political parties and the current presidential administration are providing refuge to white supremacist rhetoric and policies, and our industry’s gatekeepers are preoccupied with seeming balanced, even ordering up glossy profiles of complicit actors.”

One of the “glossy profiles of complicity actors” Lowery had in mind was an op-ed by Senator Tom Cotton (R) in The New York Times. The piece, which had been solicited by the paper’s opinion editor, called for National Guard troops to be called in to restore order in American cities rocked by Black Lives Matter protests that frequently devolved into riots. 

Had Cotton issued this call on Fox News or the Washington Examiner, no one would have thought twice. But the fact that he was able to make this argument in the flagship news outlet of the center left was an outrage that demanded not just action—the op-ed prompted a mass walkout by NYT newsroom staff—but a public rethinking of the entire enterprise of journalism itself. The theory of new journalism built on a rejection of neutrality and objectivity would not be quietly embraced by journalists at legacy outlets, but trumpeted in the pages of news outlets across the country. It would become a cause célèbre of journalism in itself.

Lowery’s racially motivated rejection of objectivity was not new to The New York Times. The previous year, Nikole Hannah-Jones had published her 1619 Project, which argued in an entire edition of The New York Times Magazinededicated to the theme that Americans had been born not in liberty, but in slavery. That Hannah-Jones and The 1619 Project had been repudiated by virtually the entire field of American history, including historians at elite American universities, mattered little or not at all. The reason was exactly the one promulgated by Lowery and Illing: The subjective truths of the Black Lives Matter movement and the quest for racial equity powering not only outweighed the imperatives of truth-seeking, but negated them entirely.

By now, readers of this piece will have detected the core philosophical framework undergirding this shift. For decades, post-modernism had taught that there is no such thing as objective truth, but only social constructs built by those in power. In this case, the power was “white supremacy.” This served the movement remarkably well. With a wave of the collective hand, it could dismiss hard data about police shootings of Black Americans relative to the general population as racially biased and stigmatize those dared to raise questions around the data as full-blown racists. 

Over subsequent years, the same template would be applied to whatever political cause was championed by the left at any given moment. The most prominent of these waves was the gender movement, which used this machinery to overwrite the science of biology with the social science of gender ideology. Those, like J.K. Rowling, who chose to debate the merits of these ideas were labeled anti-trans bigots, or, in Rowling’s case, Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists, or TERFS. 

With COVID, the argument shifted in the direction of near total enforcement of the science establishment orthodoxy on the issue. If you explored the idea that the virus may have originated from a lab that worked to enhance the virality of coronaviruses like SARS-CoV-2, you were branded a conspiracy theorist. If you questioned the efficacy of non-respirator masks, which the head of America’s pandemic response, Anthony Fauci, had only weeks before publicly claimed were not effective in stopping transmission, you were called not only anti-science, but a disease vector. Government, newly empowered by post-2016 election information policing powers, stepped in to censor inconvenient facts on social media.

The legacy media and its political allies had built a powerful trebuchet to beat political enemies into submission.

In the introduction to my book about The New York Times, I warned that although the bien pensant had managed to successfully pull off the great epistemological feat of the 21st century—using narrative machinery to reconstruct public truth—this feat would not go unnoticed. The legacy media and its political allies had built a powerful trebuchet to beat political enemies into submission. As with any war, however, the enemy defeated by a powerful new weapon inevitably learns to build and wield that weapon itself. The warfare that results becomes far more destructive. 

Over the past five years, we have witnessed exactly this effect take hold of the American public consciousness. In the wake of the greatest clampdown on information, there has been a counter-weaponization of it. Accounts banned or “throttled” by Big Tech censors returned to platforms with a literal vengeance. Users that had been punished for questioning the efficacy of COVID vaccines would now build conspiratorial narratives about inoculation as an instrument of evil. People who were labeled racist for asking if BLM’s central claims withstood real scrutiny would turn to open race-baiting as a form of retribution.

It was at this exact moment that the world was plunged into geopolitical chaos. In February 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine. A year later, Hamas stormed into Israel, slaughtering 1,200 civilians, raping women, and dragging 200 hostages, including women, children, and even infants, into Gaza. In both cases, the major combatants—Russians under a leader trained by the KGB, the master-agency of propaganda, and the Muslim Brotherhood-inspired Islamists for whom psychological manipulation constitutes the essence of their war against the West—reached naturally, almost reflexively, for the dark arts.

On social media platforms, they found legions of willing soldiers. In the pre-digital era, propaganda required either building media infrastructure—creating newspapers, standing up broadcast channels—or infiltrating existing ones by recruiting or bribing journalists as assets. Both endeavors are expensive, time consuming, and carry significant risk. Today, every one of those factors has been inverted. The creation of bot networks is, for a state actor, a relatively trivial affair. Paying off top-tier influencers through shell companies or using advertising deals with inflated pricing is virtually impossible to detect. 

The vast sums at stake make this kind of activity irresistible. In 2024, news reports identified influencer Lauren Chen and her husband, Liam Donovan, as two figures mentioned in an unsealed indictment against figures tied to Russian state media outlet Russia Today (RT). The indictment alleged that individuals working for RT paid Tenet Media, the company owned by Chen and Donovan, to distribute content produced by other influencers. Ultimately, neither Chen nor Donovan were charged.

For the first time, however, we were given a glimmer of insight into the amounts at stake. The company belonging to Chen, a mid-level influencer, was paid $10 million. For top-tier influencers, the numbers likely scale disproportionately higher.

Conspiracy theory is the most optimized format … it removes the most expensive, time-consuming constraint aspect of journalism—original reporting of corroborated facts.

All this has created the conditions for a perfect storm of propaganda. The demand is bottomless. All that is required is a ceaseless flow of content to feed the flywheel of social media engagement. In this maelstrom, conspiracy theory is the most optimized format. On the supply side, it removes the most expensive, time-consuming constraint aspect of journalism—original reporting of corroborated facts. Instead, the latest, zaniest, and most dangerous ideas that come to mind are instantly turned into “investigations” with dark portent. The material exists prepackaged: antisemitic tropes, tales of flying saucers and alien abductions, and alternative histories that discard established fact as their starting point. The only barriers are technical, and even then they are strikingly low—two or three cameras, a microphone, and a small production team.

On the other side of the market, the demand is bottomless. In the 1990s, when talk radio was on the rise, the content had to be heard in real time and could only be accessed on stations, and in regions, where it was available. Today, all podcasting—the modern equivalent of talk radio—is accessible at any time to every person on the planet. Hyper-specific niches open into mass audiences whose scale dwarfs that of pre-internet broadcast media. The economics scale at breakneck speed.

But there is another factor at work. In his book, How to Win an Information War, disinformation scholar Peter Pomerantsev makes a powerful point expressed in the title of the book’s first chapter: “Propaganda is the Remedy for Loneliness.” This notion traces back to French sociologist and philosopher Jacques Ellul, who wrote that modern man

feels the most violent need to be reintegrated into a community, to have a setting, to experience ideological and affective communication … That loneliness in which he can share nothing, talk to nobody, and expect nothing from anybody, leads to severe personality disturbances.

 If loneliness had been a driving factor in the 1960s when Ellul was writing, today it’s more than even an “epidemic,” as it’s sometimes described. It is the very premise of digital life. The all-encompassing solution to it, the rectangular black holes into which we pour our loneliness, is both remedy and cause of the disease. The atomization of living life with heads bowed, eyes locked on the device of our hands, is total. The common culture defined by books and magazines is gone. And with it, the shared vocabulary of generally agreed upon fact—the moon landing was a triumph, safely administered vaccines keep populations healthy, biological reality exists, and a complex dynamic of politics and markets, not a shady cabal of uber-rich Jews, determines the course of nations—has been dispatched.

 The one great hope lies in the very thing that the confluence of forces on the left and right have sought to dispense with: Objective reality exists.

Audiences, instead, walk through the doorways of conspiracy theory, where they can join a club of initiates given access to something hidden from the broader world. As Ellul put it: 

For it, propaganda, encompassing human relations, is an incomparable remedy. It corresponds to the need to share, to be a member of a community, to lose oneself in a group, to embrace a collective ideology that will end loneliness. It also corresponds to deep and constant needs, more developed today, perhaps, than ever before: the need to believe and obey, to create and hear fables, to communicate in the language of myths.

This is the age of propaganda. The one great hope lies in the very thing that the confluence of forces on the left and right have sought to dispense with: Objective reality exists. It can be studied, measured, and theories about it can be tested. More than anything, in the final analysis, reality always asserts itself. Getting there is about acknowledging this basic fact—and agreeing that no single party or school of thought has a monopoly on the truth. Instead, we collaborate to build models that aim not to advance interests but get close to “the real thing,” whatever it might be.

The dialectic of theorizing, testing, and improving is painstaking. It’s not sexy, and it’s certainly not lucrative. But if there is any path forward, it is this one. It’s time for us to take it.

I thought everyone needed one more thing to worry about, so here you go: evolving AI. When I hear this phrase I think of two things. The first are AI systems designed to simulate organic evolution. The second are artificially intelligent systems that are capable of evolving themselves. That latter one is the type you need to worry about.

Systems that simulate evolution already exist – Avida, Biogenesis,  Grovolve, Tierra, Framsticks: and others. They basically have some code that competes for some resource or to complete some task and the code randomly mutates and reproduces. That’s it, all you need for an evolution simulation. Code can compete for computer resources, or be a physics simulator with digital creature trying to move quickly across terrain. These are sometime gamified for entertainment, but are also used for serious research, to study patterns within evolutionary systems. I would love to see these kinds of systems get more and more sophisticated, even to the point of reasonably simulating living systems. Such systems could be used to test hypotheses about evolution – and would also disprove a lot of silly creationist talking points.

But now we are talking about evolvable AI – AI systems that are capable of developing themselves through evolutionary processes. A new paper in PNAS discusses the potential power and risks of such systems. They echo they kinds of issues that have been explored in science fiction for decades. The authors write: “Evolvable AI (eAI), i.e., AI systems whose components, learning rules, and deployment conditions can themselves undergo Darwinian evolution, may soon emerge from current trends in generative, agentic, and embodied AI.” The results, they argue, have not been adequately addressed when discussing the potential risks of rapidly developing AI ability.

The authors distinguish two types of evolving AI – breeder systems and ecological systems. In breeder scenarios the programmers are in control of the process, selecting which code to “breed” and evaluating the outcome. This process is like a digital version of domestication, and has the potential, if done wisely, to maintain control. In fact, systems can be bred to have greater predictability and control. There are still risks here. So far humanity has not bred an animal to be more intelligent than humans. This could theoretically happen with AI, resulting in emergent behavior not specifically selected for that could get out of the control of human programmers.

A far greater risk, however, is the ecosystem scenario in which the program itself produces variation and selection, without external control. They argue that such systems lead to “selfish replication” which “reliably gives rise to cheating, parasitism, deception, and manipulation, even in very simple systems.” This echos Dawkins’ “selfish gene” in which evolutionary forces result in genes, essentially, doing whatever they can to maximize their passing into the next generation, without consideration for the interests of the whole organism, the population, the species, or the ecosystem. That is how evolution works – it cannot really see the bigger picture, but rather the selective feedback loop considers only survival and reproduction. There is still ongoing debate among evolutionary biologists the extent to which selective pressures can operate at any level other than the individual creature. Dawkins argued it was better understood at the gene level, which is why a parent, for example, would sacrifice themselves for their child – they may die, but the genes live on through their children.

In any case – this same “selfish” principle, when applied to AI, could lead to unpredictable and extremely bad behavior on the part of the AI. They too would not really see or understand the big picture, and will simply maximize whatever parameters they were given. Systems capable of independent evolution are likely to find unpredicted (perhaps unpredictable) solutions to problems, ones that might be anathema to human interests. Again, we are already seeing this is current AI systems (lying, cheating), but this phenomenon would be much greater with evolving systems.

One significant problem with evolving AI is that would essentially be impossible to control. Any controls we put in place would simply become a selective pressure, with evolving AI systems finding creative ways around the controls. This would be exactly like the evolution of antibiotic resistance in bacteria. In fact, it could be a lot worse. Natural systems essentially have to wait for a fortuitous mutation to occur. The reason why bacteria evolve resistance so quick is because there are so many of them and their lifecycle is so short. The opportunities for such mutations are therefore enormous. The same would be true of an AI system that could test billions of possibilities in moments. But also, AI systems do not have to wait for the right mutation to pop up – they can create it themselves. They can explore new possibilities, direct the course of their own evolution, and in fact evolve their ability to do so. They can learn how to optimize randomness vs directed changes, and learn which patterns predict successful evolution. If something doesn’t work, they can try something else. They could pass on acquired characteristics. Such systems would not only be evolutionary, they could be super-evolutionary.

These types of processes can function at multiple levels, not just the code itself. For example, programmers are already using evolutionary methods to evolve prompts for AI systems. Prompts themselves affect the behavior of AI, and when engineered in a sophisticated way can significantly improve an AI’s ability.

The outcome of such systems would be essentially impossible to predict. There would be emergent behaviors that may even be hard to notice, or fully understand. The most predictable thing about such systems is that they will be “selfish”, because that seems to be inherent in evolving systems themselves. The end result is the creation of AI systems that are prone to cheating, lying, parasitism, and manipulation, that we cannot understand or control. If we make such systems powerful enough and give them enough resources, it seems likely that they will eventually become more intelligent (at least in some ways – even short of true sentience) than humans.

The authors also recognize that such systems would be incredibly powerful, and therefore they are coming and can produce useful products. We just have to do it wisely. For example, any such evolutionary AI should be run entirely in a sandbox, isolated from the outside world. It has to be truly isolated, so that it cannot find a way out of the sandbox. Once the result of such an evolutionary AI is sufficiently tested and understood, it can be released. But they warn against running evolutionary systems out in the world where their behavior cannot be controlled. This makes sense, but I wonder if the sandbox method is sufficient. If these systems are prone to deception and manipulation, might one such system trick its users into thinking it is safe, until it is release into the world? That sounds like the plot to a great sci-fi dystopian horror. We may be living through act I of such a horror story right now.

One final word – I get that there is a lot of AI hype our there. This is almost always the case with any new technology that is sufficiently disruptive or game-changing. The existence of hype is a given – it does not mean, however, that the technology is not truly disruptive. It often means that it will just take longer than the hype indicates, but in the long run the hype will not only be realized but exceeded. I do not buy the “AI is all hype” brigade, nor do I buy the “fund me” propaganda or blithe reassurances by the tech bros. The truth is somewhere in the middle. What I mostly listen to are reasonable experts who are given sober warnings, like the authors of the current paper. This technology is genuinely very powerful. That power needs to be respected, understood, and properly regulated. This requires anticipating what can potentially go wrong, and that is what this paper does. This is not a prediction – it is laying out potential worst-case-scenarios so that we do not blindly walk into them.

 

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