Skeptic

A review of God: The Science, The Evidence. The Dawn of a Revolution by Michel-Yves Bolloré and Olivier Bonnassies. 

The purported goal (stated in the Preface) of this book is “to shed light … on the question of the existence or non-existence of a creator God.” This professed evenhandedness is doubly (if not trebly) disingenuous. The actual purpose of the book is to argue not just for the existence of a creator God, but specifically the Christian God—and also not just the Christian God but specifically the God of Catholicism.

Protesting too much, elsewhere in the book the authors assert “the purpose of this book is not to militate for a particular religion,” but this is belied by six chapters with such titles as “The Alleged Errors of the Bible, Which Are Not Errors.” The entire book, in fact, is not good faith argument, but apologetics for a particular religion. It begins with this statement: 

Until recently, believing in God seemed incompatible with science. Now, unexpectedly, science appears to have become God’s ally. Materialism, which has always been a belief just like any other, is seriously shaken as a result.

This is sloppy if not entirely disingenuous. The authors use the word materialism as synonymous with naturalism (which is the philosophical foundation for science) but often seem just to mean atheism. And, of course, materialism is not just a neutral word for a philosophical stance; it also has a secondary negative meaning.

The argument rests initially on two pillars, neither of them novel or unfamiliar: the finitude of the universe (as confirmed by the Big Bang and somehow also the anthropic principle) and its supposed fine tuning. Elsewhere in the book the authors even assert that the “slander and harassment” supposedly “suffered” by the supporters of these two ideas serves as proof of their validity! And the authors reach their primary point less than halfway through the book: “That a creator God exists is the only obvious conclusion.” What, then, is the rest of the book about? 

Curves of Understanding

The title of the first chapter of the book repeats its subtitle, “The Dawn of a Revolution.” The authors assert that scientific advances beginning in the twentieth century have led to a complete reversal of the thinking that God was incompatible with the sciences, as illustrated in the two-page timeline that ends the chapter:

This diagram exhibits several peculiarities:

• The horizontal axis, representing time, is catastrophically distorted. The span from 1500 to 1900 takes a little less than 6"—about one and a half inches per century. The span from 1900 to 2000 measures a little more than 3", so about three quarters of an inch per century—already a serious distortion. But the span from the last figure on the left side (1896) to 1900 (only 4 years!) is a little over three inches, which would require more than six feet per century!  
• The vertical axis is unlabeled. The curve is meant to reveal the “rise and fall of materialist thought” (although upside down), so the vertical axis must be … immaterialism?
• The inclusion of Lamarck is dubious. Although he may have been the first naturalist of the period to propose a theory of evolution, it was wrong. In the history of the science of evolution, Lamarck is mentioned only in passing. The theory is of course properly attributed to Darwin and Wallace. In the timeline, Darwin is credited not with evolution but only natural selection, and Wallace doesn’t appear at all.
• The implication of the diagram is that everyone on the right side of the timeline (the part where the line is descending) is associated with the rise of “materialist thought” and everyone on the right is associated with its fall. Many of those on either side would dispute such characterizations.

Science

The authors repeatedly demonstrate a profound misunderstanding of science. The supernatural—literally, super (above, over, beyond) + natural—is not within the subject matter of science at all. And God is, as the authors themselves note, the quintessence of the supernatural.

Naturalism is the framework within which science is conducted. Without it, science simply can’t be done.

But the authors’ misunderstanding goes beyond this. Materialism (naturalism) is not, as they insist, “a belief just like any other.” Naturalism is the framework within which science is conducted. Without it, science simply can’t be done. 

Reinforcing this misapprehension, the authors refer to “the theory of a purely material universe.” The entire phrase is meaningless: it's not a theory, it's the ground on which the entire edifice of science stands.

Another persistent misunderstanding is that of the concept of proof and its applicability to science. As a website literally called The Logic of Science puts it, “Science doesn’t prove anything, and that’s a good thing.”

Although the authors actually acknowledge (with a quote from Karl Popper) that science doesn’t deal in proofs at all, they introduce the novel phrase “relative proof” (as opposed to “absolute proof,” which can only be found in logic, mathematics, and the like). This term is so eccentric in this context that a Google search for that exact phrase yields only websites devoted to the subject of genealogical proofs, such as the website of a professional genealogist literally named Relative Proof. 

The obsession with proof persists throughout the book. In a chapter bizarrely entitled “Preliminary Conclusions” (bizarre both because the phrase is almost oxymoronic and because it occurs over two hundred pages in), the authors say that “cosmology allows us to establish two separate proofs.” They are, of course, the Big Bang and fine tuning. 

The authors’ summary of what they call the scientific “approach” is childishly simplistic and misleading. For example, they write, “The first step … is to create a theory.” Well, no. The first step is to perform observations. In the context of the scientific method, theory means a scientifically acceptable or plausible general principle or body of principles based on data and offered to explain phenomena. A theory is a decisive step—but not the final step—in the process. The point of a theory is to provide a comprehensive understanding of a range of phenomena, not a single phenomenon. And, in any case, science continues far beyond the initial proposal of a theory. 

Perhaps the clearest indication that the authors fundamentally misconstrue science is a bizarre table showing what they call the six domains of supposedly scientific theories, ranging from Group 1 (Absolute Proof, which, including as it does mathematics and logic, doesn’t apply to the natural sciences at all and is, if to be included in the table at all, a Group 0) through Group 6 (“Theories without implications, and that are neither modelable nor subject to experimentation”). This classification is entirely idiosyncratic. The sciences are not grouped by the level of support of “proof” possible, but by their subject matter.

Even more remarkable is the set of examples the authors choose for Group 5 (“Theories that can be tested against reality, but that are neither modelable nor subject to experimentation”), which include: 

evolution, paleontology, origin of life on Earth, origin of the Moon, origin of water, existence of a creator God

In the last column (“Force of Proof”) is the cell for this group: “The strength of the proof depends on the quality and number of correspondences between the implications of the theory and observable reality.”

There’s no branch of science examining the “existence of a creator God.” Although the word theology looks like it refers to the science of God, it's not a science at all, but a subject in a Catholic seminary. One of the authors (Bonnassies), in fact, earned a B.A. in Theology from the Catholic Institute of Paris.

The Big Bang

The authors assert that the discovery that the universe had a beginning (the Big Bang) was a devastating blow to materialism. No such blow occurred. Such discussions are on forums like Reddit and Quora; religious websites; and books of apologetics, not in scientific labs. According to the authors, the Big Bang refutes materialism because ex nihilo nihil fit (nothing comes from nothing). This is, of course, the Kalam cosmological argument (as the authors themselves acknowledge): 

Premise: Everything that begins to exist has a cause.
Premise: The universe began to exist.
Conclusion: Therefore, the universe has a cause—namely, God.

But it’s not as if, before the discovery of the Big Bang, materialism was the dominant view. Quite the contrary—when the universe was believed to be eternal, the same argument was widely used—having been traced back to at least Aristotle and Plato. The authors even manage to rope in the heat death of the universe as further proof:

Premise: The universe is going to end.
Premise: Everything that is going to end has a beginning.
Premise: Everything that has a beginning has a cause.
Conclusion: Therefore, the universe has a cause—namely, God.

The authors even draft the theory of relativity into the argument:

Premise: “space, time, matter, and energy are interrelated.”
Premise: “no single one of them can exist without the others.”
Conclusion: “if a cause exists at the origin of our universe, it's necessarily atemporal, non-spatial, and immaterial”—namely, God.

All of these arguments can be consolidated thusly: 

Premise: The existence of the universe is inexplicable. 
Conclusion: Therefore, God.

Again and again, the authors insist that the discovery that the universe had a beginning decisively refutes any possible naturalistic explanation for its existence. But, of course, Jews, Christians, Muslims, and other religious adherents alreadybelieved that the universe had a beginning. But many religions believe in both God and an eternal universe, including Hinduism, Jainism, and Mormonism (remarkably, Mormons consider themselves Christians—they accept Jesus as the savior—even if most Christians do not).

There’s no branch of science examining the “existence of a creator God.”

With or without the Big Bang—with or without a beginning of the universe—the argument is the same. The notion that the Big Bang (and other twentieth century scientific discoveries) rendered naturalism false is absurd—however many pages the authors spend pleading it. Furthermore, even if the argument were valid, it would only prove a First Mover—the noninterventionist God of Deism. But, as we’ll see, the authors argue for a specifically Christian God (actually, an even more specifically Catholic God), along with the Bible, miracles, and the whole lot.

Fine Tuning

According to the authors, “The values of these numbers [the so-called constants of nature] were fixed at the moment the Universe came into being.” This is both disingenuous and unsupported. The passive voice (“fixed”) implies agency—who better an agent than God? And the notion that they could have been any values other than what they are is entirely speculative. The authors finish that sentence by asserting that they “are invariable in time and space.” But this is an open question. 

Later in the book, in the chapter about biology, the authors assert that “biological fine-tuning is added to the cosmological fine-tuning.” Sean Carroll and others have observed that, even discounting the notion of a multiverse of one sort or another, there are several problems with the fine-tuning argument, not the least of which involved the anthropic principle.

The philosopher Nick Bostrom reports, in fact, that there are over 30 versions of the anthropic principle that range from the weak or tautological (“conditions that are observed in the universe must allow the observer to exist”) to the strong (“the universe must have properties that make inevitable the existence of intelligent life”).

Clearly, the authors espouse not only the strong version—but specifically the notion that this proves the existence of a creator God. It is, in other words, just another version of the fine-tuning argument, which Douglas Adams ridiculed with what has come to be known as the puddle analogy:

If you imagine a puddle waking up one morning and thinking, “This is an interesting world I find myself in — an interesting hole I find myself in — fits me rather neatly, doesn't it? In fact it fits me staggeringly well, must have been made to have me in it!"The Multiverse

Although the concept of multiple universes is ancient, in the modern era it's most closely associated with the Many Worlds Interpretation of Hugh Everett, which he introduced as a way to resolve the (supposed) problem of the quantum collapse. 

The authors mention the concept of the multiverse early as an example of “speculative theories to counter the Big Bang.” But no scientist has suggested that the multiverse might “counter” the Big Bang.

The authors devote an entire chapter to the subject (“The Multiverse: Theory or Loophole?”), which they regard as invented purely to avoid the dilemma of what they see as only two possibilities: “a creator God or pure chance.” They claim that the notion of the multiverse is, quoting Neil Manson, “the last resort for the desperate atheist.”  

The notion that the Big Bang (and other twentieth century scientific discoveries) rendered naturalism false is absurd.

As the authors show, many theorists have been troubled by the universe's apparent fine tuning—and see a multiverse as a way of explaining it. But the multiverse was developed by Hugh Everett in studying quantum mechanics, not by atheists disputing God or trying to avoid “the real metaphysical questions at stake.”

Biology

The chapter on biology recapitulates observations that life is incomprehensibly complex and that the origin of life seems unfathomably improbable: 

Premise: Biology is incredibly complex.
Premise: The origin of life appears to be incredibly improbable.
Conclusion: Therefore, God.

The authors reinforce these two points laboriously. They leave unclear whether they believe that life arose because God arranged things at Creation (the Big Bang) to make it inevitable, or because God intervened at various points to ensure it arose in the face of otherwise astronomically poor odds. 

Appeal to Authority

Not content with scattering quotations from notable people throughout the book, the authors appeal to authority in four entire chapters:

13. One Hundred Essential Citations [by which the authors mean quotations] From Leading Scientists
14. What Do Scientists Believe In?
15. What Did Einstein Believe In?
16. What Did Gödel Believe In?

In Chapter 14, the authors worry over the commonly held belief that “modern scientists are not very religious, or at least far less religious than the general population.” Their excuses, caveats, and quibbles notwithstanding, that’s true. In the United States (and throughout the countries of the world except for a few such as Turkey and India), scientists are much less likely to believe in a personal God than the rest of the population.

Earlier in the book, before devoting an entire chapter to him, the authors mention that Einstein famously said “God does not play dice.” The actual quotation (“I am at all events convinced that He does not play dice.”) is found in a letter Einstein wrote to Max Born specifically disputing the then-new theory of quantum mechanics. This context matters.

Evidence from Outside the Sciences

The next section of the book includes additional material on several unscientific topics:

• The Jews (a.k.a., in the book, “The Hebrews”). In a chapter arguing that the Bible contains “truths” that were “humanly inaccessible” at the time it was written, and a separate chapter recounting the history of the Jews from ancient times through the Six-Day War of 1967, the authors imply (but never explicitly state) that the Jews were and are God’s chosen people. They argue that the Jews’ supposedly uncanny ancient knowledge and later improbable history both imply an interventionist God.
• The inerrancy of the Bible. In both the chapter about the Jews and that one arguing that the apparent (“alleged”) errors were not actual errors, the authors argue that the Bible is inerrant. Their main argument is that the book was written specifically for the ancient Hebrews, and for that reason composed in largely metaphorical language. But the main assertion is that The Bible is not literal: it “pursues purely supernatural ends, and therefore corrects only those errors that prevent us from understanding who God is.” 
• “Jesus is the Messiah and God incarnate.” To exclude so many of the rest—even those that might completely agree with the idea of a creator God—is curious. Elsewhere in the book, in a long footnote, the authors characterize the ideas of Buddhism, Hinduism, and Brahmanism about the origin of the Universe as “rarely rationally articulated,” and whose adherents “struggle to present them coherently.” Islam (about 25% of the world population), which also espouses a creator God, goes entirely unmentioned. 
• The miracles in Fátima, Portugal, in 1917. By including these purported miracles (as well as the Shroud of Turin) in a book supposedly about the scientific evidence for God, the authors identify themselves as apologists specifically for Catholicism, since other Christian churches don’t recognize them. 
• Argument from Emotions. Although, early in the book, the authors assert that “emotions come into play when we evaluate a claim and its conclusions” (implying that they may distort such evaluation), in Chapter 22, they tell us to perform “an exercise in listening to the interior voice.” After recapitulating an explanation of the origin of conscience in evolutionary psychology, they ask, “Is it compatible with what you feel?”
• “Philosophical Proofs”: A recapitulation of arguments, both ancient and modern, supposedly proving the existence of God. Almost all of these arguments (some of which, of course, recapitulate those already presented) assert only a creator God—not the specific Catholic God of the authors. 

We are, by this point, far from supposedly scientific evidence. 

Straw Man Argument

Throughout the book, the authors repeatedly recite ideas that a “coherent” materialist supposedly must believe. Some of these are indeed widely believed by atheists, such as:

• “Miracles cannot exist.” 
• “Prophecies and revelations cannot exist.”
• “The spirit world—including devils, angels, evil spirits, possessions, exorcisms—does not exist.”
• “Deterministic laws apply universally.”
• “All processes in the Universe … operate solely through chance and necessity.”

In the penultimate chapter (“Materialist Arguments against the Existence of God”), the authors assert arguments that, for the most part, materialists (atheists) don’t make—either disbelieving or simply lacking a belief. But the authors all but argue that the burden of proof is on the materialist: “Believing in nothing is a belief in itself and an active choice.” Really? And is belief really a choice?

God Books in Context

Perhaps not surprisingly, given the general interest in the subject, this book is one of an established genre. A search for “God and science” on Amazon, for example, returns over 10,000 results (curiously, reversing the search for “science and God” generates over 50,000 results), including: 

• The Science of God: The Convergence of Scientific and Biblical Wisdom
• Finding God in Science
• Cosmic Chemistry: Do God and Science Mix?
• God, Science, and Religious Diversity: A Defense of Theism
• Science Confirms the Existence of God
• Science and God: Do You Have to Choose?
• From Science to God: A Physicist’s Journey into the Mystery of Consciousness
• Science and God: How Science and Logic Support the Bible
• God Speaks Science: What Neurons, Giant Squid, and Supernovae Reveal About Our Creator
• Believing Is Seeing: A Physicist Explains How Science Shattered His Atheism and Revealed the Necessity of Faith
• The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief
• Science Confirms the Existence of God
• Finding God In Science: The Extraordinary Evidence for the Soul and Christianity, A Rocket Scientist’s Gripping Odyssey
• God and god of Science
• God Discovery: How Science and Logic Reveal the Existence of God
• The Call of Wonder: How the God of Reason Created Science in His Image

The list goes on and on. And, of course, there are also many books of religious apologetics (such as William Lane Craig’s The Kalām Cosmological Argument) without the words God and science in the title.

Apparently, a lot of Christians (to whom nearly all of these books appear to be specifically addressed) are worried about the apparent conflict and are looking for a comforting reconciliation. But from the sheer length of that list, it can be inferred that the worry isn’t easily relieved. 

Meanwhile, materialist scientists remain entirely unpersuaded.

Usually, wellness therapies that claim to treat everything actually treat nothing.

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He is called Rags.

On the morning of May 5, 1980, a sixty-year-old man named Elias Joseph Barauskas collapsed at the Simple Simon restaurant in downtown Dayton, Ohio. He was revived briefly at Miami Valley Hospital, declared dead, came back, and was declared dead again at 6:55 that evening. No one seemed to know his name. They called him Rags.1

Over two hundred people filed into Sacred Heart Church for his funeral. Three priests officiated. CBS sent a crew; the segment aired on Sunday Morning. A local artist had painted his portrait, and a downtown bank hung it on the wall. He was buried at the Dayton VA National Cemetery—Section 19, Site 2257—because it turned out, among the many things Dayton had not known about him, Elias was a World War II Army veteran.2, 3

Only after he died did Dayton learn the rest. Two brothers were reached by phone in Connecticut and Florida by a genealogist working with the county coroner. Elias had grown up Lithuanian-American in Waterbury. He had spent four years at Sacred Heart Seminary in Tampa, training to become a Catholic missionary. On a train, sometime in the 1950s, he fell hard for a woman he met there. As his plan had been to take his missionary vows, the pressure of whether to pursue personal or brotherly love precipitated a crisis that proved unbearable, a brother told the Dayton Daily News. Elias succumbed to a nervous breakdown. His Army experience may have predisposed him to such a crisis. His family placed him in a psychiatric hospital in Connecticut, then another in Kentucky, from which his mother inexplicably withdrew him before he might have recovered. He drifted. In 1965, his family knew he was in Newark. After that, he ended up sleeping rough in Cincinnati until the Cincinnati police tired of him and drove him thirty miles north to Dayton, where they dropped him off. 

There, he lived on Dayton’s streets for something close to fifteen years. He asked for nothing and bothered no one. The city that paid him no particular attention while he was alive turned out, when he died, to have been watching and wondering about him all along. 

I have been thinking about Rags lately because I have been writing about homelessness, and he is the kind of person any framework must account for or admit it cannot. There are thousands of reasons for homelessness, or for “becoming unhoused” in the current parlance. He was not unhoused by a shifting housing market. He was made homeless by an impossible choice presented to a fragile and sincere mind, a likely ineffective psychiatric system that let him go too soon, a first-generation American family that may have been embarrassed and could not hold him, and a police force that solved its problem by shipping him off to another city. He was made homeless, in other words, by the country we were in, back in 1965, which is not the country we are in now. 

Your Brain on Homelessness 

Though there are many causes for homelessness, there is an emerging predictable trajectory for what homelessness does to the brain. It is the brain that takes the hit from homelessness, and the damage is staged, rapid, and predictable. 

The hypothalamus, sitting beneath the thalamus and weighing about four grams, is the master regulator of the body’s stress response. When threat signals are routed through the amygdala and other limbic structures, it releases corticotropin-releasing hormone, which sets in motion a cascade ending in cortisol released from the adrenal cortex, alongside epinephrine and norepinephrine from the adrenal medulla. Cortisol mobilizes glucose, sharpens attention, dilates the pupils, suppresses nonessential functions like digestion and reproduction, vasoconstriction increases blood pressure, and the body is set to an alarm state that readies quick reactions and decisions. For short periods, this system keeps you alive as it evolved for our ancestors to escape the predators of the Serengeti. When stress persists over months to years, it is this system that destroys you.4, 5

In 1998, I attended a lecture by Peter Senge of the MIT Sloan School of Management and the innovator of the Learning Organization. He described a company with the toxic culture of fear, uncertainty, and constant anxiety. Directly as a result, they were regularly visited by ambulances carrying off the early- to mid-career employees experiencing heart attacks. For people with marginal hearts to begin with, and unaware of their weakness, vasoconstriction can kill. 

In Silicon Valley where I lived at the time, there were many such examples. One might project that productivity and innovation were also abysmal. Today, more universities are under pressure to show positive cash flows, applied research, and job training students. The explicit message is: “either keep up or get out.” 

Brain destruction is specific. The hippocampus is dense with cortisol receptors that normally put the brake on hypothalamic output. Under unremitting stress, the hippocampus shrinks. In fact, hippocampal size can serve as a proxy measure of the length and severity of the stress. A damaged hippocampus breaks the brake, so the prolonged stress response establishes a positive feedback loop in which increasing damage produces dysregulation that spins out of control, producing even more damage. 

A damaged hippocampus also impairs what researchers call mental time travel: the hippocampus is centrally involved in projecting yourself forward into imagined future scenarios—the cognitive operation that lets a housed person plan for next month’s rent or next year’s job. Damage the hippocampus, and the future dims or recedes completely.6, 7

The prefrontal cortex regions responsible for planning, working memory, impulse control, and the valuation of future rewards are vulnerable because their pyramidal neurons carry a dense glucocorticoid load and depend on tightly tuned catecholamine signaling that stress disrupts. There, dendritic retraction—the shrinking of branching connections between neurons—is seen in animal models within weeks of chronic stress onset and in human imaging studies of populations under prolonged adversity. Early dendritic changes are largely reversible if the stressor is removed. Later changes, including frank neuronal loss, are not. The foresight machinery, in other words, withers under siege, and the longer the siege, the less of it returns.8, 9

The brain structure responsible for choosing among optional futures is damaged; the structure responsible for committing the damage to autopilot is strengthened.

Meanwhile, the basal ganglia are taking the survival routines a homeless person executes daily—where to sleep, when to line up, where to find food—and converting them from deliberate, effortful, prefrontally-planned behaviors into automatic ones. This is the same circuit that lets a commuter drive home without consciously choosing each turn, and it is a positive feature of a self-directed dynamic system, not a bug, of how the brain economizes attention. After roughly sixty to ninety days of consistent repetition, the routines are crystalizing. After six months, they are deeply automatic. After a year, they are nearly impossible to override even when circumstances improve.10, 11

Therein lies the double trap. The brain structure responsible for choosing among optional futures is damaged; the structure responsible for committing the damage to autopilot is strengthened. A person homeless for, say, six months, thus has a less competent foresight system and is more entrenched in a dysfunctional lifestyle culture than the same person is at six weeks. Provide housing at six weeks, and you are working with a brain that can still imagine the future and override its survival routines; provide it at six months, and you are working with a brain that is structurally less able to do either. 

This is the neurobiology of declining foresight and imagination. It is not a metaphor. It is dendrites retracting in measurable numbers, hippocampal volume declining in measurable percentages, and basal ganglia circuits encoding behaviors in measurable strength. The clock is running on tissue. 

Measuring Damaged Foresight 

Behavioral economists have a term for the rate at which a person devalues future rewards relative to immediate ones: the temporal discount rate. Offered $100 today or $120 next week, most people wait. Offered the same choice with a one-month delay, fewer will. The steepness of the curve—how rapidly the future loses value as it recedes from our ability to imagine—is what economists measure, and it varies enormously across populations.12

People experiencing homelessness have, on average, some of the steepest discount curves ever recorded. The future, for them, is worth very little; it is discounted precipitously. This has nothing to do with ethics or personal character. It is a measurement. It is what the data show, replicated across studies using monetary choice tasks, delay discounting paradigms, and behavioral measures of impulsivity. A homeless person offered a small reward today versus a larger reward next week will, far more often than a housed control, take the small reward today.13, 14, 15

This is not an irrational choice for homeless people, because who knows what the future holds for them? For most of us, to quote a popular idiom, a penny saved is a penny earned, but sometimes a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. Recall Walter Michel’s famous marshmallow test in which children who could delay gratification long enough to get two marshmallows (instead of taking one immediately) ended up in the long run with higher GPAs, better jobs, increased incomes, better marriages, and even superior BMIs. But if you are a child growing up in a home where someone is likely to nab the one marshmallow while you are waiting for the second one, it pays to take the immediate reward. 

The conventional reading of this finding is that steep discounting causes homelessness—that impulsive people who cannot defer gratification end up on the street through a series of present-biased decisions. There is some truth to this for some individuals. But it gets the causality mostly backward. Steep discounting under conditions of genuine uncertainty about tomorrow is not impulsivity. It is the exhibition of one of humankind’s greatest evolutionary gifts: rational adaptation. If you do not know whether you will be alive next week, whether you will be assaulted tonight, whether the small amount of money in your pocket will be stolen before morning, then taking the certain immediate reward is not a failure of self-control. It is the correct answer to the actual problem. 

The trouble is that this rational adaptation, sustained over months, becomes neurologically encoded. The hippocampus and prefrontal cortex that compute the value of future rewards are the same structures being damaged by chronic stress. The basal ganglia circuits that automate present-focused survival routines are the same circuits being strengthened by daily repetition and reinforcement. The discount rate that began as a sensible response to a dangerous environment becomes, over time, a feature of the brain itself. By the time housing is offered, the future has been devalued not just contextually but structurally. The person can be housed and still be, in a measurable sense, unable to plan for next month—because the apparatus that makes next month feel real has atrophied. 

This is what makes the recovery window decline the way it does. It is not simply that homelessness is hard to escape because life on the street is extremely demanding, though it is that. It is that the cognitive operation of escape—imagining different futures, evaluating which is Plan A, B, or C, and sustaining action across the multistep sequence required to reach any of them—depends on neural machinery that homelessness progressively dismantles. The longer the dismantling continues, the less of the machinery remains to do the imagining. 

Motivational interviewing assumes a person who can hold a future self in mind long enough to be motivated by it.

This also explains, in a way the standard policy literature does not, why so many evidence-based interventions fail: they are applied too late. All the good intentions, such as cognitive-behavioral therapy, assume a functioning prefrontal cortex. Motivational interviewing assumes a person who can hold a future self in mind long enough to be motivated by it. Case management assumes a client who can attend the next appointment. These assumptions may hold for many people who have been homeless a few weeks. They hold less reliably for people who have been homeless six months. They do not hold at all for people who have been homeless several years. The interventions are not failing because they are bad interventions. They fail because they are being applied to a brain that has, by the point of intervention, lost the capacity to use them. 

Fast and Slow 

Humans are extraordinarily adaptable, and that is normally our edge. Imagination may be one of the things that most separates us from other animals. The brain is not a fixed-purpose organ. It is an elegant learning system that calibrates itself to whatever environment it finds itself in, and it does this so fluidly that we rarely notice it is happening. The species’ entire claim to fame is that we make the best of any new situation. 

In homelessness, this adaptability works against us. 

Evolutionary psychologists working in life history theory describe a dimension along which populations and individuals vary: the speed at which a person’s developmental program runs. Slow life history strategies—delayed reproduction, extended parental investment, long-term mate bonds, accumulation of education and resources—develop in environments where the future is predictable and rewards for waiting are reliable. Fast life history strategies—early reproduction, less parental investment, present orientation, immediate sociality—develop in environments where the future is uncertain, mortality is elevated, and waiting is punished. A.J. Figueredo, at the University of Arizona, has spent two decades documenting how these strategies cluster together as a single underlying factor responsive to environmental signals about predictability and risk.16, 17

The brain reads its inputs and calibrates accordingly. Homelessness is an environment whose signals are unambiguous. The future is uncertain. Mortality is elevated. Waiting is punished. The brain responds the way evolution shaped it to respond. It shifts toward a faster strategy: shorter time horizons, present consumption, immediate sociality. The slow life history strategy that the housed world rewards—delayed gratification, long-term planning, faith in tomorrow—is itself an adaptation, calibrated to a relatively recent and historically unusual condition: a world in which most children survive to adulthood, most paychecks arrive when promised, and most futures resemble the futures one plans for. The fast strategy isn’t a defect. It is what the brain reverts to when the world stops cooperating. 

My brother Thomas once introduced me to John Graham, a force-of-nature man in my hometown of Greenville, Ohio—a town of twelve thousand in Darke County, about thirty miles northwest of Dayton. Graham, who grew up in the Pittsburgh mill town of McKeesport, founded the Good Samaritan Home in Greenville: a halfway house for men recently released from prison, anchored by a mentoring model he called Citizen Circle. He once told me about a man in his program who wanted a hundred-dollar coat with the Cincinnati Reds emblem. A friend in the house bought it for him, even though it meant the friend wouldn’t eat for a week. The coat was here. The next paycheck was in the future. The future, by the rules of survival, would not arrive with the same assurance as the present. 

What the framework adds to the standard behavioral economics finding is the question of permanence. The brain that has spent six months reading signs of an elevated mortality, a future uncertain, may not easily return to mortality normal, future reliable, even when an apartment is provided. The signals it learned to weight are still in memory; new situations have yet to be weighted. The brain is just doing what it has always done: adapting to new situations. We do not know how long the readaptation takes, or whether it ever fully completes. 

The day is already full. 

Behavioral economists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir documented something useful about how scarcity affects cognition. In a series of studies, they showed that financial scarcity—being broke—imposes a cognitive load roughly equivalent to losing thirteen IQ points. Not because poor people are less capable. Because mental machinery is consumed by the immediate.18, 19

Their most striking experiment followed sugarcane farmers in Tamil Nadu, a south Indian state, through a single harvest cycle. The same farmers, tested before harvest when they were poor and after harvest when they had been paid, performed substantially better on cognitive tasks afterward. The thirteen-point gap closed. Their brains had not changed. Their pockets had. The cognitive impairment of poverty, in their study, fully reversed.20

The farmers had been poor in the months leading up to a single annual harvest. They had homes. They had families. They had identities as farmers, futures as farmers, and social networks of other farmers who would also get paid at harvest. Strip away those protective factors, sustain the scarcity for a year instead of a season, and the experiment becomes something different. The reversibility, our neurobiology suggests, becomes only partial. The farmers got their thirteen points back. The chronically homeless do not. 

The residents of Skid Row have been telling this same story directly to a camera for years. In Mark Laita’s Soft White Underbelly interviews—a YouTube series that has accumulated thousands of hours of testimony from people on the street in Los Angeles—the same observation surfaces from person after person, in the unprompted way that signals it isn’t ideology but description: there is no time. The day is already too full. Finding a place to sleep takes hours. Finding food takes hours. Charging a phone, getting a shower, refilling a prescription, replacing shoes that were stolen overnight—each of these, without a car, an address, or a safe place to leave belongings, is a half-day errand. By the time the immediate is handled, the day is gone, and tomorrow’s demands are already arriving.21

This is what the loss of temporal anchors looks like from the inside. A housed person treats next week as a place to which they will safely and predictably arrive; to a person living on the street, next week is a hopeful rumor. The cognitive bandwidth that might otherwise be spent on application deadlines, appointment times, or the multistep sequence required to obtain a replacement ID is already burnt. The bureaucracy that requires three appointments at three offices on three different days, in the right order, with the right paperwork, has not misjudged the difficulty of compliance. It has failed to understand what it is asking. It assumes a temporal architecture the applicant no longer possesses. 

A research team led by Rebecca Brown documented across two studies, first in Boston in 2012 and later at the University of California, San Francisco, found that homeless adults in their fifties carry geriatric and cognitive burdens closer to those of housed adults a decade or two older—twenty years of biological time, lost to scarcity. The farmers in Tamil Nadu got their thirteen points back. The accumulation that Brown’s team measured never comes back.22, 23

What the Math Says 

Here are some numbers, working from estimates in the framework literature and from my own modeling. Eviction prevention or emergency financial assistance, deployed before the first unhoused night, costs from three to five thousand dollars per household. If it works, the cognitive cascade never begins; recovery probability remains effectively 100 percent. Housing intervention at three months—Housing First plus rapid case management—has an expected lifetime cost around $70,000, given a recovery rate of about 70 percent and ongoing support for the 30 percent who don’t fully recover. The same intervention at twelve months runs around $165,000, because the recovery rate has dropped to 25 percent and the ongoing-support population is now 75 percent. Long-term chronic management without resolution runs roughly $400,000 over twenty years, with a recovery rate near 5 percent.24, 25, 26, 27

These numbers may be wrong in their particulars, but they are correct in their shape. Each three-month delay roughly doubles the lifetime cost of resolution, because each three-month delay roughly halves the probability of resolution. 

The system spends the most where the brains are least able to use it, and the least where they could.

Now consider how the United States actually spends its homeless services budget. HUD’s competitive Continuum of Care funds—the largest federal stream for direct homelessness response—flow heavily to Permanent Supportive Housing, which by program definition targets chronic homelessness; roughly three-quarters of these competitive funds went to PSH in recent years. The fractions reaching homelessness prevention and the first-months population, where recovery probability is highest, intervention is cheapest, and prevention of chronicity is achievable, are much smaller.28

This allocation is precisely inverted. The system spends the most where the brains are least able to use it, and the least where they could. This is not a compassion problem. It is a systems-design problem. Chronic homelessness is more visible, generates more political pressure, and qualifies people for more program categories. Newly homeless people are by definition harder to find, since they have not yet entered the homeless services system. The system has organized itself around the population it can see, which is the population for whom intervention is most expensive and least effective. 

There is a name for this in clinical medicine: late-stage care. We have built the equivalent of a healthcare system that funds hospice generously, oncology adequately, and screening programs barely at all. We are then surprised that people keep dying of advanced cancer. 

What Would Work 

A workable response to the framework requires three components, none individually novel, all currently missing as an integrated system in the United States. 

The first is real-time identification at the point of housing loss. Most homeless people enter the homeless services system weeks or months after their first night without a stable address, when they finally appear at a shelter intake or a benefits office. By that point the window has narrowed. The points where housing loss is visible in real time—emergency departments, eviction courts, jail releases, hospital discharges, foster care exits, school enrollment changes—are not currently connected to a rapid response. They could be. A person leaving an eviction hearing without housing should not have to find their way to a shelter system three weeks later. They should leave the courthouse with an appointment. 

The second is a place to land that is not a shelter. Emergency shelters as currently configured—group sleeping, night-only access, no privacy, no continuity, little safety, and daytime expulsion—are not a stopgap on the way to housing. They are an enactment of homelessness. They require the person to perform homelessness in order to receive help, which accelerates the identity shift the framework predicts and which the data confirm. What the first six months actually require is a transitional placement that preserves the prehomeless identity: a private room, a lockable door, an indefinite stay, an address you can put on a job application. This is closer to a hotel with services than a shelter. It is also closer, not coincidentally, to what Finland actually built. 

The third is counseling calibrated to phase. In the first three months, standard cognitive-behavioral approaches still work because the prefrontal cortex is stressed but functional. Between three and six months, the support has to shift toward external scaffolding—calendars, reminders, accompanied appointments—because the planning apparatus is degrading. After six months, the model has to change again, toward the ultra-low-barrier approaches that meet a 24-hour temporal horizon, with the understanding that recovery to full self-sufficiency is no longer the realistic goal for everyone. This is not defeatism. It is the same clinical honesty that distinguishes early-stage from late-stage care in any other condition. 

Finland is the existence proof that the architecture can be built. Beginning in the late 1980s, and accelerating after 2008, Finland adopted a national Housing First policy with rapid scattered-site placement and indefinite tenure. They closed shelters and moved their residents into apartments. Between 1987 and 2023, the country reduced its homeless population by roughly 75 percent, from about 18,000 to roughly 3,400, even as homelessness rose across most of the developed world. They did this by treating housing as a precondition for stabilization rather than a reward for compliance, by intervening early, and by accepting that some fraction of the population will need indefinite supportive housing—and funding it accordingly.29, 30, 31

Since 2023, the trend has reversed. A new Finnish government cut housing allowances and social-security benefits, and the two reports since have shown consecutive rises in homelessness—about 11 percent in 2024, then 20 percent in 2025, the largest single-year increase ARA has ever recorded. Long-term homelessness rose by 29 percent in the most recent year, and street homelessness, which Finland had nearly eliminated, climbed by 50 percent. The reversal is not evidence that the model failed. It is evidence of what the model required to keep working, and what worked was withdrawn. 

The Finnish model is not utopian. It is substantially cheaper, on a per capita basis, than what the United States currently does. It just allocates the money differently, and earlier. 

There is a constraint the framework cannot wish away. Every transitional placement, recovery residence, or halfway house has to go in some particular neighborhood, and the neighbors get a vote. Graham faced years of opposition in Greenville from residents who did not want the recently incarcerated living among them. He prevailed because he was the kind of man who prevails, and the work he started in Greenville eventually informed a network of similar efforts across the Miami Valley. But the friction never let up, and most people who might consider this work decide, in the face of that friction, not to. 

Graham died on January 7, 2026, at age 77, from complications following a routine cardiac procedure. The framework calls for hundreds of placements like the one he built, in hundreds of neighborhoods. Each will face exactly the opposition Graham faced, and many without the man who knew how to prevail. The neurobiology of the recovery window is the easy problem. The political economy of where the recovery actually happens is the hard one.32, 33

What We Don’t Know 

A framework like this lives or dies on a study that doesn’t exist yet. 

The declining recovery window is built on convergent evidence from stress neurobiology, behavioral economics, habit formation research, and identity theory. It is biologically plausible, clinically resonant, and consistent with the cross-sectional data we have. What it has not been is directly tested. Nobody has enrolled five hundred people within a week of their first night without housing and followed them through the next two years, measuring temporal discounting, executive function, and cortisol at fixed intervals, then tracking who recovered and who didn’t after housing. Such a study would cost roughly two and a half million dollars over four years. The United States spends about twelve billion dollars annually on homeless services. Yet, we have not allocated 0.02 percent of one year’s budget to find out whether we are spending the rest of it at the right time.34

In the absence of that study, three scenarios remain live. Cognitive changes might be largely state dependent and reverse with housing alone, in which case the urgency argument is overstated. They might be partially irreversible, with irreversibility increasing with duration, which is what the convergent evidence suggests and what I think is most likely. They might be largely irreversible past some threshold, in which case the urgency argument is understated and prevention becomes nearly the only thing that works. 

Decision theory does not require the question to be settled. In two of the three scenarios, early intervention is the difference between full recovery and permanent functional impairment. In the third, early intervention is somewhat redundant but not harmful. There is no scenario in which acting as if the clock matters produces worse outcomes than the current approach. The expected value calculation favors urgency at every weighting of the unknowns. 

Natural History 

Twelve years ago, I published a meta-analysis of fifty-six randomized trials of treatments for low back pain. The finding was that 96 percent of improvement in acute cases, and 66 percent in chronic cases, occurred independent of any treatment. Natural history. The body doing its work, with or without our intervention. The implication for clinicians was uncomfortable: if you don’t account for what would have happened anyway, you can’t tell whether you’re actually helping.35 Readers of Skeptic may recognize that framework from earlier work on the chiropractic and low back pain literatures.36 Homelessness inverts it. There, the question was whether treatment could outperform biology’s own recovery. Here, the question is whether intervention can happen before biology’s window for recovery closes. 

The homeless service system faces the same epistemological problem in reverse. Instead of overclaiming credit for a recovery that biology was going to deliver, it may be underclaiming the damage that accumulates when biology’s window for recovery is foreclosed by duration. The body wants to heal. The brain wants to plan. Both of these are, under the right conditions, automatic. Both of them require those conditions to be present in time. 

I saw Rags many times. In the summer of 1977, I worked in the building that had once been the old Dayton YMCA, since converted into city government offices. I rode the electric bus into work each morning and walked another two blocks to the government building, where I worked on the problem of abandoned housing—which intersected with homelessness. Very often Rags would be there across the street. He was tall, physically imposing in a way that registered before anything else about him did. We would nod and smile to each other. We never exchanged words. 

Friends of mine who talked with him during those years told me he turned up at the periphery of nearly every public gathering in town. Concerts in the park, festivals, anywhere a community had assembled. Rags would be there, but always at the edge, never stepping inside the gathering itself. He was drawn to the warmth, my friends said, but kept his distance from it, as though approaching too close might consume him. They would speak to him. The substance of what they said, my friends recalled, mattered far less than the fact of speaking. Human contact was the real message: someone cared enough to acknowledge and reach out to a fellow human. Rags listened to both levels of communication: the words and the intention behind them. 

What I saw, and what my friends saw, was the picture the framework predicts: a man whose desire for connection had survived his capacity to act on it. Fifteen years on the street had not extinguished what he wanted from other people. It had eroded the emotional risk-taking machinery for entering a group. The limbic structures that register the warmth of a gathering had not been damaged. The prefrontal and hippocampal systems that would have let him imagine himself across the street, walking into the music, sitting on the grass with the others, had been. He could feel the gathering. He could not construct his way into it. He stood at the edge because the edge was as close as the architecture for approach would carry him. 

Social programs fail in part because the biology of decision-making and recovery is overlooked—left out of the design and ignored in the evaluation.

He died at sixty, of a heart attack on the morning shift at Simple Simon. His name was on a National Cemetery stone before Dayton learned the rest of his story. He was a soldier, a seminarian, a brother, a man who fell in love on a train and could not survive what came after. The country he was born into kept him alive long enough to fail him in two psychiatric hospitals, then drove him to a different city and let him sleep in doorways for half his adult life. The country we live in now does it differently. It does not do it less. 

Lee Sechrest and Patrick McKnight, my mentors at Arizona, taught that an omitted variable is deadly. The omitted variable in the care of homelessness has been the brain. Social programs fail in part because the biology of decision-making and recovery is overlooked—left out of the design and ignored in the evaluation. Brain science offers the chance to reduce noise and sharpen the signal. If the brain is an omitted variable, restoring it to the context of behavioral programs should improve predictability and outcomes. This should herald a new era in program design and evaluation. 

What the framework asks of us is what the framework’s namesake—natural history—has always asked. Pay attention to time. Account for what the body and brain are doing on their own, with or without our help. Show up before the window closes. The clock has always been running. It is time the people designing these interventions stop treating the brain as a black box and start designing for the organ that has to do the changing. 

E.O. Wilson predicted decades ago that psychology would eventually be absorbed by biology. For the population this essay is about, that absorption cannot wait.

Ostracizing antisemites like Nick Fuentes is necessary and just. The cancel culture concept only obscures what’s wrong with today’s political culture.

What‘s the difference between cancel culture and shaming toxic people who infect one’s political movement?

This question recently embroiled the American conservative movement after Heritage Foundation President Kevin Roberts refused to denounce Tucker Carlson for his interview with antisemite Nick Fuentes. Roberts said that Heritage rejects the policy of “canceling our own people,” and specifically objected to canceling both Carlson and Fuentes.1

Roberts was widely rebuked by other conservatives for his statement and for defending his association with Carlson in the name of opposing cancel culture. There’s a world of difference, say his critics, between the behavior of woke activists in 2020 after the George Floyd protests, and sensible work to critique bad actors who’ve gained too much influence inside conservatism. 

There is a difference, but is simply criticizing vile characters like Fuentes enough for a movement to maintain its dignity? And if Fuentes is disinvited from podcasts, is that cancel culture? What even is cancel culture, and does treating it as an uncontested political sin help us understand what’s happening in our political culture? Or does doing so play into the hands of attention-hungry trolls like Fuentes, who profit from the platform conservatives now reflexively give to victims of cancellation? 

It’s not cancel culture to criticize. 

Why don’t critics of Kevin Roberts think they’re engaging in cancel culture? 

Writing in The Free Press, Eli Lake attempts an answer.2 It was “cancellation,” he says, when the editor of The Philadelphia Inquirer resigned over writing the headline “Buildings Matter, Too” during the George Floyd protests in 2020, and it was cancellation when a high school student was denied admission to college because of old tasteless internet posts. By contrast, criticizing Carlson for his amicable conversation with a rabid antisemite is only “doing the hard work of policing one’s coalition.” 

But why should we criticize Carlson? Not, apparently, for inviting Fuentes on the podcast in the first place, but simply because he didn’t grill him hard enough. Lake recommends William F. Buckley’s approach in a 1968 interview with the rapist-turned-Black Panther advocate of terrorist violence, Eldridge Cleaver.3 Buckley gets Cleaver to admit he endorses the assassination of Richard Nixon, and other odious positions. But it’s noteworthy that Buckley does not actually criticize, let alone condemn, any of these positions in the interview. He at most asks tongue-in-cheek questions that relay others’ criticism to elicit Cleaver’s response. He actually grills him little better than Carlson did Fuentes. 

You can’t shame a shameless troll, you can only embolden him.

Lake’s idea is that since Buckley is only using speech to try to discredit Cleaver, it can’t be cancel culture and so can’t be bad. But Buckley’s tactic is no model here. Even if he had been more vocally critical it would not have erased the dramatic effect of treating an agitator for crude mob violence as worthy of civilized conversation. To be sure, Buckley had the free speech right to platform a spokesman for thuggish Marxist viewpoints. But not every exercise of free speech is wise. 

By the same token, it was Carlson’s right to host Fuentes, but in exercising his rights he also elevated and dignified an obscene antisemitic troll. In the weeks since Carlson’s interview, Fuentes has now done a grand tour of the podcast circuit and has even made it onto TV interview programs like Piers Morgan’s, where the host tried to be critical but is widely seen even by critics of Fuentes as having been bested by him.4 You can’t shame a shameless troll, you can only embolden him. 

The Confused Definition of Cancel Culture 

It’s now widely thought that cancel culture is an offense against free speech. We see this in the closest thing to a textbook definition of cancel culture we can find, in Greg Lukianoff and Rikki Schlott’s 2023 book The Canceling of the American Mind. They define cancel culture as “the uptick beginning around 2014, and accelerating in 2017 and after, of campaigns to get people fired, disinvited, deplatformed, or otherwise punished for speech that is—or would be—protected by First Amendment standards and the climate of fear and conformity that has resulted from this uptick.” 

Read carefully, this definition is ambiguous. Does it mean that cancel culture is itself legally forbidden by the First Amendment (because it punishes people for speech that should be free), or just that it’s a personal moral offense perpetrated against those who are legally exercising their free speech rights? 

If it means the first, then the definition does not cover all of the outrageous cancellations by woke activists. Some deplatformings really did violate someone’s free speech rights, as when a student mob shut down Judge Kyle Duncan’s speech before the Federalist Society at Stanford in 2023. But not all did. When The Philadelphia Inquirer editor Stan Wischnowski resigned in 2020 because of outrage over his decision to publish an article bemoaning the impact of Black Lives Matters protests on urban areas, he was well within his First Amendment rights to resign, and the paper would have been within its rights to fire him. Even if the editor’s article made a valid point and we think the paper’s ideological agenda is misguided, the editor does not have a right to his job, and the First Amendment protects a paper’s right not to have to fund a dissenting employee’s speech. 

But if we take the definition of cancel culture to mean some personal moral offense against those who exercise legally protected speech, then many of Carlson’s critics are engaging in it in spite of themselves. However abhorrent Fuentes’s racist views may be, they’re also protected by the First Amendment. So, unless we adopt the social justice activist view that hate speech is actually violence, his critics are trying to punish him—if only through social shaming—for his protected free speech. That’s certainly true for any who say Fuentes should not be on conservative podcasts: they want to deplatform him, and other antisemites may now fear they will suffer the same consequences. But even those who just want to criticize him more harshly, on or off a podcast, are still otherwise punishing him. 

Not every exercise of First Amendment rights is rational or wise.

So even the textbook definition of cancel culture is confused. Either it doesn’t explain what was wrong with core examples of the most objectionable cancel campaigns, or it actually classifies totally reasonable efforts to ostracize unreasonable people—itself the exercise of the rights of free speech and free association—as some kind of moral offense. 

We need another framework for understanding what was wrong with cases like the 2020 Philadelphia Inquirer firing. 

An Alternative Conceptualization 

Not every exercise of First Amendment rights is rational or wise. Buckley unwisely platformed Cleaver as many today are unwisely platforming Fuentes. Some free speech is even overtly irrational. What made the Inquirer firing so bad was simply that it was driven by a kind of religious fervor to ferret out heretics who offend against a cherished but irrational orthodoxy. 

But this kind of fervor is what defines a concept that is older and better-tested than cancel culture. A religiously driven social campaign to root out and punish heretics is what defines a witch hunt. 

Cancel culture is a not very descriptive name for simply the latest chapter in humanity’s long history of irrational, inquisitor-driven persecution campaigns, from the literal medieval witch hunts targeting heretical devil worshipers, to Stalin’s party purges of traitors to the communist party. The ideologies driving these campaigns have varied, but all mobilized mobs who cared little about evidence to root out some unorthodox other. 

The problem isn’t cancellation per se, it’s the canceling, smearing, persecutions, and sometimes prosecution of scapegoats because of the delusions and madness of crowds.

And while witch hunting campaigns often involve resorting to state force to suppress dissent or silence speech, they do not always. The Satanic panic in the 1980s included (futile) campaigns to censor rock and roll music and even prosecutions (which were eventually overturned)5 of child care workers alleged to be Satanic abusers. Over 12,000 cases of abuse were reported in this period, none ever substantiated as Satanic.6 But the campaign, which originated in Evangelical churches and drew on now-discredited psychological theories of recovered memories, also involved voluntary boycott and smear campaigns that simply worked to impugn reputations without violating anyone’s rights. Everyone—from Procter & Gamble7 (because it had a logo confused with Satanic symbols), to the makers of Dungeons & Dragons8 and The Smurfs,9 to (naturally) heavy metal musicians like Ozzy Osbourne—was a target. Some of these alleged witches were tried in real courts, many were simply tried (or mistried) in the court of public opinion. 

To chalk this up to cancel culture is to dramatically understate what makes the underlying culture outrageous. The term alludes to the cancellation of TV programs by networks, and was first used after notable celebrities had opportunities canceled because of various scandals. But it was of course no outrage that Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby were canceled after dozens of credible accusations of sexual assault. It is outrageous when others had opportunities revoked because of unfounded accusations of wrongdoing—or credible accusations of manufactured wrongs—spread by online cancel mobs. 

The problem isn’t cancellation per se, it’s the canceling, smearing, persecutions, and sometimes prosecution of scapegoats because of the delusions and madness of crowds. 

As Stalin’s party purges demonstrate, witch hunts don’t need to be justified in the name of explicit, overt religiosity to be pursued with religious fervor. Nominally atheistic movements like communism can draw inspiration from religious models. (A relevant symbol here is that Stalin himself spent five years in seminary training to become an orthodox priest before he became enamored of communism.10) 

Fast forward to the 21st century. As John McWhorter has argued persuasively in Woke Racism, the social justice egalitarianism of the last few decades bears all the hallmarks (in the words of his subtitle) of a new religion. The movement has its own articles of faith (that any inequality represents injustice), its own sacred texts (DiAngelo and Kendi), its own conception of original sin (white privilege), and its overwhelming demand for repentance and submission, in the name of which so many cancel campaigns have been launched. 

As I’ve argued elsewhere, that demand for submission is what empowers all the rest of the religious fervor of the woke movement.11 And the moral code behind the demand is something that woke egalitarianism actually inherits from old-fashioned Judeo-Christian religion. 

But if the real problem with woke inquisitions and heretic hunting is its religious fervor, will religious conservative critics of cancel culture be willing to admit this? 

The Blind Spot for MAGA Witch Hunting 

Surely many religious people are willing to condemn inquisitorial witch hunts of religion’s past. But are they willing to condemn them because of their religious fervor? And will they be willing to confront baseless persecution when it arises again? 

This question is pressing because anyone critical of woke witch hunting has to confront the fact that the MAGA movement is prone to it as well. They need to confront this even if MAGA doesn’t hunt for its heretics in the same way or to the same degree. 

In The Canceling of the American Mind, Lukianoff and Schlott do offer three whole chapters detailing very recent campaigns against free speech launched by politicians on what they characterize as the right. As I’ve argued, actual free speech violations (e.g., when student mobs pushed speakers off stage) were only among the worst offenses of the woke witch hunters. If there’s not even respect for free speech among the activists and politicians more broadly on the right, then surely MAGA activists are capable of engaging in witch-hunting campaigns whether or not they target free speech. As just an early indication of this, Lukianoff and Schlott note that in 2017 there were more attempts to fire university professors launched by the right than were by the left. 

The George Floyd Moment on the Right 

If the killing of George Floyd and his portrayal as a fallen martyr inflamed the woke hunt for heretics, shouldn’t we be willing to talk about how the killing of Charlie Kirk did something very similar among the MAGA faithful? 

Make no mistake, as conservatives have eagerly insisted, Kirk’s mourners did not riot in the streets over Charlie Kirk’s death, and there were many differences between Kirk and Floyd and in the circumstances of their deaths.12 What’s more, many of those who openly celebrated Kirk’s assassination or political violence against people who share a similar viewpoint, or who claimed that Kirk had it coming, certainly did deserve to lose their jobs or otherwise face public shaming. Just as we rightly deplatform Nazis, we also rightly ostracize advocates of violence. 

At the same time, some of those punished in connection with statements made about the assassination surely did not deserve it, and the only way to explain why they were punished is to point to a kind of witch hunting mentality in the MAGA crowd. 

Consider the case of Darren Michael, a theater professor at Austin Peay State University in Tennessee, who was fired for posting a headline to Facebook saying “Charlie Kirk Says Gun Deaths ‘Unfortunately’ Worth it to Keep 2nd Amendment.”13 Michael was expressing disagreement with Kirk’s position on gun control, citing the tragedy of his death as a reason. Or consider Marjean Corkran, who was fired by Enterprise State Community College in Alabama for posting “Let us not forget some other children were shot in another (expletive) school today.”14 Or Suzanne Swierc, another university employee who was fired by Ball State University in Indiana, for posting “If you think Charlie Kirk was a wonderful person, we can’t be friends.”15

Joshua Bregy of Clemson University in South Carolina shared a post privately with friends on Facebook.16 It opened with an explicit denunciation of political violence and closed by noting that he grieved the tragic loss of Kirk. But it also took issue with Kirk’s views on guns and with the idea of treating him as a martyr. Someone from the Clemson College Republicans on his friend list shared a screen shot of the post.17 This was then reshared by influencers and politicians until President Trump himself called for defunding Clemson.18 At this point, Bregy (along with others who made more inflammatory statements) was dismissed. 

They may have lacked tact, but they did not call for or celebrate violence. 

More recently Greg Lukianoff himself has written about how his organization, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression (FIRE), has counted 80 attempts to discipline academic employees about statements on Kirk’s death since September 10th, compared to 98 comparable attempts in all of 2020 to do the same after Floyd’s Death.19 The Chronicle of Higher Education has also kept a record of academic employees fired for comments on Kirk’s death.20

Sorting through the data reveals many academic employees who said things that betrayed a severe lack of judgment, fully warranting their dismissal. (Could some dismissed after George Floyd have deserved it as well?) But Michael, Corkran, Swierc, and Bregy seem to have done nothing more than commit the faux pas of speaking ill of the dead by disagreeing with Kirk’s worldview. They may have lacked tact, but they did not call for or celebrate violence. 

No one has a right to a job. Advocates of violence certainly shouldn’t expect to keep their jobs in spite of their gross display of bad judgment. And perhaps we can understand why some fans of Kirk, in their grief and anger, were erroneously swept up in an online movement to ferret out genuine offenders. But the effect of the campaign’s lack of concern for evidence—like other witch hunting campaigns—was the targeting of many innocent victims. 

The campaign had its inquisitors: online influencers like Chaya Raichik, who became a clearing house for indiscriminate allegations of heresy against Kirk. In just the first two days after she declared “This is war,” I count on her feed at least three very public accusations directed against individuals who did little more than express perhaps tactless disagreement with Kirk.21, 22, 23, 24

It’s fundamentally a religious culture that underpins the recent uptick in witch hunting. And it’s virulent, to one degree or another, in key sectors of both political camps. 

Charlie Kirk’s death should have been condemned. But he has also been sanctified into a conservative martyr. Speakers at his heavily scripted and deeply religious memorial service compared him not only to St. Stephen25 but to Jesus Christ himself.26 In a movement that already revels in its religious faith, in its acceptance of dogmas strictly on the basis of traditional authorities, it should come as no shock that in their grief and anger over their martyr, emotion and not evidence would push some to hunt the latest new category of witch, those who refuse to recognize their martyr. 

Conservatives did not riot in the streets after Kirk’s assassination. But they also didn’t need to: they held political power. And notably, as Lukianoff and Schlott argue in their book, when they lost power on January 6, 2021, some MAGA activists did riot. And even for those conservatives who would never do such a thing, there’s an uncanny reluctance to recognize that the fundamental psychology behind these activist movements in their midst have many of the same signs of witch hunting by the woke. 

It’s fundamentally a religious culture that underpins the recent uptick in witch hunting. And it’s virulent, to one degree or another, in key sectors of both political camps. 

Breaking the Witch Hunters’ Spell of Cancel Culture 

For those of us who don’t have tribal loyalty to any political camp, it should only be liberating to abandon the cancel culture concept in favor of a clearer conceptualization. 

If we understand what’s been called cancel culture as just another witch hunt motivated by the latest religious-like reawakening, we can understand the difference between tribal campaigns to smear, deplatform, and persecute heretics, and rational efforts to ostracize bad actors. The campaign to canonize George Floyd and sniff out any objections to this orthodoxy were driven by irrational fervor that often targeted innocent victims. But campaigning to deprive Nick Fuentes of undeserved publicity can be a principled exercise of justice itself. 

Antisemitism itself has always been an essentially religious call for witch hunting, where the Jew plays the role of the witch.

Such an effort to ostracize the likes of Fuentes is not just fundamentally different from a witch hunt. It actually represents the conscious opposition to the whole phenomenon of witch hunting because it’s working to expel an active witch hunter from polite circles. 

Antisemitism itself has always been an essentially religious call for witch hunting, where the Jew plays the role of the witch. Motivated by Christianity, neo-pagan Nazism, or Islam, antisemites blame all the problems of the world on powerful Jews. Medieval inquisitions hunted witches and Jews alike. Ostracizing the witch hunters means expressly rejecting the religious fervor of the incitement to launch pogroms. 

Don’t let witch hunters like Fuentes use their cancel culture spell to make it seem like they’re on the side of reason, freedom, and justice.

“These people are frauds and they are grifters and they do not deserve your time.” That’s conservative political commentator Ben Shapiro at the December 2025 Turning Point USA conference anchored by the conservative student organization’s new leader, Erika Kirk, who took over after her husband Charlie Kirk was assassinated.

Who are these frauds and grifters Shapiro is referring to? It was two of his fellow conservatives and (former) friends: Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson, who he went on to describe as “charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty.”

Owens, in fact, was Shapiro’s colleague at The Daily Wire until the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack on Israel, when she suggested that Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu had prior knowledge of the attack and—in 9/11 conspiracism parlance—Let It Happen On Purpose (LIHOP) for political reasons, which include the “ethnic cleansing” of Gazans that was the “real holocaust.” She left the organization five months later to start her own independent show. 

Since Charlie Kirk’s assassination she has accused Erika Kirk of somehow being connected to or orchestrating his murder—most likely connected to Israel and the Jews, of course—but before this incident Owens was already trafficking in anti-Semitic tropes and conspiracy theories, alleging Jewish involvement in 9/11 and the assassination of JFK, hinting that Jeffrey Epstein might have been involved in the Israeli intelligence agency Mossad (and, of course, that he was murdered in prison) and referencing “a cabal of Jews in Hollywood” she thinks control Kanye West (Ye), after the rapper tweeted he was going “death con 3 on Jewish people.”

Owens also blamed the move to ban TikTok on “powerful Jews” like the Anti-Defamation League, accused George Soros (who is Jewish) of funding the Black Lives Matter movement to destabilize the United States, described Israel as an “occult nation” that shields “child abusers,” and has her doubts about the Holocaust when suggesting that Josef Mengele’s medical experiments were so extreme that “it sounds like bizarre propaganda” because “it would be a tremendous waste of time and supplies.”

Then there is Owens’s conspiracy theory of who was really behind the Atlantic Slave Trade—the Jews, of course—to which I responded on X by calling her “the Louis Farrakhan of our time” for repeating the lies from the Nation of Islam’s 1991 book The Secret Relationship Between Blacks and Jews (that claimed “monumental Jewish culpability” in the evils of the Atlantic slave trade that Farrakhan called the “Black African Holocaust”), followed by my assessment of her loose association with the truth and her probable motivation (anti-Semitism). In response, Owens repeated her assertion that “Jews enslaved black people” and instructed me to apologize or, in common social media parlance, shut the fuck up (STFU). Five million views later Owens doubled down on her choice options for me (“Say sorry, or STFU”), apparently believing that (1) I’m Jewish (I’m not) and (2) I use unspecified “Hollywood movies” and “classroom brainwashing” (presumably Schindler’s List and the classroom materials produced after the film’s release) to brainwash people into believing the crimes of my ancestors onto White men (Jews are not White?).

For younger readers unfamiliar with Louis Farrakhan, he’s the Candace Owens of the 1990s, famous for his Million Man March on Washington, DC, in 1995 in which he regaled his audience (numbering 600,000 according to the National Park Service) for two and a half hours about how adding a “1” to the “pregnant number 9” results in the number 19, which is the sum of the 3rd President Thomas Jefferson and the 16th President Abraham Lincoln whose monuments are on the mall over which Farrakhan looked, “each one of which is 19 feet high,” and how adding the number “1” to the 555-feet height of the Washington Monument and “we get 1555, the year that our first fathers landed on the shores of Jamestown, Virginia, as slaves.”

Then there is Farrakhan’s conspiracy theory about international bankers (guess who?) that orchestrated the New World Order to control the media, Hollywood, and the Zionist Occupied Government that runs the United States. Jews are “bloodsuckers” responsible for the slave trade, plantation slavery, sharecropping, and Jim Crow, and so it is no coincidence that Jewish building owner Larry Silverstein was involved in 9/11 in a plot to collect insurance money for the destruction of the World Trade Center buildings that fateful day. There is so much numerological nonsense and anti-Semitic codswallop from Louis Farrakhan that we published a cover story in Skeptic in 1996 with the Nation of Islam minister on the cover, but the point here is to imagine what his influence would be if he had a podcast audience of millions, and tens of millions more consuming clips on social media platforms!

As for the claim that Jews enslaved Black people, its partial veracity is instructive. Yes, a handful of Jews participated in the slave trade. But historians estimate that Jews owned roughly 1.25 percent of enslaved people in the Southern United States in 1860—a figure in proportion to their tiny share of the population (0.2–0.4 percent). And as with other activists who claim that the Atlantic slave trade was orchestrated by Whites who profited exclusively from the practice, Farrakhan and Owens fail to mention from whom Whites and Jews (and everyone else) purchased African slaves—from Black slave traders on the continent.

I have defined pseudohistory as the purposeful distortion of the past for present political or ideological reasons. First among equals in this new pseudohistory is the podcaster (and former Fox News host) Tucker Carlson, whose substantial audience matches and sometimes exceeds that of Owens. He traffics in the same anti-Semitic tropes on a daily basis, and featured on his show the podcaster and blogger Darryl Cooper, whom Carlson described as “the most important popular historian working in the United States today.”

Cooper, in fact, has no formal training as a historian and attended undergraduate college for only three semesters before joining the Navy where he served as an electronics technician. Nevertheless, Carlson uncritically entertained Cooper’s ahistorical conspiracism about who was really “the chief villain of the Second World War”—none other than Winston Churchill. Cooper described the British Prime Minister as a “psychopath” and warmonger who cajoled Hitler into an unwanted war with the West even though he, Churchill, knew that Hitler only ever wanted to combat Russian Communism by invading the USSR after, you know, annexing Austria, the Sudetenland, Bohemia, Lithuania, and Czechoslovakia, and then invading Poland, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Norway, Yugoslavia, and Greece.

As for the Holocaust, Cooper is echoing David Irving and other pseudohistorians and Holocaust deniers when he claims that the camps were built to house all the prisoners of war captured in the early and successful days of the good and necessary war against the Russians and, says Cooper, “were completely unprepared to deal with the millions and millions of prisoners of war and they just threw these people into camps and millions of people ended up dead.”

Ended up dead. I wonder how that happened? Oh, maybe those gas chambers with the Zyklon-B blue staining on the bricks gives us a clue? And has Cooper never heard of the Holocaust by Bullets? This is the millions of Jews, gypsies, and other ethnic groups in Poland, Ukraine, and other territories murdered by the Einsatzgruppen—the special police battalions that followed the Wehrmacht into these conquered lands, going through every city, town, and village, rounding up Jews and others, and murdering them one at a time or lining them up in front of pits they were forced to dig and shooting them all at once.

For example, in a report from Einsatzgruppe A during the winter of 1941–1942, 2,000 Jews were killed in Estonia, 70,000 in Latvia, 136,421 in Lithuania, and 41,000 in Belarus. On November 14, 1941, Einsatzgruppe B reported an additional 45,467 shootings, and on July 31, 1942, the governor of Belarus reported 65,000 Jews were killed the previous two months. Einsatzgruppe C estimated they had killed 95,000 by December 1941. Finally, Einsatzgruppe D reported on April 8, 1942, a total of 92,000 killed, for a grand total of 546,888 dead, or half a million plus in less than one year.

On some level they must know they are lying.

As for the rest of his so-called revisionism about the Second World War, Darryl Cooper is cribbing from political commentator (and one-time POTUS candidate) Patrick Buchanan’s 2008 book Church, Hitler, and the Unnecessary War, which denies that the Second World War pitted freedom against tyranny. Instead, these new deniers assert that the U.S. allies of Britain and the USSR were the most imperial and tyrannical (respectively) nations on earth. Here is Mark Weber, the head of the Institute for Historical Review (the leading Holocaust denial organization), in a lecture I attended in Orange County at which David Irving also spoke:

At the outbreak of war in 1939, Britain ruled over the largest colonial empire in history, holding more millions of people against their will than any regime before or since. America’s other great wartime ally, the Soviet Union, was, by any objective measure, the most tyrannical or oppressive regime of its time, and a vastly more cruel despotism than Hitler’s Germany.

The myth holds that in World War II we witnessed the triumph of good over evil, whereas in reality, Weber says, the Allies’ goodness was indistinguishable from their opponents’ evil:

In fact, the record of Allied misdeeds is a long one, and includes the British-American bombing of German cities, a terroristic campaign that took the lives of more than half a million civilians, the genocidal “ethnic cleansing” of millions of civilians in eastern and central Europe, and the large-scale postwar mistreatment of German prisoners.

Deniers have long drawn the moral equation of Auschwitz = Dresden, Treblinka = Hiroshima. David Irving, for example, made the equivalency argument in his 1971 book Apocalypse 1945: The Destruction of Dresden. Calling the attack on Dresden “the worst single massacre in European history,” Irving asks, “Is there any parallel between Dresden and Auschwitz?” His answer has the nuance of a moral sledgehammer: “To my mind both teach one lesson: that the real crime of war and peace alike is not Genocide—with its implicit requirement that posterity reserve its sympathy and condolences for a chosen race—but Innocenticide. It was not the Jewishness of the victims that made Auschwitz a crime, but their innocence.”

The Allies may have killed innocents on the road to victory, but the killing stopped the moment the Germans and the Japanese were defeated. The genocide of Jews by Germans ended on VE day, and the genocide of Chinese by Japanese ended on VJ day. Auschwitz and Nanking were no more. The Allies killed in order to stop the killing by the Axis, and for no other reason. The Axis killed for geography, for political control, for economic power, for living space, for racial purification, and for pleasure, and the killing would have gone on and on were it not for the Allies. Anyone unable to see the difference should have their license to practice history revoked.

Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson are obviously bright and gifted public commentators who fully understand the dynamics of the new media landscape and are using it to great success, as measured by clicks and eyeballs (and, by extension, subscriptions and advertising revenue), but on some level they must know they are lying. I am only one of many who have bombarded them with such facts and statistics to correct their many false claims. So what is going on here? 

Are Candace and Carlson just performatively punking us all into talking about them to keep the spotlight on their shows (and here I am writing about them!), or are they purposefully deceitful in service of deep anti-Semitic hatred of all things Jewish (including and especially Israel)? I don’t know. No one knows what is in someone else’s mind (the “other minds problem”), but based on their words and actions, which is all any of us have to go on with other minds, anyone who would join a Fair Play for Candace and Carlson Committee needs a reality check with history.

Candace and Carlson are bad actors with no principles beyond, perhaps, a coordinated effort to increase their audience size through outrageousness, a strategy proven to work wonders in the age of social media—studies show that social media algorithms prioritize emotionally charged and outrageous content that, in an autocatalyzing feedback loop, contributes to the growth and profitability of the platforms that most employ the strategy, which drives more eyeballs to the sites, which generates more clicks, which produces more revenue …

Don’t think for a moment that the process is intellectually neutral and that the questioners are innocent inquisitors just curious about the world.

Now, let’s address the verisimilitude of the claims themselves, for that is how their millions of followers respond to such criticisms—“what if they’re right?!” They’re not right. They’re wrong. And none of these claims are new. I’ve heard them all before, starting in the early 1990s with the emergence into public consciousness of the Holocaust deniers, most notably David Irving, who Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, and Darryl Cooper are channeling in the “Just Asking Questions” (called “JAQing off”) mode. Cooper cites Irving’s controversial book Hitler’s War, which didn’t deny the Holocaust but suggested Hitler was unaware of it. To highlight the method, I posted a series of JAQs on X, explaining that “I’m not saying the Holocaust didn’t happen, but …” followed by a series of questions right out of the deniers’ playbook:

• How many bodies could the crematoria at Auschwitz incinerate in a day? I’m not saying the Holocaust never happened, I’m just asking how those death figures could be real … 
• I’m not saying the Holocaust didn’t happen. I’m just wondering why the lock on the door in the gas chamber at the Mauthausen concentration camp doesn’t lock? Wouldn’t the Jews have just pushed open the door and escaped?
• I’m not saying the Holocaust didn’t happen. I’m just asking where is the order from Hitler to exterminate the Jews?
• I’m not saying the Holocaust didn’t happen. I’m just asking why the Zyklon-B levels on the bricks at Auschwitz are not as high as they are for the delousing gas chambers to kill lice? Wouldn’t it take more gas to kill people than lice? Just curious. Asking for a friend.
• I’m not saying the Holocaust didn’t happen. I’m just asking why there are no holes in the ceilings of the gas chambers at Auschwitz where the SS allegedly poured the Zyklon-B pellets into the room to gas the Jews?
• I’m not saying the Holocaust didn’t happen. I’m just asking why no one will debate me on national television on the specifics of the Holocaust? What’s wrong with just asking questions and debating all sides of an issue?

Because these were individual posts on X, many of my followers thought I’d lost my mind. So I followed up explaining that these and many other such talking points are refuted in my book Denying History, co-authored with Holocaust historian Alex Grobman, and addressed point-by-point in my lecture on Holocaust Denial.

I also highly recommend the book by Richard Evans, Lying About Hitler: History, Holocaust and the David Irving Trial, in which the preeminent historian of Nazi Germany poignantly captures the difference between negligence and deception: 

There is a difference between, as it were, negligence, which is random in its effects, i.e., if you are a sloppy or bad historian, the mistakes you make will be all over the place. They will not actually support any particular point of view … On the other hand, if all the mistakes are in the same direction in the support of a particular thesis, then I do not think that is mere negligence. I think that is a deliberate manipulation and deception.

One JAQ claim is especially instructive for understanding what deniers like David Irving—channeled by Candace, Carlson, and Cooper—are up to. It concerns the gas chambers at Auschwitz–Birkenau, about which Irving offered a memorable one-liner during his libel trial against historian Deborah Lipstadt, whom he sued for calling him a Holocaust denier: “No Holes. No Holocaust.” Here is the syllogistic logic of this claim:

• Eyewitness accounts after the war reported that SS guards poured Zyklon-B pellets into induction ports on top of the subterranean gas chambers.
• If you go to Auschwitz–Birkenau and examine the gas chambers you will not find induction port holes on the gas chamber ceilings.
• If those eyewitness accounts are false, maybe other eyewitness accounts are false.
• Maybe the Holocaust is not what we think it is.
• Maybe the Holocaust never happened.

Alex Grobman and I devote a long section of our chapter on Auschwitz–Birkenau in our book to this issue (and how, precisely, the Nazis gassed people at the death camp), so let me here briefly refute the claim that if there are no holes in the gas chamber ceilings at Auschwitz then the Holocaust never happened, starting with the state of the gas chamber ruins today, which the Nazis destroyed on the eve of the Soviet army liberation of the camp in January 1945. Below are my own black-and-white photographs (Figures 1 and 2), showing one of the possible induction port holes, along with an aerial photograph (Figures 3 and 4) of the ruins of one of the crematoria from the site museum archives.

Figure 5 (below) is a ground-level photograph of one of the crematoria at Auschwitz–Birkenau (note the tall chimney in the background) showing the four induction ports on ceiling of the gas chamber. Figure 6 (below) is an aerial photograph of Crematoria 2 and 3, revealing the shadows cast by the four induction ports on each of the two gas chamber ceilings. 

The deniers’ rebuttal to this clear refutation of their claim is that the photographs were doctored after the war to fit the eyewitness testimony of the war crimes committed at the death camp, so Alex and I went to the archives at Yad Vashem in Israel and reviewed the original photographs to see with our own eyes that they were not doctored. In the case of the aerial photographs, these came from B-17s on a bombing run to destroy the industrial factory at Auschwitz III (Buna), and we spent hours scrolling through thousands of images in a filming run that mostly included farms, villages, and empty landscape. We also had the aerial images examined by an expert on aerial photography at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who confirmed that they had not been doctored in any way.

They are unprincipled actors with an agenda and should be denounced as such.

The point of this exercise is to highlight the consequences of “just asking questions.” It takes a few minutes to ask such questions, whereas it can take days, weeks, months, and even years to refute them in detail with evidence and sources. 

Yes, of course, Tucker Carlson and Candace Owens are free to ask any questions they like, and we are free to refute their lies and distortions of the truth—that is what it means to live in a free society. But don’t think for a moment that the process is intellectually neutral and that the questioners are innocent inquisitors just curious about the world. They are unprincipled actors with an agenda and should be denounced as such. That some conservatives refuse to do so is understandable (who likes to admonish friends?), but in a counterfactual test, would they demur to comment if liberal public commentators refused to reproach anti-Semitic comments and conspiracism by prominent liberal figures? Everyone knows the answer. And everyone knows that everyone knows the answer (common knowledge), so I stand with Ben Shapiro and his concluding remarks at the Turning Point USA conference: “Friendship with public figures who say or do evil things is not an excuse for silence on the matter.”

Amen, brother.

Changes in the structure of the media in recent years have expanded the range of opinions voiced in public, broadening the so-called “Overton Window,” that is, the articulation of views that is considered to be within the bounds of acceptable discourse without being perceived as too extreme. Issues that were once considered inappropriate to discuss in polite society are now seeping into civic dialogue.

The issue of immigration is illustrative of this trend. For years, the mainstream media, particularly the prestige press, evinced a liberal bias,1 and in the United States worked to delegitimate resistance to immigration as racist. Over time, however, cable television steadily chipped away at the dominance of the big three television networks—ABC, NBC, and CBS—which led to greater market segmentation, resulting in a more fragmented media landscape. With the expansion of news outlets, immigration restrictionists today have much greater voice in the media than they did in the past. Right-wing cable news and internet sites now reflect a broader scope of opinions, which has occasioned a polarization in America’s political culture. Podcasting is accelerating this trend. 

The Podcasting Revolution 

Podcasting has emerged as one of the most dominant formats of contemporary media. In essence, podcasting is a form of programming made available in digital format for downloading over the internet. A portmanteau of “iPod” and “broadcast,” the term podcast was coined by The Guardiancolumnist and BBC journalist Ben Hammersley in an article that appeared in 2004.2 The year before, a program called Open Source hosted by Christopher Lydon was launched, which featured discussions on politics and culture. It is considered by some observers to be the first ever podcast.3 Since then, the format has skyrocketed in popularity. Critically, the U.S.-based social media and online video sharing platform—YouTube—enabled the proliferation of podcasting. Subsequent platforms have emerged, including Bitchute, Rumble, and Odysee, which created even more venues for podcasting and related programming. 

Not unlike listening to the radio was in the past, podcasts are designed for passive consumption. People often listen to them when they are carrying out other tasks—driving, working out, doing chores, etc. According to a 2023 Pew Research Center study, roughly half of all Americans have listened to a podcast in the previous year, a figure that presumably has increased since then.4 The emergence of COVID-19 and the ensuing lockdown propelled the popularity of podcasting, as people spent time at home and tuned in for information, entertainment, and a sense of connection.5 Inasmuch as young people comprise the largest segment of podcast consumers, its popularity is projected to continue in the future. 

Because podcasts are DIY enterprises with no official gatekeepers, the entry costs are low. Virtually anyone with an internet connection can launch one. Podcasts do not necessarily require a professional set or expensive cameras. Since there is no commissioning process involved, the style of podcasts is often freewheeling and uncensored. Podcasts thrive on candor. Their unfiltered nature makes them attractive to audiences jaded by the stage-managed major networks. 

To many listeners, podcasts are effective venues for honest conversations. Their formats are often long, which can be more meandering, encouraging interlocutors to be more open in their discussions. With no studio audience, there is an ambience of personal conversation that encourages people to open up more.6 Podcasts offer the opportunity to connect with supporters in a more comprehensive way than previous media, thus fostering deeper connections between their hosts and their listeners. Unlike previous media formats, podcasting offers a more intimate experience, allowing hosts to share stories, insights, and expertise in a conversational tone.7

Flexibility is another key feature, as podcasts can be consumed anywhere and at any time. Although most listeners tune in to podcasts for entertainment, they often hear about news stories as well. People who listen to them can get information that they would not have heard about elsewhere.8 Moreover, when Americans hear about news on podcasts, a large proportion of them view it largely as accurate (87 percent),9 a figure substantially higher than their trust in the mainstream media.10

The fledging medium of podcasting presents an attractive vehicle for views that had previously been locked out of the public sphere. 

The rising popularity of social media sites, such as Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, enable podcasters to garner large followings. With a substantial fan base, they can become self-financing. A myriad of monetization options are available. The most popular hosts earn multimillion salaries. For example, Joe Rogan rakes in on the order of $60 million a year on his podcast alone. As of 2024, the podcasting industry was valued at $2.2 billion and is expected to grow to $17.59 billion by 2030.11 The fledging medium of podcasting presents an attractive vehicle for views that had previously been locked out of the public sphere. 

Tucker Carlson 

Since his departure from Fox News, Tucker Carlson has gained an enormous following on social media. Although at one time his program was the highest rated news show in the history of cable television, his strident opposition to illegal immigration and the Black Lives Matter movement scared off many advertisers. Fox News dismissed him from his position in April of 2023 but provided no reason for his termination. 

Undaunted, in May of 2024, Carlson launched a podcast entitled The Tucker Carlson Show, which by July of 2024 rose to one of the most popular shows on Spotify. Concomitant with his departure from the mainstream media, has been his increasing extremism. His program has hosted many controversial figures, for example the amateur historian Darryl Cooper, who appeared on the program and castigated Winston Churchill as the “chief villain of World War II.”12 In late October of 2025, Carlson sat down with the noted racialist Nick Fuentes for a cordial conversation, but soon faced severe backlash for platforming him. The incident polarized the conservative movement. Whereas Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation and chief author of the Project 2025 publication, defended Carlson’s decision to interview Fuentes, Fox News personality Mark Levin condemned his former colleague for platforming Fuentes.13

The Trump administration’s military intervention in Iran has also polarized the MAGA movement. Some of Trump’s most stalwart supporters have broken ranks and have become some of his most vociferous critics. After the president posted a controversial AI-generated image of himself dressed in Christ-like robes, Carlson mused that he might even be the anti-Christ.14

Candace Owens 

Candace Owens, a rising star in the podcast sphere, has appeared as a guest on Tucker Carlson’s programs on numerous occasions. The two have frequently praised each other’s journalism. Following the October 7, 2023, Hamas-led attack on Israel, her public remarks occasioned a very public feud with one of The Daily Wire’s founders, Ben Shapiro. Finally, Owens was dismissed from her position in March of 2024, as her comments were perceived as antisemitic by Shapiro and other members of The Daily Wire’s staff. Undaunted, she expressed relief following her termination, posting on 𝕏 “The rumors are true—I am finally free.” 

Owens exudes a Patrician demeanor. Her early childhood, however, was dysfunctional and underprivileged. Born in 1989 in White Plains, New York, she described her situation as a family of six that lived in a small, three-bedroom apartment within a run-down, roach-infested building. When she was nine years old, though, her paternal grandparents took her to live with them in a middle-class neighborhood in Stamford, Connecticut, where her surroundings were much better. Reflecting on the move, she described it as one of the greatest blessings of her life.15

As a young adult, Owens identified as a liberal, though she had no interest in politics. In 2016, she created and promoted a project called Social Autopsy, an intended anti-cyberbullying platform.16 The idea was to let users submit screenshots of offensive or harassing social media posts, then build a searchable database that would link those posts to people’s real names, employers, and other identifying information. Critics from across the political spectrum immediately called it a doxxing tool or public shaming database that would enable harassment and vigilantism by de-anonymizing users. After her crowdfunding campaign aiming to fund the project was taken down for violating terms of service, Owens abandoned the idea and it never launched. Her curiosity about politics was ultimately piqued when Donald Trump courted Black voters by asking them, “What do you have to lose?” Stunned by his lack of traditional etiquette, she was soon converted. She understood the brazenness of his approach, and it eventually won her over.17

Podcasts thrive on candor. Their unfiltered nature makes them attractive to audiences jaded by the stage-managed major networks.

For her rejection of the claim that racism remains pervasive in contemporary America, Owens has occasionally been derided by her detractors as a “white supremacist,” though she rejects that characterization. The Black Lives Matter movement has come under her scathing criticism. Not one to shy from controversy, one week after George Floyd’s death Owens released a video in which she condemned the protests and rejected the mainstream media narrative that Floyd was a martyr for Black America. The video went viral and was viewed nearly 100 million times in only four days. Many people praised her for having the temerity to speak “the truth.”18 Her pronouncements were not without critics, however, with the popular comedian Dave Chappelle calling her “a rotten bitch.”19

Increasingly on Owens’s podcast, the legitimacy of Israel is routinely called into question. After breaking with The Daily Wire, Owens became much more strident, even declaring the authenticity of Jewish ritual murder. In her estimation, the state of Israel was intended to be a haven for Jewish ritual child-murderers and pedophiles affiliated with the 18th-century Frankist sect.20

Owens has criticized not only Israel, but the broader Jewish diaspora. In recognition, in late 2024, she was selected as the “Antisemite of the Year” by StopAntisemitism, an advocacy group devoted to combating antisemitism and criticism of Israel.21

Despite her controversial pronouncements, Owens is still a sought-after political and social commentator. Once dubbed “the new face of Black conservatism,” Owens is enormously popular, especially with younger people. Her YouTube channel has roughly 5.97 million followers and has been viewed over a billion times. For that reason, her drift toward extreme discourse is understandably disconcerting to some quarters of the Jewish community. Ominously, it could presage a greater collaboration amongst extremist subcultures. 

Nick Fuentes 

An important event occurred in July 2025, when Candace Owens hosted Nick Fuentes for a two-hour interview on her podcast. In the past, the two have traded barbs, but also praised each other. When Owens was released from The Daily Wire for her criticism of Israel, Fuentes instructed his followers to “stand with Candace.”22 During the July 2025 interview, there were some tense moments: Owens needled Fuentes over why he had not married and started a family. She also objected to his belief that race determined a person’s abilities and to his claim that Black civilization was inherently inferior. But the tone was generally cordial, and they agreed that the pro-Israel lobby had an outsized influence on American politics.23

The so-called “generational run” of Nick Fuentes continues to gain momentum. A master of riffing, his podcast has become immensely popular, amassing a huge following. Profiles in major publications, including The Atlantic and The New York Times Magazine, have elevated the young podcaster as practically a household name.24 Fuentes champions a form of national populism with a strong focus on race. He envisages an American nation with a strong White ethnic core. Previously, he defended the system of Jim Crow, arguing that segregation was better for both Black and White Americans. On numerous occasions, he has stridently criticized the Black community, demonstrating no compunction in using the n-word. Still, not unlike other people of his generation, Fuentes occasionally adopts a Black oppositional aesthetic. As he explains, by unapologetically using the n-word, he seeks to demonstrate that he is the “realest nigga in America.” 

His racism has not precluded Fuentes from collaborating with Black public figures. For instance, Fuentes accompanied the musician Ye (formerly known as Kanye West) to press conferences and advised him on his 2024 presidential campaign. Fuentes also worked with Sneako—an online influencer with a multiracial background—to produce social media content for Ye’s electoral bid. Adding more fuel to the fire, Ye and Fuentes appeared on Alex Jones’s Infowars program in early December of 2022. On the broadcast, Ye repeatedly expressed his admiration for Hitler. Fuentes has echoed this sentiment, once describing the German Führer as “really fucking cool.” 

Even many of his detractors concede that Fuentes is a very talented young man whose oratory is persuasive. In an interview with Megyn Kelly, Tucker Carlson described Fuentes as “the single most influential commentator among young men.” After the Hamas attack on Israel on October 7, 2023, Fuentes gained many followers, as more and more people tuned in to listen to his analysis on Middle Eastern affairs. Moreover, his strident denunciation of Israel and the larger Jewish community has endeared him to antisemites both on the political right and the political left. After all, his critique of Israel is arguably the rawest on the internet. He implicates a “Jewish oligarchy” as the motive force behind many of the problems that bedevil the world today. In light of his increasing notoriety, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D) announced his intention to introduce a resolution to condemn Fuentes. This pushback, however, seems to have only elevated Fuentes’s stature in the podcast sphere, as he has become a much sought-after guest on programs, many of which are operated by Black hosts. 

Jesse Lee Peterson 

Jesse Lee Peterson, a Black conservative, has established a reputation as a no-nonsense commentator on racial issues. With roughly half a million followers on social media, he has long counseled Black Americans to work hard and be self-reliant. His background is a classic bootstraps story. Born in 1949 in Alabama, Peterson was raised by his grandparents on a plantation, where his slave ancestors once worked. His early life was marked by family fragmentation. Growing up, Peterson recalled, anger consumed him. Throughout much of his life, he projected this anger everywhere, toward his mother, his father, his friends and teachers, and especially toward White people.25 According to Peterson, fatherlessness is the root cause of dysfunction in the Black community. 

In 2016, Peterson launched The Fallen State, which has become a popular podcast. Prominent white nationalist figures, including David Duke, Richard Spencer, Mark Collett, Jared Taylor, Lilly Gaddis, Leonarda Jonie, and, of course, Nick Fuentes, have appeared on the program. In one episode, Peterson urged White Americans to carve out a separate territory in the United States for a White ethnostate. He invoked the example of South Africa as a fate that faced White Americans if they failed to do so. 

Some of his critics have accused Peterson of outright white supremacy. His blackness, some suggest, reduces the shock value of his opinions that would be considered beyond the pale if a White person had articulated them.26 Peterson has indeed collaborated with white nationalists in the past. For example, in 2022, he spoke at the third America First Political Action Conference (AFPAC), which was organized by Nick Fuentes. The Anti-Defamation League opined that Peterson’s speech was one of the most inflammatory at the event, as he described Blacks as the destroyers of America.27

Podcasting: A Forum for Black–White Rapprochement 

More and more Black conservatives are following the example of Peterson and are entering the podcasting world. The Hodgetwins—Keith and Kevin Hodge—launched their show in 2008 and have emerged as a popular team. With an estimated two million followers, they have carved out a significant niche in the podcast industry. As unabashed conservatives, they opposed the Black Lives Matter movement and have supported Donald Trump, though they do so no longer, following the U.S. strikes on Iran. 

Myron Gaines, who founded The Fresh and Fit Podcast in 2020, has emerged as another popular Black podcaster. Born in Brooklyn, Gaines is of Sudanese descent and was raised Muslim. Originally, his podcast focused on issues related to the manosphere, a largely online movement that champions masculinity and opposes feminism. But after the October 7 Hamas attacks, Gaines has become a vocal critic of Israel. An avid conspiracy theorist, he implicates Israel as the main agent behind the 9/11 attacks and the JFK assassination. On an evening in January of 2026, Gaines, Fuentes, Sneako, Clavicular (a noted “looksmaxxer”), and Andrew Tate, along with his brother Tristan, sparked controversy when they attended a nightclub in Miami. The DJ played Ye’s controversial song “Heil Hitler,” during which some of the attendees appeared to perform Nazi salutes.28

The format of podcasting has expanded the boundaries of acceptable discourse, or at least has made the articulation of unpopular and controversial ideas more feasible than in the past.

Perhaps one reason why Black podcasters seem amenable to Fuentes is because of the racial facts on the ground. After all, any program of forced racial expulsion and separation does not seem feasible in contemporary multiracial America. Fuentes seems to recognize this and recently called for a united populist front to include the political left, which urged to jettison its advocacy of open borders and wokeism. For the political right, he counsels abandoning their reverence for the free market.29

It can be inferred that Fuentes favors a form of national socialism not unlike historic fascism. For many of the young men of Generation Z, who face social isolation and an uncertain economic future, such a program is attractive. Fuentes has managed to craft his message is such way that it resonates with young followers of various ethnic and racial backgrounds. 

♦ ♦ ♦

Whereas previously, impolitic rhetoric would often be regarded as hateful and deserving of condemnation, the irreverent nature of podcasting discourse tends to be disarming. Nick Fuentes occasionally praises Hitler and the Third Reich, but in such an ironic fashion that it does not provoke the kind of ostracism that such pronouncements would have done in the past when delivered in a more serious demeanor. 

Unlike old-school white nationalist movements, this contemporary movement endeavors to create a self-sustaining counterculture, which includes a distinct vernacular, memes, symbols, and a number of blogs and alternative media outlets. Taking a page from Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals, young activists have applied his tactics to conservative causes.30

The format of podcasting has expanded the boundaries of acceptable discourse, or at least has made the articulation of unpopular and controversial ideas more feasible than in the past. For many years, espousing positions such as white supremacy and antisemitism carried potentially high costs, often resulting in some type of sanction or cancellation. 

Today, however, some controversial podcasters have enormous followings, enabling them to make substantial earnings and wield significant influence in politics and culture. From its humble origins, podcasting is now eclipsing much of the legacy media. Moreover, podcasting encourages frank and unfiltered discourse. This feature has done much to forge a rapprochement across various political orientations, including white nationalists, Black conservatives, far left activists, and anti-Zionists.

Among critics of “wokeness,” an increasingly heated debate has emerged about what should be done about university disciplines shaped by postmodern-derived Critical Social Justice theories—most notably Gender Studies. Some argue that these fields should be dismantled entirely. Others believe they should be reformed to operate under the normal standards of academic inquiry.

The Reform vs. Abolition Debate 

The term “woke” originated in Black American history to describe awareness of real and widely recognized systemic injustice, as in being alert to the very real oppression going on in society. In its contemporary usage, however, it has expanded to refer to a theoretical framework in which social injustice is understood to be embedded in the assumptions and biases we are all said to have been socialized into, but be largely unaware of—White supremacy, patriarchy, colonialism, and cis/heteronormativity. Critics have adopted the term disparagingly because it reflects the central problem with this framework: that its adherents believe themselves to possess a critical awareness of hidden systems of power, while those who question them are implied to remain asleep. 

Throughout history, ideological movements convinced of their own correctness have adopted similar assumptions. They begin with the premise that they are right and then seek ways to explain away why this is not evident to everybody else. Rather than accept disagreement as legitimate and engage with it, they devise frameworks, which hold that others are ignorant or willfully oblivious. We see this in religious traditions, in which nonbelievers are described as blind while converts are said to have “seen the light,” and in contemporary culture through concepts such as being “red-pilled”1, 2 (drawn from The Matrix), in which only those who have awakened can perceive reality as it truly is. 

The core problem with this epistemology is that it renders itself unfalsifiable and impervious to critique or self-correction. Criticism is preemptively dismissed as further evidence of its central claim: that most people remain blind to social reality. Critics broadly agree that such circular reasoning is incompatible with rigorous academic inquiry. Universities exist to produce knowledge, which requires supporting hypotheses with evidence, accepting attempts at falsification, and engaging in open scholarly critique. Where critics differ is in how to respond when academic disciplines fail to meet these standards. Some argue that such fields should be reformed to meet them, while others believe they should be dismantled altogether. 

Gender Studies as a Test Case 

Many identity-based academic fields draw on these theories, but many recent debates have focused on Gender Studies, which provides a useful test case. In considering whether it should be reformed or abolished, two questions are especially important. 

First, are the subjects it addresses—sex, gender, and sexuality—important aspects of human life, about which it is valuable to develop reliable knowledge and careful ethical reasoning? Given that human beings are a sexually dimorphic, sexually reproducing species, I submit that the answer is yes. 

Second, what kind of intellectual environment is most likely to produce that knowledge and ethical reasoning? One possibility is a reformed university environment that upholds viewpoint diversity, interdisciplinary research, high evidentiary standards, and robust critique. The alternative is to remove the subject from academia altogether, leaving discussion of these issues largely to ideologically homogeneous alternative spaces. 

Since the problems within Gender Studies emerged from the dominance of a single theoretical framework, and that dominance has produced poor scholarly outcomes, reforming the field to meet the standards of rigorous academic inquiry seems the better option. The core issue is not whether the study of sex, gender, and sexuality should exist, but whether any single theoretical framework should be insulated from the standards of evidence and critique that define academic inquiry. Indeed, reforming the field and displacing its current theoretical framework may ultimately be the same project. 

This debate reflects a broader philosophical and epistemological divide across contemporary culture between those who prioritize individual liberty and plurality, and those who seek to impose a single vision of the common good on everybody. Do we want to preserve a society in which individual liberty, viewpoint diversity, and the free exchange of ideas are valued? And do we believe that such a society provides the best way to discover truth, reconcile differences, and consign bad ideas to the dustbin of history? 

A Case Study: Simovski and Haltigan 

The conflict between the “reform” and “abolish” positions was recently illustrated in a disagreement between Nicole Barbaro Simovski, a social scientist and Director of Communications at Heterodox Academy, and J.D. Haltigan, Professor of Developmental and Evolutionary Psychopathology. In “Viewpoint Diversity vs. Women’s and Gender Studies,”3 Simovski addresses the problem of academic departments that have become ideologically dominated by Critical Social Justice theories. She considers the debate over whether such fields should be required to introduce greater viewpoint diversity or dismantled altogether, and argues for the former approach. As she concludes: 

The most pressing question facing higher ed—and its leaders—right now is not necessarily whether ideologically homogeneous departments should be preserved as-is or dismantled altogether (though we’re seeing the latter already in some places), but whether universities are willing to do the harder work of reopening them to genuine inquiry. Viewpoint diversity is not just a box-checking exercise; rather it is a requirement for knowledge production and teaching. When it is absent, disciplinary progress stagnates, students unenroll, and the door is opened for political actors to step in to resolve the problems universities have avoided. 

Simovski’s proposal is to bring different approaches to the study of sex, gender, and sexuality into dialogue so that competing hypotheses can be tested against each other through normal scholarly processes. Haltigan responded bluntly, “[This is] the problem with Heterodox Academy in a nutshell. You don’t introduce viewpoint diversity into something like ‘Gender Studies.’ You abolish it. It is not science. It is not knowledge. It has no place in the university.”4 Here, Haltigan is likely referring to the “Critical” theoretical framework that currently dominates the field, rather than to any study of sex, gender, or sexuality. But Simovski’s argument is precisely that opening the field to more rigorous forms of critical inquiry would allow those topics to be studied in ways that meet normal academic standards. 

Simovski replied by arguing for the value of bringing different disciplinary approaches into dialogue. For example, biological evidence about the distribution of sex traits could be examined alongside sociological analyses that attempt to explain why theories of a “sex spectrum” arise. Doing so allows scholars to consider the strongest version of the “spectrum” claims while also presenting the case for a sex binary grounded in biological evidence. In her view, excluding either sociological or biological approaches would simply shut down inquiry rather than advance understanding.5

A framework that regards evidence, reasoned argument, and falsifiability as tools of oppression cannot participate in the processes through which universities produce knowledge.

There is, of course, a profound difference between empirical sociological research that studies the different beliefs people have about sex, gender, and sexuality, and Gender Studies rooted in Queer Theory that is opposed to such rigorous sociological research on principle. In her piece, Simovski does not go into detail about what it might look like in practice to bring together scholars working within these very different epistemological frameworks. I will consider that question below. Simovski’s concern is instead the broader principle of interdisciplinary collaboration and viewpoint diversity. 

The problem is the theories, not the subject. 

On that broader principle, I agree with Simovski. Fields addressing sex, gender, and sexuality should be opened to genuine critical inquiry and include scholars from relevant disciplines. These are complex subjects that intersect with multiple areas of scholarship. Biology is central to the study of sex and reproduction; evolutionary and cognitive psychology can illuminate questions about psychological sex differences; sociology helps us understand how different groups conceptualize sex, gender, and sexuality; and philosophy offers competing frameworks for addressing their ethical dimensions, including gender-critical feminism and social conservatism. 

However, I also agree with Haltigan that the theoretical framework currently defining Gender Studies cannot be sustained under the normal standards of academic inquiry. This is not simply one perspective among many whose claims can be weighed against competing hypotheses. To the extent that postmodern-derived theories, including Queer Theory, reject the possibility of objective knowledge, treat evidence, reason, and debate as instruments of oppressive power, and resist falsification, they do not meet the basic criteria by which academic claims are evaluated. A framework that regards evidence, reasoned argument, and falsifiability as tools of oppression cannot participate in the processes through which universities produce knowledge. 

Illustration by ALE+ALE for SKEPTIC

My own stance on theories such as Queer Theory is informed by having studied them intensively for 17 years, both inside and outside the academy. These approaches are often deliberately obscure and counterintuitive, which means that many people support or oppose them on the basis of political alignment rather than a clear understanding of their claims. Yet when those claims are made explicit, they can be assessed against the same standards applied elsewhere in academia. 

Many people, for example, assume that supporting the rights of same-sex attracted and gender-nonconforming individuals requires endorsing Queer Theory. In fact, most people in those categories do not subscribe to it, and many object strongly to being “queered.” Historically, greater social acceptance of homosexuality and gender nonconformity emerged alongside the development of biological and psychological research, which treated these traits as natural variations within a sexually reproducing species, rather than as moral or political categories. 

By contrast, Queer Theory interprets sex, gender, and sexuality through political and discursive frameworks. It seeks to destabilize categories of sex, gender, and sexual orientation and to understand them chiefly in terms of power relations and identity. In doing so, it rejects the biological foundations of sex, and demands affirmation of gender identity as a form of political activism in place of empirical inquiry to discover what is true, or philosophical debate to consider what is ethical. It can plausibly be argued that this shift has undermined earlier progress toward social acceptance—an empirical and philosophical question best examined within a reformed academic environment where competing arguments can be tested. 

This is precisely why the positions associated with “reform” and “abolition” are not, in fact, opposed. Opening this area of study to genuine viewpoint diversity would not preserve these theories in their current form; it would require them to defend their claims under conditions in which those claims can be tested. To the extent that they cannot meet those conditions, they will not endure. 

Reform as the Most Effective Way to Abolish Bad Ideas 

What would it actually mean to open Gender Studies to genuine critical inquiry? Two basic requirements would be necessary: 

1. genuine viewpoint diversity and 
2. a clear expectation that scholars acknowledge competing hypotheses and respond to criticism in accordance with normal academic practice. 

The study of sex, gender, and sexuality is not inherently illegitimate, and opening it to rigorous inquiry would mean including scholars from disciplines that examine these subjects using established methods, including biology, psychology, sociology, and relevant philosophical frameworks. Scholars would be expected to present their claims alongside competing explanations and respond directly to criticism—standard practice across academia, where hypotheses are proposed, alternatives considered, and evidence weighed through ongoing debate. 

Under these conditions, students would encounter a genuinely pluralistic intellectual environment. They could examine questions about sex, gender, and sexuality from multiple perspectives, while understanding how those perspectives differ and how well they are supported. Claims about the sexually dimorphic nature of humans, or about the nature of sexual orientation, or individual variation in traits considered masculine or feminine could be evaluated biologically. Questions about gender roles could be explored through evolutionary psychology, empirical sociology, gender-critical feminism, liberal individualism, or social conservatism. 

Unlike fields such as biology, which are defined by a shared methodological framework, Gender Studies is a more conceptually open field concerned with the study of “gender.” As such, it has no clear basis for restricting itself to a single theoretical approach. Indeed, it emerged from Women’s and Feminist Studies and includes a long tradition of scholarship critical of the very concept of gender, making the exclusion of gender-critical perspectives particularly difficult to justify on academic grounds. 

Scholars within Gender Studies would also be expected to engage with interdisciplinary critique of their own research or theoretical papers. It would not be acceptable to declare certain claims, such as those relating to gender identity “not up for debate,” or to dismiss skepticism of it as a denial of people’s right to exist, or engage in any moves to prevent knowledge claims from being tested and refined. The expectation would be that disagreement would be engaged with as it actually is. In Who’s Afraid of Gender?6 feminist and queer philosopher Judith Butler defines an “anti-trans ideology movement” and then declares it contradictory and incoherent. She does so by conflating socially conservative views that endorse traditional gender roles with gender-critical feminist views that reject them, even though these have been utterly opposed to each other for decades and, arguably, centuries. 

It would be far more productive to examine these competing perspectives directly. Consider the value of an open debate between gender conservatives, who see gender roles as a natural expression of sex differences important to societal health; gender- critical feminists, who see them as oppressive social constructs harmful particularly to women; gender identity “queer” theorists, who argue that an internal sense of gender is ubiquitous and more fundamental than biological sex; and evolutionary psychologists, who recognize both significant psychological sex differences and individual variation, typically without drawing prescriptive conclusions.7 A university setting is precisely the place where such views can be compared rigorously, their assumptions examined, and their evidential support assessed. 

Where better to undertake this kind of analysis than within a university’s Gender Studies department? 

If such reforms were applied consistently, several outcomes would be likely. The most committed adherents of postmodern-derived queer theory would likely leave the field. Because their theoretical framework treats debate, evidence, and falsification as mechanisms through which “dominant discourses” maintain power, a system that requires open argument and engagement with competing evidence therefore conflicts with the ethics and epistemology of the theory itself. Rather than defending their claims under those conditions, many would likely choose to resign. They might present this as having been forced out, but since they had been welcomed to meet standard academic expectations, such claims would be less likely to persuade a broader audience or generate the kind of backlash that often accompanies perceived suppression. 

Liberal societies create conditions in which disagreements can be contested through argument and evidence rather than through coercion and force.

Some might remain and attempt to defend their ideas in direct comparison with approaches grounded in biology, psychology, empirically rigorous sociology, or competing ethical frameworks. In that case, students and scholars would be able to assess clearly how those theories perform when subjected to the same standards of evidence and critique that apply elsewhere in academia. They are highly unlikely to fare well. Those who fear that simply allowing such ideas to be expressed will make them more persuasive may underestimate either the poverty and incoherence of Queer Theory or the ability of students and scholars to evaluate arguments critically. 

This is how flawed ideas are properly and lastingly defeated. 

Importantly, such a reform would also preserve intellectual fairness. On the possibility that critics are mistaken and have missed demonstrable valuable insights from Queer Theory, a reformed academic environment would allow it to demonstrate that. Theories that survive open scrutiny deserve to endure; those that cannot lose credibility. 

Either way, the result would be the same: ideas about sex and gender would be evaluated through evidence and argument rather than protected through ideological insulation. 

Why Censorship Backfires 

There are always those who argue that allowing ideas to be expressed and debated strengthens them. This view rests on a strongly social constructivist assumption: that people are socialized into accepting dominant discourses uncritically. From this perspective, harmful ideas must be suppressed rather than challenged. Advocates therefore support banning, penalizing, or “no-platforming” views they regard as dangerous so that only approved perspectives are widely encountered. 

This logic has long motivated Critical Social Justice activists seeking to control permissible discourse within universities, but it also appears among some of their opponents. Conservative activist Christopher Rufo, for example, has argued explicitly for emulating this strategy of Critical Theorists in order to replace “woke” discourses with conservative ones through institutional control.8

Those who value the free exchange of ideas for the purposes of knowledge production and conflict resolution reject this approach consistently. They argue that suppressing ideas violates freedom of belief and expression, and that bad ideas are best defeated by exposing them to criticism. Universities, in this view, are precisely the place where flawed ideas should be tested, debated, and, where necessary, dismantled. This is not a “soft” approach. It is precisely because I regard these theories as deeply flawed that I argue they should be exposed to open scrutiny rather than suppressed. Suppression protects ideas; scrutiny exposes them. 

The historical record provides little support for the claim that censorship achieves its intended aims. As uncompromising free speech advocates Greg Lukianoff and Nadine Strossen argue in their paper “Would censorship have stopped the rise of the Nazis?”9 attempts to suppress extremist movements frequently have the opposite effect of strengthening them. Attempts to suppress ideas typically make them more attractive and give their proponents the glamour of being persecuted by the establishment for being the holders of The Truth “they” don’t want you to know. We see clear examples of this dynamic more recently. 

Did the speech policing and cancellation tactics of the Critical Social Justice movement in the United States reduce racism and sexism or increase acceptance of gender identity? Or did they provoke resentment, contribute to the growth of alternative media spaces, and fuel an anti-woke backlash, alongside declining support for LGBT-related policies?10 The causes of Donald Trump’s election are complex and contested, but resentment toward identitarian activism is widely cited as a motivating factor. Even those who view his election positively would acknowledge that it was not the outcome intended by censorious activists. 

Suppression protects ideas; scrutiny exposes them.

Similar questions arise in the United Kingdom. Did efforts to censor criticism of gender identity and immigration policy increase acceptance of trans identity and a more pro-immigration stance among the general public? Or did this lead to widescale resistance in which Britain became known as “TERF Island”11 while Reform, campaigning on an anti-immigration platform, rapidly gained unprecedented support and overtook the two established parties in popularity?12 Whatever one’s evaluation of these developments, they run counter to the aims of those advocating censorship. 

It is, of course, possible to argue that these developments would have occurred regardless, or even more rapidly, without attempts to restrain them. But claiming that the rise of the antiwoke had nothing to do with resentment at the authoritarian tactics of the woke requires dismissing a large body of public reaction to overreach. At minimum, these cases provide disconfirming evidence for the position that censorship is a good way to make disapproved ideas go away. 

The Authoritarian Cycle 

One striking feature of this dynamic is that many critics of wokeness on the political right readily acknowledge that censorship by Critical Social Justice activists helped provoke the recent anti-woke backlash. Some go further, portraying right-wing illiberalism as simply a response to left-wing excess. Yet the reasoning often stops there. The likelihood that adopting similarly authoritarian tactics might produce a comparable backlash against them is rarely considered. There is little reason to think the dynamic that undermined the authority of the identitarian left would not eventually undermine their own movement as well. 

One explanation may lie in a common psychological tendency: those deeply convinced of their own correctness often assume that, once opposing views are suppressed, others will eventually come to recognize the truth of their position. Their ideas, they imagine, will then remain dominant indefinitely—a belief that might be described as “real authoritarianism has never been tried.” 

In reality, authoritarianism has been tried repeatedly. Throughout history, systems built on the imposition of a single ideological orthodoxy have tended to produce cycles in which one dominant ideology replaces another, each suppressing dissent until it is eventually displaced in turn. The only political arrangements that have shown any lasting success in interrupting this cycle have been liberal democracies. By protecting freedom of belief and speech and by building institutions that support viewpoint diversity, liberal societies create conditions in which disagreements can be contested through argument and evidence rather than through coercion and force. 

Unfortunately, this insight remains deeply counterintuitive to many people. Advocating viewpoint diversity often provokes impatience or frustration. Liberal commitments to open debate are frequently caricatured as a kind of polite pluralism in which everyone expresses their opinions indefinitely while congratulating themselves on their open-mindedness and nothing ever gets resolved. From this perspective, insisting on viewpoint diversity appears to be a naive half-measure or an unwillingness to confront bad ideas decisively. It is often portrayed as an idealistic defense of abstract freedoms in a world where, many believe, material realities demand more forceful action. 

I believe this is mistaken. While individual liberty certainly does matter as a principle in itself, and upholding it consistently is fundamental to protecting the founding principles of liberal democracies like the United States of America, there is also a strategic and pragmatic argument for defeating bad ideas with better ones. It works. If we compare Western liberal democracies, which have at least imperfectly protected individual liberty, open debate, and viewpoint diversity, with societies that have not—or with those same societies before they developed liberal democratic institutions—the advantages of this system become clear. Liberal institutions have proven far more effective at producing knowledge, resolving social conflicts, and advancing human rights. 

Illustration by ALE+ALE for SKEPTICWhere do we go from here? 

The United States now has a window of opportunity to reform its universities by opening disciplines captured by a single, deeply flawed ideology to genuine inquiry, interdisciplinary critique, and viewpoint diversity. Doing so would allow those theories to be examined and challenged in ways that are both legitimate and lasting. 

Attempting instead to suppress such ideas would have the opposite effect. It would shield them from the scrutiny that universities are uniquely positioned to provide, removing precisely the conditions under which they would be forced to defend themselves against criticism—and ultimately fail to do so. Rather than losing credibility, they would be able to retreat while plausibly claiming persecution, a narrative that historically tends to increase both their glamour and public sympathy. 

Should public opinion shift and a future election bring a different political party to power, those who attempted to suppress woke ideas may find they have unintentionally created ideal conditions for those ideas to return with renewed strength. More importantly, they will have helped entrench the norm that governments may determine which ideas are permissible within universities. If academic inquiry can be regulated by the state today to eliminate woke ideas, it can just as easily be regulated tomorrow to eliminate ideas that challenge a different political orthodoxy. 

Universities would then find themselves in the extraordinary position of having the boundaries of legitimate scholarship shift with every electoral cycle. Institutions that are meant to produce knowledge would instead become instruments of whichever political faction happened to hold power at the moment. 

That is not how knowledge is produced in a liberal society.

My mental map of the universe has evolved over my life, partly due to new scientific discoveries and partly due to my own education. As if often the case, as you learn more, things get more complicated. The simplistic picture I had as a child was that the universe consisted of many galaxies in which there are many stars and around which there are planets, likely something similar to our own solar system. I have had to modify this model dozens of times, and perhaps I need to make another little tweak. This has to do with where planets exist.

First, galaxies are not randomly distributed throughout the universe. They are bound together in local groups, those groups are gravitationally bound into galaxy clusters, which in turn are part of superclusters which are finally organized into giant filaments, the largest gravitationally bound structures in the universe. So our universal address is – the Sol system within the Milky Galaxy, part of the Local Group within the Virgo Cluster which is part of the Laniakea Supercluster.

At some point I also learned that not all stars (and therefore, not all planets) exist within galaxies. Estimates of the number of stars within and between galaxies just overlap, so they may be equal, but the average estimates indicate that likely 1-10% of all stars are not in galaxies. They are wandering between galaxies, mostly within galaxy clusters. The first intergalactic star was discovered in 1997. It is likely that most such stars were formed within galaxies (you need clouds of gas and gravitational disturbances for stars to form) but then were flung out because of gravitational interactions with other objects, such as a black hole. Two galaxies colliding can also spray their stars throughout the cluster. It is also very likely that such stars would retain their planets.

In fact, intergalactic stars would be a great place for life. They would not be at risk from nearby supernova or gamma ray bursts. There is also a much lower density of cosmic rays outside of galaxies (they are largely produced within galaxies and are trapped by magnetic fields within galaxies). So space travel would also be much easier within an extragalactic solar system. They are also likely to be extremely isolated from other systems, and their nighttime sky would be much darker. Some would have only some distant smudges of other galaxies. But many would have spectacular views of nearby galaxies dominating their sky.

At some point I also learned that within the Milky Way there are more rogue planets wandering between stars than there are planets gravitationally bound to stars. There are likely about a trillion planets orbiting stars, and 4-5 trillion rogue planets. These are less likely to host life as we know it, without the warmth of a nearby star. But it is possible for such planets to host chemosynthetic life within subsurface oceans. Moons of rogue gas giants may also be warmed by tidal forces. It’s even possible for some worlds to have thick hydrogen atmospheres which could keep the surface of the planet warm enough to have liquid water for billions of years.

A recent study, theoretically at least, may add another location where there are a surprising number of planets – around supermassive black holes at the centers of galaxies (including the Milky Way). Quick caveat – this is an ArXiv preprint publication, so not yet peer-reviewed. It is based on modeling and simulations without any confirmation from observational data.

Some supermassive black holes are called active galactic nuclei (AGN) if they are actively “feeding” on a disc of matter swirling around them. These astronomers were interested in whether or not this disc of material could form into planets. It is generally considered that such swirling discs of material are too hot to allow matter to clump together and form planets, but they considered the conditions as you get further and further from the AGN. Their simulations found a sweet spot where the temperature and radiation are low enough to allow for planet formation while still having enough matter to clump into planets. Essentially you end up with a distance gradient of “doubling time” – the amount of time on average for any clump of rock and dust to double its mass. Some regions would have only slow growth and produce only pebbles. Others would have rapid growth, enough to exceed the mass necessary for stars to ignite. And in between – lots of planets.

They estimate there could be tens of millions of planets around a single AGN. They also hypothesize that there may be many exotic objects in these regions. For example, you could have a rapid enough doubling time and a sufficient supply of dust that an object could form entirely of dust (no significant hydrogen or other gas) and yet exceed the mass of star formation. What would happen to such an object? We have no known examples. Some actual stars may also form in this region.

Any planets forming around an AGN would likely be a terrible place for life, this being a generally hostile environment. This also is a tiny number of potential planets compared to the number of star-bound and rogue planets in the galaxy. If this turns out to hold up under peer review, and if observations confirm their predictions, then this would be an interesting small tweak to our models of where everything is in the universe. It would be most interesting for the potential for exotic objects to exist in these regions. Microlensing would be capable of detecting such objects around AGNs, so this is a testable hypothesis.

The post Planets Around Black Holes first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

When Robert Trivers died this year, I lost a friend and the world lost one of the few people who genuinely understood why we lie to ourselves. Skeptic readers know his work even if the name sits just out of reach—his fingerprints are on half of modern evolutionary psychology. Bob once let me fly him out to lecture my state pharmacy association on the science of deceit: a room full of pharmacists learning, from the man who worked it out, that the mind is built to fool its own owner before it fools anyone else. He was generous like that, and funnier than his reputation. That idea—self-deception as design, not defect—is where any honest account of our species has to begin.

It’s also the first entry on a list I’ve spent years assembling in an attempt to gather the load-bearing findings about human nature—scattered across biology, psychology, economics, and anthropology, buried in thousands of pages no busy person will ever read—and compress them into something you can hand to a friend. What follows is the compression of the compression. Seven ideas. If they’re new to you, they will rearrange how you see nearly everything. If they’re not, consider this the map of where the bodies are buried. 

The line between clear sight and self-deception runs through every skull, and it does not stop running because you’ve read an article about it. 

A warning before we start: there is no flattering way to read this list. I am implicated in every item on it. So are you. 

1. You are the mark, not the con artist. 

Trivers’s central insight, laid out in The Folly of Fools, is that self-deception is not a malfunction. It’s an adaptation. The most convincing liar is the one who believes his own lie—he leaks no tells, because there’s nothing to leak. So natural selection built minds that hide their real motives from the conscious tenant upstairs. The unsettling part is the part most people skip: in this arrangement, the “you” that experiences your own reasoning isn’t running the con. You’re the one being conned. Your sense of why you do what you do is a press release, not the minutes of the meeting. 

2. The rider works for the elephant. 

Jonathan Haidt’s metaphor, with the mechanism supplied by Daniel Kahneman’s two systems: conscious reasoning (the rider) imagines it’s steering, but the automatic, emotional, intuitive part (the elephant) decides first—in milliseconds—and the rider’s actual job is to invent justifications after the fact. When you form a political opinion, you do not reason your way to it. You feel your way to it, then reason your way to a defense. This is why facts so rarely change minds. You’re not arguing with someone’s logic. You’re arguing with their elephant, and the rider you’re talking to is just the press secretary. And here’s the twist that should keep an honest person up at night: the implication is notthat morality is arbitrary. There are almost certainly better and worse answers to how conscious creatures should treat one another—Sam Harris is right that the moral landscape has real peaks and valleys. The problem is that the machinery generating your moral certainty was never built to track those peaks. It was built to track your tribe. 

Our power has outrun our self-knowledge. That gap is no longer a curiosity. It’s the central problem of the species. 3. You are a monkey with a machine gun. 

For the overwhelming majority of our existence, we lived in bands of roughly 150, chased scarce calories, faced physical threats, and tracked reputation face-to-face. That world is gone. The brain is not. You are running twenty-first-century software—cable news, dating apps, global markets, eight billion strangers—on hardware and instincts shaped over deep evolutionary time, in a world that vanished in an eyeblink by comparison. Nearly every modern pathology is this mismatch wearing a different mask: obesity is the calorie-seeking system in a world of abundance, social-media misery is the status-tracking system run at a volume it was never built for, chronic stress is a threat-detection system designed for lions and now triggered by email. Our power has outrun our self-knowledge. That gap is no longer a curiosity. It’s the central problem of the species. 

4. Tribalism is a feature to be managed, not a bug to be solved. 

This is the sentence most people across the spectrum get wrong. Progressives tend to think tribalism is ignorance that education will cure. Conservatives think it’s a virtue when aimed at the right targets. Libertarians think clear thinking dissolves it. All three are wrong, because the impulse to sort the world into us and them is as deep in the architecture as language. You will not eliminate it. The groups that out-survived the others were the ones that cooperated inside and competed outside, and you are their descendant. The functional question is never how to abolish tribalism but how to channel it—through cross-cutting institutions, productive competition, and norms of engagement. Societies that manage it thrive. Societies that let it run loose produce Yugoslavia, Rwanda, and Weimar. The historical record on this is not ambiguous. 

5. The Blank Slate is not just wrong—it’s dangerous. 

Steven Pinker’s target is the still-dominant assumption that humans arrive infinitely malleable, with no nature worth mentioning—that every difference between individuals, groups, and sexes is pure socialization. The science doesn’t support it. But the deeper problem is moral, not empirical. If people have no nature, then anyone who refuses to be molded to your program must be acting in bad faith—stupid, corrupt, or evil. That inference is the seed of every utopian catastrophe in history. The planners who believed they could manufacture a New Man had the power. They lacked the knowledge. The gap between the two filled with corpses. You cannot modulate what you refuse to acknowledge; a pilot who denies gravity does not fly well. 

6. Patternicity will fool you, and it feels exactly like insight. 

This one belongs to Skeptic’s own founder. Michael Shermer’s point is that the brain is a pattern-detection machine with the sensitivity dial turned all the way up—because mistaking a shadow for a predator a hundred times is cheaper than mistaking a predator for a shadow once. So we find faces in clouds, meaning in coincidence, conspiracies in noise. Layer motivated reasoning on top, and you don’t just find patterns everywhere; you preferentially find the ones that confirm what your tribe already believes. The feeling of having seen through to the truth is generated by the same machinery whether or not there’s anything there. Which means the conviction can’t be your evidence. It never could. 

The smartest reasoners are often the most expertly biased, because they’re better at building the defense. 7. Design for the animal, not the angel. 

Here’s the payoff, and it’s strangely hopeful. The systems that work are the ones built for the creature that actually exists. Markets succeed because they channel self-interest instead of pretending it away—the butcher feeds you out of his own interest, not his benevolence. The American founders built checks and balances not for angels but for the ambitious, self-interested primates who would actually hold power. “If men were angels,” Madison wrote, “no government would be necessary.” The institutions that fail are the ones designed for a species we wish we were. Understand the animal, and you can build a civilization worthy of it. Deny the animal, and the animal runs the show. 

♦ ♦ ♦

There’s an eighth idea, and it’s the one that makes the other seven dangerous to summarize: the bias blind spot. We can see every distortion clearly—in other people. Hand a sharp partisan a list like this one and watch him aim it across the aisle, never once at himself. The studies are brutal on this point: greater intelligence and scientific literacy don’t reduce motivated reasoning on identity-defining issues. They supercharge it. The smartest reasoners are often the most expertly biased, because they’re better at building the defense. 

So I’ll say what the science forces me to say. Nothing on this list exempts me from anything on this list. I am the mark in my own mirror as surely as Trivers was in his—and he knew it, and knowing it was the closest thing to an escape hatch our species has ever found. Solzhenitsyn wrote that the line between good and evil runs through every human heart. The line between clear sight and self-deception runs through every skull, and it does not stop running because you’ve read an article about it. 

You are not the exception. Neither am I. But the effort to catch yourself—to ask, before the next certainty hardens: Is this my thinking or my tribe’s? Is this evidence or is it rationalization?—is the one thing the animal can do that the animal it evolved from could not. 

That effort is what my book The Why Behind Things is for. This was the cheat sheet.

We founded Skeptic magazine and the Skeptics Society in 1992, partially in response to a market demand from consumers and the media for a scientific and rational response to increasingly tantalizing claims of the paranormal and supernatural, ESP and Psi, telepathy and telekinesis, NDEs and OBEs, ghosts and poltergeists, astrology and psychics, cryptozoology and strange creatures, haunted houses and mysterious places, UFOs and aliens, conspiracy theories and cults, and a litany of anomalous psychological experiences people reported.

What, wondered general readers and editors at media outlets, is going on here? Joining the burgeoning skeptical movement that began in the 1970s in response to such claims (including and especially the irrepressibly entertaining psychic and spoon-bender Uri Geller, debunked by James “The Amazing” Randi), we were promptly inundated with media requests for interviews with experts in these various claims and fields, and it was taken for granted by virtually everyone in what is today called (sometimes pejoratively) the Mainstream Media (MSM), that if you feature someone making an extraordinary claim you need to balance the report with someone with a prosaic explanation, presumably someone from the scientific or academic community, or those closely aligned in adjacent fields.

By the mid 1990s we had film crews in our office every week, and it was a rare day when I didn’t have a radio interview by phone or a television interview at a local station or studio. For a Fox Family Channel television series I co-hosted (with X-Files’ Mitch Pileggi) called Exploring the Unknown, we included believers in the phenomena and let them make their best case for the reality of what they claimed was true, and then we provided a skeptical perspective on what scientists and other experts thought was really going on.

When my first book was published in 1997, Why People Believe Weird Things, my publisher sent me on a book tour around the country in which each day was filled with multiple media interviews, radio and television shows, and a book signing at a local bookstore. For this and subsequent books, I was on Oprah (ABC), Donahue (ABC), Nightline (ABC), Dateline (NBC), 20/20 (ABC), Larry King Live (CNN), Charlie Rose (PBS), The Colbert Report (Comedy Central), The View (NBC), Politically Incorrect with Bill Maher (ABC), Unsolved Mysteries (History Channel), along with hundreds (thousands?) of radio and print media.

Oh, to have such imbalance back! Those days are gone, along with most of those shows.

I had a few complaints along the way about imbalance. For example, Larry King Live would typically have a table full of UFO believers and me as the token skeptic, and Oprah edited out of a show my comment that the psychic for which I was there to offer a rational explanation of her apparently paranormal phenomena, had actually already done a reading the day before on the woman in the studio audience that day that made it look like she was “telepathically” receiving the information she had already gotten. I was often edited to shorten my explanation, or sometimes even to make it look like I was befuddled even though I wasn’t.

Oh, to have such imbalance back! Those days are gone, along with most of those shows. And while many of today’s MSM outlets still mouth their support of “fair and balanced” reporting, in my experience most do not practice it, at least in those areas about which I know a fair amount. On UFOs, for example, where I was a regular commentator on these mysterious sightings in the sky (or abductions in peoples’ bedrooms), today there are weekly reports, segments, and shows about UFOs (now called UAPs, or Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena), that almost never feature any scientist or scholar to offer a prosaic explanation. 

Unidentified ≠ Aliens. Unidentified = Unknown. Full stop.

Think about that. As I’ve been reporting for years, even hardcore UFOlogists admit that at least 95 percent of all sightings have natural terrestrial explanations, such as (to quote UFO advocate Leslie Kean’s 2010 book UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go on the Record):

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.

And yet…nearly every report you will ever see on MSM, cable shows, podcasts, and social media posts completely ignore the 95 percent and focus instead on the 5 percent unexplained, which does not even mean that they’re alien spaceships or Russian or Chinese super-craft! Unidentified ≠ Aliens. Unidentified = Unknown. Full stop.

I know well the media mantra “if it bleeds it leads,” along with the “man bites dog” meme, but where are the media editors who tell their reporters “be sure to interview someone with a different perspective” or “let’s talk to someone who knows all about this topic but doesn’t believe what our main guest thinks is real”? Yes, there are still a few around, but the imbalance is glaringly obvious to anyone who pays attention.

For example, I am a member of the Galileo Project as their token skeptic, thanks to the foresight of the director Avi Loeb, the highly accomplished astronomer at Harvard University (and with whom I have a $1000 bet that we will not have disclosure of alien contact by December 31, 2030). But as Avi reports and posts about in his daily Medium blog, he has television and podcast interviews every day in his office, often several a day, whereas his equally accomplished and reputable colleagues who know as much as he knows about, say, 3I/Atlas (the interstellar object that swung through our solar system in 2025), go under the media radar when they say it is most likely a comet; whereas Avi, who admits it probably is a comet, is willing to say that it could be an alien mothership coming into our solar system, and could even release baby ships to invade Earth! Wait, what did that Harvard astronomer just say? Get the camera crew!

I don’t begrudge Avi’s newfound fame (after toiling for decades as a black-hole expert grinding out hundreds of scientific papers that almost no one reads and zero media people care about), and who wouldn’t be absolutely thrilled to discover that we are not alone in the universe, and not only that, a disclosure that these aliens know we’re here and have even visited Earth? I certainly would, and most scientists, philosophers, theologians, and the general public (according to surveys) would be equally ecstatic. But so far, we not only have no definitive evidence of alien contact, this extraordinary claim doesn’t even have ordinary evidence for it, so why does the media focus on the 5 percent and largely ignore the 95 percent?

I find it absolutely mind-blowing what has unfolded over the past two decades.

It didn’t use to be that way. It is now. Why? Because of the rapidly changing media landscape largely driven by what is called the attention economy. I have done the best I can to keep up, which is no small feat for a Baby Boomer raised and come of age in the era of Walter Cronkite and three television networks, but I find it absolutely mind-blowing what has unfolded over the past two decades. 

For example, for Scientific American I penned 214 consecutive monthly essays over the span of 18 years. For most of that time I and the magazine were inundated with reader mail for weeks after each issue, and when the internet really took off and the magazine opened up readers’ comments online, chatter there and on social media carried on for weeks after each issue. That is not what happens with published articles, essays, and opinion editorials today. Discussions about this or that commentary last, at most, a few days, but usually just a few hours or minutes, before it is bumped down the page by countless other content, which is now being generated by countless content producers.

The Conspiracy Grift

Skeptic magazine, Volume 31 Issue 2

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When my Scientific American column ended in 2019 I was recruited by the online platform Substack to relaunch it. But this time I started posting my commentaries every week instead of every month, and even that made me feel like I was a slacker compared to other content producers, independent journalists, and the like, who were cranking out material every day. And then I noticed that instead of a couple of us at Scientific American, there were hundreds of regular columnists at Substack, and given their business model of taking pennies-on-the-dollar per creator, that number has now ballooned to somewhere between 40,000 and 50,000 (!), drowning out any expert in a cacophony of voices.

The numbers are so staggering that, compared to my reach before all this came online, I feel completely overwhelmed as if I am just shouting into a hurricane-level wind.

And then there is podcasting. I appeared on Joe Rogan’s popular show seven times over the years, and when it was clear that this was going to become another popular means of content production for skepticism I started my own podcast, The Michael Shermer Show. I am proud of the show and love doing it, inasmuch as I speak to authors of new nonfiction books that I would be reading anyway, and here I get to have a one-on-one conversation with the author, which I never had before. But I’m a nobody compared to the tens of millions of people reached by Rogan and many other popular podcasts, and according to Spotify there are between six and seven million podcast titles in 2026 (while Apple Podcasts reports having 2.6–2.9 million shows). Even when filters are used to skim off the inactive podcasts, there are still over 400,000 active shows, together reaching around 600 million monthly or regular listeners for 2026. The numbers are so staggering that, compared to my reach before all this came online, I feel completely overwhelmed as if I am just shouting into a hurricane-level wind.

Even more overwhelming is what is primarily driving today’s media: the attention economy. Most of these content producers, companies, and organizations derive their budgets from subscribers and advertisers, which are driven by numbers of followers, which in turn are in search of something—anything—that grabs their attention. You think 3I/Atlas is a comet? Boring! You think 3I/Atlas could be an invading alien spaceship coming into our solar system to colonize Earthlings and turn us into slaves? Take my money!

And who do podcasters wish to get on their shows? Some seek out real experts, but a lot of the most popular podcasters seek out the most famous people they can get, and these days those are the people with the most followers, who might then follow the podcast, which will drive up their listenership numbers, which will generate more revenue, which … and there is our attention economy at work.

The real story behind the CIA spending $20 million on PROJECT STARGATE to study psychics.

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I’m a humanistic weirdo, and as such I’m not sure where I belong in this modern culture war. I love truth and reason — I’ve built a career on them — but I belong to a humanistic tradition that refuses to stop at the head and leave the heart out of it. And these days there aren’t many of us. So when I look at the people we’ve come to call “anti-woke intellectuals”—many of whom have written for Skeptic or appeared as guests on The Michael Shermer Show podcast—I don’t see them the way either side wants me to.

I see two very different people wearing the same coat. One wants to make the world more reasonable. The other is settling a score. As a humanistic psychologist who studies narcissism, I’ve come to think the difference between them is stark, and that telling them apart matters more than almost anything else in our culture war.

How did this come about?

A Brief History of Anti-Woke Intellectuals

In 2018, the journalist Bari Weiss wrote an essay in The New York Times introducing readers to what the mathematician Eric Weinstein had half-jokingly named the “Intellectual Dark Web” (IDW): a loose constellation of thinkers who had either been pushed out of mainstream institutions or had walked away from them, because they would not go along with what they saw as a tightening orthodoxy on race, gender, and identity. The roster was eclectic and included Eric Weinstein, of course, along with his brother Bret and his biologist wife Heather Heying, but also the neuroscientist Sam Harris, the psychologist Jordan Peterson, the political commentators Ben Shapiro, Dave Rubin, and Douglas Murray, the philosopher Christina Hoff Sommers, the Quillette publisher Claire Lehmann, and Skeptic’s own Michael Shermer. Joe Rogan handed many of them their largest microphones. Steven Pinker, Jonathan Haidt, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Debra Soh, Maajid Nawaz, Gad Saad, and others orbited nearby.

So what is an anti-woke intellectual? It isn’t simply someone who disagrees with progressive politics. Plenty of people hold conservative or classical-liberal views without building a vocation around them. The anti-woke intellectual makes the critique of progressive social ideology the central, organizing feature of their public work. The argument, in its strongest form, goes like this: a movement that began as a genuine response to real injustices has, in places, curdled into something illiberal—a secular religion complete with heretics, blasphemy, and excommunication; a hostility to open inquiry; a habit of treating disagreement itself as a kind of violence, in which words become a form of violence, or even saying nothing when others think you should, as in the activist phrase “silence is violence.”

The first type of anti-woke intellectual criticizes ideas; the second type is consumed by them.

And here’s the thing worth saying up front before anyone reaches for the comment box: A lot of that critique is correct. The grievance studies affair, in which James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian managed to get absurd hoax papers (one rewriting a chunk of Mein Kampf in intersectional jargon, another about dog park “rape culture” … by dogs) accepted by peer-reviewed journals, exposed something real about the collapse of standards in certain corners of the academy. Gad Saad’s notion of “idea pathogens” names a phenomenon many of us have watched spread. Steven Pinker’s Council on Academic Freedom at Harvard responded to a genuine chilling of speech on campus. I am not here to defend the excesses of the movement these thinkers criticize. I’ve seen those excesses up close, and some of them are indefensible.

I would like to make a different observation. Watch these intellectuals long enough and you notice they don’t all have the same vibe. There are, I argue here, two distinct types—and the difference between them has almost nothing to do with their stated positions, which often overlap, and almost everything to do with what’s driving the engine underneath.

The Two Vibes

The first type of anti-woke intellectual criticizes ideas; the second type is consumed by them.

The first type can tell you, specifically, which policy or claim or practice they object to and why—and they can also tell you, without choking on the words, what the other side gets right. This is the critic who goes after a practice (a mandatory diversity statement, the erosion of institutional neutrality) rather than after the souls of the people who hold it; the scholar who writes a whole book arguing that left and right are each tracking real moral goods the other is half-blind to, which is not a book you write if your aim is to humiliate anyone. You can imagine this person being talked out of a position by a better argument.

The second type is different, and you sense it before you can name it. The fight isn’t part of their work; the fight is the work—and you can watch the arc unfold in public. There’s the scholar who raised a reasonable campus objection, was treated abominably for it, left academia over it, and whose public thinking has since widened into a steadily more totalizing suspicion of nearly every mainstream institution. There’s the writer who genuinely named something real about the culture and then built a combative public identity around an enemy that only ever expands—because naming a real problem and being consumed by it are not mutually exclusive. There’s the public figure for whom a private grief and a civilizational crusade have fused into a single object, so that one enemy now explains even a death. In each case, a suspicion that began aimed at one bad idea has metastasized into a distrust of whole institutions, whole classes of people, anyone who won’t agree that the virus is everywhere.

You’ll notice I’m not naming names, and that’s deliberate. I’m a psychologist, not a mind reader: I can’t diagnose anyone I haven’t personally assessed, and I’m describing publicly observable behavior, not pronouncing on anyone’s character or sorting real people onto a permanent list. (I surely wouldn’t want that done to me.) Since you likely know who you’d put in each camp, I’d rather you fill in the names yourself than hand you a roster to argue with.

Also, I’d like to add that these camps are fluid—in fact, that’s the part I most want to stress. A first-type thinker can have a second-type week and find his way back; a second-type crusader can cool into a first-type critic once the wound finally heals. Nobody is fixed. But the behavior sorts cleanly, and once you can see the tells, you can’t unsee them—including, if you’re honest, in yourself.

The Tells

How do you know which vibe you’re dealing with, including when the intellectual in question is you?

The first tell is the object of attack. The grounded critic goes after a claim, a policy, a specific bad argument. The consumed critic goes after a people: an enemy class, vaguely defined and infinitely expandable, into which any new opponent can be folded.

The second tell is revisability. Ask yourself: what would it take for this person to say “I was wrong about that one”? For the first type, you can imagine an answer. For the second, the question is almost unintelligible; being wrong isn’t a possibility they’re holding open, because the position isn’t really a hypothesis. It’s an identity.

The third tell—and this is the one I most want to flag—is reflexive cynicism about compassion. The consumed anti-woke critic has come to treat every expression of care as a cover story. Someone advocates for the vulnerable? Status-jockeying. Someone expresses concern for a marginalized group? A bid for moral superiority. Everything kind is secretly a maneuver. Now, sometimes there is a hit there. Performative compassion is real; moral grandstanding is real; some people absolutely do weaponize the language of care for advantage. A good skeptic keeps that possibility on the table.

The crusade is the bandage that never comes off because the cut is never allowed to heal.

But there’s a vast difference between calibrated suspicion, applied where the evidence warrants it, and a blanket presumption that all compassion is fraud. The second isn’t insight. It’s a worldview in which goodness has been defined out of existence, and that’s not reason. It’s a kind of paranoia wearing reason’s clothes.

Which brings us to the fourth tell: the totalizing frame. One enemy explains everything. The virus is everywhere. Every disappointment, every institutional failure, and every personal grievance flows back to the same source. That’s not a theory anymore; it’s the structure of a conspiracy theory, or worse an all-consuming worldview, and it has the airless quality of one.

What’s Actually Running the Engine

Here’s where my own research comes in, because I think there’s a real psychological mechanism underneath the second vibe of the anti-woke intellectual, and it’s not the one people might expect.

When we hear “narcissism,” we picture the grandiose type: the swaggering, self-promoting, attention-hungry performer. But in a study with Joshua Miller, W. Keith Campbell, and Brandon Weiss, my colleagues and I mapped how narcissism actually breaks apart into different faces. There’s grandiose narcissism: antagonistic, dominant, status-seeking. And there’s vulnerable narcissism: neurotic, hypersensitive, easily wounded, perpetually aggrieved, convinced the world has failed to grant the recognition it owes. The antagonism is the thread the two share.

Both feed the second anti-woke intellectual, but in different ways. Grandiose narcissism builds the brand: the crusader who discovers that being The Person Who Fights This Thing brings a following, a revenue stream, a standing ovation, and who needs the enemy to stay enormous because the enemy is now load-bearing for the self. Vulnerable narcissismsupplies the wound: the person who was genuinely humiliated—fired, mobbed, exiled, betrayed—and for whom the critique is no longer about the world at all but about settling a score that never closes. A real injury becomes a permanent organizing principle. The crusade is the bandage that never comes off because the cut is never allowed to heal.

And when this goes collective, it gets its own engine. The work of Agnieszka Golec de Zavala on collective narcissism describes groups built around the belief that we are exceptional, that we are not sufficiently recognized, and shows that such groups reliably turn hostile toward whoever they cast as the threat to the in-group’s image. An anti-woke movement organized around shared grievance, rather than shared inquiry, will behave exactly this way: ever-vigilant, ever-aggrieved, retaliating against perceived insults to its own greatness. The truth-seeking recedes; the score-settling takes over.

That’s the distinction I’d draw, and I’d put it as a question anyone in this fight can ask themselves: Am I doing this to make society better, or to repair a narcissistic injury? The two can look identical from the outside. They have very different effects on the world.

The Mega-Irony of the Narcissist

And here is the part I find mega-ironic: the second camp talks, almost without exception, from a place of pure victim mindset. The very thing they are most likely to mock in their opponents (the grievance gang, the victimhood culture, the perpetual woundedness group, the “everyone is out to get us” cohort) is the thing they have most thoroughly become. Their accusation becomes a mirror of themselves.

The woke didn’t take your life from you. Make them the smallest possible part of your story, not the largest, and the crusade loses its grip.

I spent an entire book, Rise Above, on the victim mindset, and its final chapter is about what happens when that mindset goes collective. The research is unsettlingly precise here. The psychologist Rahav Gabay and her colleagues identified a stable personality trait they call the Tendency for Interpersonal Victimhood, with four signature marks: (1) an incessant need for recognition, (2) moral elitism, (3) a lack of empathy for the suffering of others, and (4) frequent rumination about one’s own victimization. Read that list slowly and ask yourself whether it describes the obsessed anti-woke crusader any less exactly than it describes the “wokester” campus activist he can’t stop ranting about. It describes both, and that’s the point. As I put it in Rise Above:

To the extent that real wounds have been incurred, we need to acknowledge that, metabolize it, and move on. But our current society does not allow that. Instead, it encourages perpetual victimhood, where emphasizing wounds nets societal rewards.

That incentive structure does not check anyone’s politics at the door. It rewards the aggrieved progressive and the aggrieved anti-progressive in exactly the same language.

At the group level, the wound becomes a flag. Collective victimhood confers real psychological benefits: entitlement and moral superiority, the sympathy and support of onlookers, and a powerful sense of group cohesion, because nothing unites people like a shared grievance. Kurt Gray and Daniel Wegner’s work on moral typecasting shows that we instinctively sort the world into weak-but-moral victims and strong-but-immoral perpetrators, and once a group has cast itself as the victim, it tends to grant itself a moral pass on the harms it does to the designated perpetrator class, a phenomenon researchers have called the “egoism of victimhood.” “It’s all the fault of the woke” is precisely this move: a chosen trauma installed at the center of an identity, reactivated whenever the world feels threatening, and used to license whatever comes next. It is the same machinery as collective narcissism, just flying a different flag.

Why I’ve Never Called Myself Woke or Anti-Woke

I should be honest about where I stand, because it shapes how I see all this. I love truth and reason. I’ve spent my career insisting that psychology earn its claims, that we follow the evidence, that we not flinch from uncomfortable findings. By temperament and training, my head belongs in the reason camp.

But as a humanistic psychologist, I don’t stop at truth and reason. I’m a particular kind of creature in this debate, and there aren’t many of us: the humanist who loves truth as much as the skeptics do but won’t amputate the heart to prove it.

Which is to say that the two camps I’ve just described don’t actually have a slot for me, and I’ve stopped expecting one. Both are organized around the same false choice: rigor or compassion, truth or justice, the cold eye or the warm one. I refuse it.

And that refusal isn’t a gap in the taxonomy I haven’t gotten around to filling. It is the position. The whole argument of humanistic psychology, going back to its founders, is that a fully developed human being holds both at once. According to the field’s founder, Abraham Maslow, the transcending self-actualizing person is the one who can do “dichotomy-transcendence.”

I’m also interested in prosocial motivation, in humanitarianism, in actually improving the lives of the downtrodden that are, not incidentally, the very things the progressive movement cares about when it’s at its best. Even though politically, I feel like I’m most accurately described as a left-leaning libertarian (but I’m politically fluid, so chill).

So I’ve never been able to plant my flag in the anti-woke camp, even as I’ve watched and named plenty of foolishness and failures of reason on the woke progressive side. Because beneath that foolishness I can usually still see the compassion that started it, a real moral impulse toward people who’ve been hurt. I’m not willing to throw that out. The error I want to correct is the abandonment of reason and the hyper-cynicism of the anti-woke obsessed. It is not the presence of care.

A Better Way Forward

Here is what I would like to offer the anti-woke intellectuals I admire, as well as the ones I worry about: The goal is integration, not demolition. You don’t have to choose between rigor and compassion; the whole humanistic tradition is an argument that a fully developed person holds both. And the first move is the one I prescribe for any victim mindset, individual or collective: as I wrote in Rise Above, it requires “moving victimhood from the center of a group’s identity to the periphery.”

A critique launched from faith in humanity, aimed at making things better, can self-correct … A crusade launched from a narcissistic wound, aimed at vindication, never arrives, because the wound is the point and the wound is bottomless.

The woke didn’t take your life from you. Make them the smallest possible part of your story, not the largest, and the crusade loses its grip. In our research on the lighter side of human nature, my colleagues and I described a “Light Triad,” and one of its facets is faith in humanity, a basic willingness to believe in people’s fundamental decency. I’d argue that faith in humanity, not reflexive cynicism, is the sounder default from which to criticize a movement, with appropriate cynicism deployed where the evidence actually warrants it. Not naïveté. Calibration. Trust as the baseline; suspicion as the targeted tool, not the air you breathe.

Because here’s the asymmetry that should worry anyone in this fight: A critique launched from faith in humanity, aimed at making things better, can self-correct. It has somewhere to land. A crusade launched from a narcissistic wound, aimed at vindication, never arrives, because the wound is the point and the wound is bottomless.

Criticize the ideology. Please. Some of it deserves it, and reason is precisely what’s been missing. But do it as the first type, not the second. Go after the bad argument, stay open to being wrong, keep the compassion you’re tempted to mock, and check, every so often, whether you’re trying to repair the world or just your wounded self.

The difference won’t always show in your conclusions. It will show in whether, years from now, you’ve helped make the world a better place—or just devoted your life feeding a virus of your own.

In Isaac Asimov’s The Caves of Steel he imagines a future in which most of humanity lives in gigantic cities, extending many levels underground. This leaves the majority of the Earth’s surface for industrial farming, necessary to feed all those densely populated cities. If you take a similar strategy, however, and keep the population at sustainable numbers, this could maximize land for natural ecosystems and also minimize the environmental footprint of the average person. So if we are going to plan our civilization around environmental sustainability we would not necessarily need Asimovian megacities, but we could concentrate the population in cities and in densely developed areas around cities, and leave large stretches of land in between undeveloped. This is far better than endless suburban sprawl.

But of course, we are not starting from scratch, and our current layout was not planned by some central committee but evolved organically. Pragmatically, the question we need to ask is – where do we go from here. Cities are growing dynamic things, so we can use city development to move in a certain desirable direction, even if we can’t tear it all down and start anew. This means it is important to study what the best city planning and development would be going forward.

When most people think of city planning to reduce the carbon emissions of transportation, the first thing that comes to mind is planning city centers so that they are walkable/bikeable and to provide public transportation, in order to minimize reliance on fossil-fuel burning cars. This also has the advantage of reducing city traffic, which can be a nightmare. However, a recent study suggests that, while important, this may be of secondary concern with respect to impact on CO2 emissions. For many cities, especially those with a single concentrated hub (as opposed to multicentric cities, like LA), the most impactful strategy might be the densification of a ring surrounding the city center. The range of this ring depends on the city, but is something like 10-20 km for a typical large city, but can extend to 40 km. Increased density can be accomplished with infill development, as many such zones are only moderately developed leaving lots of room for densification.

The idea is that the workplaces will be concentrated in the city center, and the workers will live in the ring around the city center, minimizing their commute distance. This could have a significant impact on the average commute distance that people have and therefore their transportation carbon footprint. This approach would work better for some cities than others, depending on geography. This plan could also maximize the impact of public transport, like buses and trains, dedicated to bringing people back and forth from this densified ring to the city center.

One of the major findings of the study, which used gps data to track 10 million “mobility data points”, is that there are many interdependent variables at work. It is not as simple as just densifying a certain distance from a city center. Road planning, public transportation, carpooling, and working from home are also important variables that affect each other. Essentially, what this study does is provide additional information to city planners, using an AI model to help individual planning to each city in order to minimize average commute distance.

The authors acknowledge that there is still a lot of research to do in this area. The one variable that is always the most difficult to predict is human behavior. For example, we cannot simply build more roads to accommodate increased traffic, because more roads creates “induced demand” and may actually worsen traffic. In this case we need to deal with the fact that many people move out into the suburbs, increasing their commute, because they want to. It’s nice there. At the same time there is a “build it and they will come” phenomenon – people will buy or rent houses that exist. Since we are having a housing shortage, we have an opportunity to decide where to build the millions of homes we need to meet demands.

Generally speaking, however, it is a good idea not to assume that people will do what you want them to do, and to provide multiple options for different people with different desires and in different situations. At the same time, when dealing with these big environmental issues, it is not necessary for every single person to do the same thing. We just need to move some people toward behavior associated with lower emissions, by making certain choices more desirable or easier. The effects of behavior and infrastructure on CO2 emissions are cumulative – in both directions, good and bad.

I also think generally we should not expect most people to make big sacrifices to achieve our collective goals, not for moral reasons but for practical reasons. But I also think we should not always put the burden on the individual to make the sacrifice. It’s better to look for the win-wins, to make the system work for people rather than making people work for the system, and to provide the infrastructure and opportunity for people to make choices that are good for them and good collectively, in this case for the environment.

With all that in mind, what would I like to see in terms of minimizing the carbon footprint of transportation? First, I would love more walkable cities with less traffic, and with convenient low-cost transportation options. More convenient and cost effect transportation options into city centers would also be nice. Where I live the best option I have is to drive to the nearest train station and then pay ridiculous prices for a train ticket. If the family is taking a day-trip to the city, it could literally cost hundreds of dollars.

Also, as this study indicates, careful city planning to minimize commute distance could have a significant impact. There is a confluence of issues here. In the US we lack overall housing, we also lack mid-level housing in terms of costs.  We need more condos, row houses, and multi-family units – something between an apartment and a large house sitting on a half-acre. These are exactly the kinds of homes that could be built to densify key regions around city centers. We could essentially address three problems at once.

Meanwhile, we need to continue to convert from fossil fuel burning to electric vehicles. These are more energy efficient and have a much lower carbon footprint over their lifetime. They are also now cheaper to own and have much less maintenance. Having shorter average commute distances would also make EVs, even those with modest ranges, more convenient. We are already past the technological tipping point in terms of the features of EVs themselves. The big issue is that we need to continue to build out the EV public charging infrastructure. They need to be ubiquitous.

I also think that we need to make a big push for working from home. This happened during COVID and I was hoping that everyone would realize the benefits and the trend would continue. However, once the pandemic was over some businesses snapped back to their old policies, and mostly with no good reason. We did make good progress, but not as much as we should have. We should be doing everything we can to maximize working from home. If the average worker worked from home 2 days a week, that would reduce commuting by 40%. This massively reduces traffic and CO2 emissions. Increasingly many people’s jobs involve lots of time sitting in front of a computer. There is no reason for them to commute to an office to do that. Schedule meetings on one or two days a week. In fact, in my experience, many work places have too many meetings. Most of what needs to be accomplished can happen in virtual time, then you can have one meeting to review everything. Obviously this has to be individualized to the workplace, but there are many businesses where there are lots of opportunities to reorganize workflow so that many people can work from home much of the time. Further – working from home increases productivity.

The same is true of the 4 day work week – it maintains or increases productivity. This is because of the same principle I discussed above – people are not machines that will just do what you tell them (short of oppressive environments). People work more efficiently when they are in a better mood, and have a better work-life balance.

Most of these things are win-wins. People do not want to spend large amounts of their life stuck in traffic, sitting in a car that is spewing out pollution. So give them other options, make commutes shorter, let people work fewer days and many days (or all days) from home. Provide cheap public transportation. And when they do have to drive, EVs are a superior option for many people, and we should do what we can to make it the best option for as many people as possible.

The post City Planning and CO2 Emissions first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

Our final Skeptoid Adventure of 2026 takes us to the Yucatán coast to explore the Mysteries of the Maya. So, in anticipation of that, we're playing an episode from the archive that takes us to the heart of Mesoamerica: "Finding the Black Olmec" -- Enjoy!

And this Adventure takes place December 6th-13th and links up seamlessly with the New Orleans Escapade for those who are interested!

www.skeptoid.com/adventures

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In a non sequitur leap so sweeping it is almost beyond comprehension, Pastor Joel Webbon, urging an end to women’s suffrage, asserts, “It’s because we love women—and we know that when women can vote, they vote for being raped.”1

This bizarre assertion is part of a conversation between three Christian Nationalist clergymen, Pastor Dale Partridge, head pastor at King’s way Reformed Church in Prescott, Arizona, Father Calvin Robinson, a British expat cleric, and Pastor Joel Webbon, leader of Covenant Bible Church in Georgetown Texas. In this conversation, the three assert women are guided by emotion rather than intellect. Hence, they argue, women are easily manipulated. Thus, the vote must be taken away from them for their own good:

Partridge, a Reformed pastor who leads King’s Way Reformed Church in Prescott, Arizona, argued that women are “easily manipulated by evil men.” “You want to get to my wife, you have to go through me,” Partridge said. “You’re not going to get her emotions manipulated. You are going to have to manipulate my emotions, and I’m less likely to be manipulated.” He continued, “That’s the threat, is that they can’t control men the way they can control women—which is the reason why they want the women’s vote.”2

Perhaps these men would consider certain women who don’t seem to conform to their view as helpless souls governed by their emotions as anomalies. These would include the late Golda Meir, Prime Minister of Israel, 1969–1974, the late Margaret Thatcher, Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, 1979–1990, Angela Merkel, Chancellor of Germany, 2005–2021, Hillary Clinton, Secretary of State of the United States, 2009–2013, and Kamala Harris, Vice President of the United States, 2021–2025; not to mention Supreme Court justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, Ketanji Brown Jackson, and Amy Coney Barrett; as well as the 26 female senators and 129 female members of the House of Representatives in the present federal legislature.

So, are these women anomalies, exceptions to the rule, and are most women ruled by their emotions and “easily manipulated by evil men,” as Partridge asserts? Not according to a study by the University of Michigan. One assertion about the emotionality of women is that their emotional stability is often negatively impacted by hormonal changes during their menstrual cycles. The study examined men, women naturally cycling, and women who were not cycling while taking oral contraceptives:

“Thus, there is little indication that ovarian hormones influence affective variability in women to a greater extent than the biopsychosocial factors that influence daily emotion in men,” the researchers wrote, adding that men and women’s daily emotions fluctuate “to similar extents.” According to the researchers, this shows that men and women actually have “similar levels of affective variability,” or as U-M put it, they “ride the same emotional rollercoaster.” The mechanisms behind them between the sexes, however, may “systematically” differ. “Our study uniquely provides psychological data to show that the justifications for excluding women in the first place (because of fluctuating ovarian hormones, and consequently emotions, confounded experiments) were misguided,” Beltz said.3

Another study, reported in Forbes, found that, overall, women exercised greater emotional control in management situations than men:

The only category in which women didn’t receive the better scores was “emotional self-control,” where no gender differences were found. In numerous other categories important for management success, however, women did score higher. A few key examples:
Inspirational Leadership: Women scored in 54th percentile, men in 47th percentile.
Coaching and Mentoring: Women scored in 57th percentile, men in 46th percentile.
Organizational Awareness: Women scored in 56th percentile, men in 46th percentile.
Adaptability: Women scored in 54th percentile, men in 48th percentile.4

That study notwithstanding, a 2015 article in Psychology Today asserted there is little difference in the emotionality of men and women:

Are women more emotional than men? Maybe. Men could be described as more emotional than women, too. It depends on the type of emotion, how it is measured, where it is expressed, and lots of other factors. It is also important when answering that type of question not to dichotomize sex differences as necessarily being either “entirely absent” (i.e., gender blank slate-ism) or so large that men and women “can’t relate to one another” (i.e., the old Mars versus Venus claptrap). Most psychological sex differences fall somewhere in the middle.5

Even studies using the Big Five personality scale—OCEAN, or Openness to Experience, Consciousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism—that find women express more emotional variability than men, there is no way to extrapolate from this fact that women cannot run companies or countries, which history shows they clearly can. No such profession can be reduced to a simple set of emotional regulatory factors easily cleaved between men and women.6

It appears, then, that the characterization of women by these three clerics is based less on science than on traditionally stereotypical views of women, along with their own religious biases.

One must also consider what primarily makes an individual either male or female, i.e., X and Y chromosomes. Females have two X chromosomes, while males have an X and a Y chromosome. So, is the Y chromosome special in some way that makes men intellectually superior to women? Does it carry special and unique genes women simply don’t have? While Y chromosomes do have some special genes that produce testes, they are, overall, stunted, lacking matching genes to pair with those on the X chromosomes. Hence, with paired genes of a given type, a defective gene carried on one X chromosome can be effectively neutralized by a functional gene of the same pair on the other X chromosome. Because the Y chromosome often lacks the gene to pair with the defective gene, there are genetic diseases carried by women that are almost exclusively expressed in men. One of these is hemophilia. Somehow this trio of clerics missed learning this.

However, it’s not just women exercising power that troubles these clergymen in the video. Rather, it is democracy itself. As Pastor Webbon states:

So long as we have democracy, coupled with universal suffrage, you’re constantly going to be going against the grain. You’re going to constantly have half the population voting for temperance, tolerance and suicidal empathy.7

Webbon’s solution to this problem is simple and forceful (with the emphasis on forceful):

I don’t think you’re going to get people to vote away Democracy … But my position is it has to be taken. It has to be that men—virtuous, ambitious, masculine men—have to climb the ladder of power and forcefully take away from the people that which is to their detriment.

Father Robinson disagrees, citing an historical example where people did indeed vote away democracy. The historical example he cites with equanimity is Weimar Germany giving up democracy to the Nazis. Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that he seems to see this as something positive. Early in 2025 he was defrocked by the Anglican Catholic Church after mimicking Elon Musk’s straight-arm gesture many have seen as a Nazi salute (but was, in fact, a common gesture waving to the crowd.8) Robinson stated emphatically on an Instagram post that he wasn’t a Nazi and that he made the gesture as a joke to mock liberals:

The joke at the end was a mockery of the hysterical “liberals” who called Elon Musk a Nazi for clearly showing the audience his heart was with them … My attempt at dry wit in the typically British way was not a joke at the expense of WWII nor an admission of my membership in the National Socialist Party. That would be an incredibly ignorant and bad faith assumption to make. The responses are very telling, though. The people who understand cheer—those who have eyes to see. Those who choose not to understand, reach for their pitchforks. They have a new channel for their hatred. They remain in my prayers. May the Lord soften their hearts.9

Father Robinson’s superiors at the Anglican Catholic Church would have to have been among those he characterized as “those who choose not to understand” and failed to see the humor in in his actions. Their response was:

While we cannot say what was in Mr. Robinson’s heart when he did this, his action appears to have been an attempt to curry favor with certain elements of the American political right by provoking its opposition. Mr. Robinson had been warned that online trolling and other such actions (whether in the service of the left or the right) are incompatible with a priestly vocation and was told to desist. Clearly, he did not, and as such his license in the church has been revoked. He is no longer serving as a priest in the ACC.10

The ACC church’s statement went on to condemn any trivializing of the Holocaust. Regardless of Robinson’s disassociating himself from the Nazis, he does seem to approve of the people of the Weimar Republic voluntarily giving up democracy.

It would be easy to dismiss these three clerics as members of a misogynous and racist fringe group. However, their vision of depriving women of the vote isn’t theirs alone.

Along with wanting to disenfranchise women, Pastor Webbon would like to purify our nation by ridding it of immigrants. Thus, he would like Americans to join ICE in what he sees as a noble cause. On an episode the Right Response Ministries podcast, Webbon explained how:

You can’t be vigilante, but you literally can join ICE and be God’s appointed avenger who seeks to carry out God’s vengeance on the evildoer. Immigration is evil, at least at the level that we have it today. Those who are flooding our country—it’s not theirs—they are flooding our country like a swarm of locusts and eating up the inheritance that your fathers, by their blood, sweat, and tears, laid up for you. It is a breach, a rebellion, against the Fifth Commandment to honor your father and mother. And so, to join the proper mechanism through ICE and to become, in that sense, God’s appointed deacon to carry out vengeance on the evildoer who is devouring the inheritance of the children, that is a righteous thing. You can join ICE today and make Jesus smile as you, with a gun, pack foreigners into the back of a van to be kicked out of the country. That is a godly, glorious endeavor.11

Since, unless one is a member of a Native American tribe, one must be the descendant of immigrants, many of whom—like my Irish ancestors—were also seen as bringing ruin on our nation, it is at first hard to understand Webbon’s antagonism toward immigrants. However, Dale Partridge makes it clear as to just which immigrants Christian Nationalists are referring:

Christian nationalist pastor Dale Partridge says non-European immigrants have “destroyed our nation, literally”: “If you’re not a Christian and you’re not fully assimilated—I’m talking language, culture, and values—get out of America.”12

Calvin Robinson, though of mixed-race descent, also sees an immigrant threat, though mainly from Muslims, whom he seems to see as being helped by Jews:

I get attacked on this from both sides because I mention the problem of Islam and people are like, “Yeah, but it’s the Jews who opened the door.” I’m like, “Yeah.” I mention the problem of Judaism, and they’re like, “Yeah, but the Muhammadans are raping your daughters.” These are both issues. They both need addressing. Islam has taken over, yes; it’s the broom of the Jews and they have opened the gates and it’s the reason we have barbarians everywhere. But the barbarians need dealing with and we’re not dealing with them. They are literally raping our daughters, so let’s get them out and let’s close the doors and let’s kick out the people who are opening the doors, too.13

Joel Webbon also takes the Jews to task, saying that, while they might be allowed to live in the United States, they should not have any say in its laws. On his Right Response podcast, Pastor Webbon stated:

You don’t get to drive the bus, if you’re someone who’s not a Christian, and even more than just not a Christian, but someone whose entire religion is founded on the rejection of Christ.14

In another episode of the Right Response podcast, after saying Jews might be able to live in the United States but should be denied the right to hold public office, Webbon added:

This nation is for us and our posterity. It’s not for Hindus. It’s not for Muslims. And it’s not for Jews. It belongs to Christians.15

So, in the ideal Christian Nationalist state, as envisioned by Webbon, Partridge, and Robinson, women would be denied the vote, immigration would cease and non-European immigrants would be deported, and Jews would be denied the right to hold public office.

It would be easy to dismiss these three clerics as members of a misogynous and racist fringe group. However, their vision of depriving women of the vote isn’t theirs alone. It is a key provision of the agenda of well-funded Christian Dominionists. One of its leaders is Douglas Wilson, the spiritual mentor of Secretary of War Pete Hegseth. Wilson has proposed replacing individual voting with a household voting system, in which each household—led by its masculine head—would have a single vote. In a 2025 survey involving 3,300 respondents, the Religion in Public blog found that 20.5 percent of Americans they questioned favored replacing our present system with one of household voting:

We also asked our respondents about women’s political rights, starting with the idea of a household vote. In our weighted sample, 20.5 percent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed with this proposal. Predictably, there is a gender gap – 24.2 percent of men and 16.9 percent of women agreed.16

So, assuming this survey reflects a cross section of Americans, it appears nearly one fourth of American men and a sixth of American women would favor effectively depriving women of the vote.

Let us compare these statistics with some of those of the Weimar Republic in the 1930s. In the first election in Germany following the economic crisis of 1929—that of 1930—the Nazi party received 18.3 percent of the vote. By 1932, while still a minority party, they composed the largest faction in the Reichstag, the German Parliament. In the election of March, 1933, Adolf Hitler’s Nazi Party (NSDAP) won 17,277,180 votes, or 43.91 percent of the total.17 Thus, the present strength of those favoring a plan put forward by Christian Dominionists to severely shrink the American electorate is comparable to that of the Nazi party in Germany at the beginning of its rise to power, but well below that which brought Hitler to power.

Fortunately for the continued existence of American democracy and constitutional rights, financial conditions in America do not mirror those in the Weimar Republic in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929. However, should such a financial disaster occur, those posing as saviors of our system could easily ascend the “ladders of power,” as Webbon phrased it.

Regardless of whether there is or is not an economic crisis, Pastor Webbon has laid out a timeline for the accession of Christian Nationalism:

In the near future, possibly as soon as 2028 but likely 2032, this America First Christian Nationalist movement is going to take over the GOP and it’s going to win an election. It’s going to be everything MAGA said it would be—but MAGA betrayed us—and this is what we can look for on the horizon of the political landscape. And this is what you need to be committed to and what you must be working towards.18

Skeptic: Are space aliens visiting Earth? 

James Fox: I was the biggest skeptic. And here I am, having delved into this, traveled around the world, and met with witnesses, military radar operators, and fighter jet pilots. I honestly feel like I have less of an understanding today of what’s going on than I did over 30 years ago. I really don’t know if the phenomenon is real. 

What are its origins and intent? I don’t have the foggiest clue. I really don’t. I wish I knew. And I’m starting to come to the realization that I’m just not going to know. I’m probably never going to find out. And it’s kind of frustrating. 

Skeptic: And here you are 30 years later. I’ve watched all those films. You go on Amazon Prime and type in UFOs, and there are just pages and pages of them. But yours are, by far, the best. The Phenomenon, and then your recent one, Moment of Contact, really stand out head and shoulders above the others. 

I know The Age of Disclosure is the big talking media event at the moment. That’s fine. But I like your films better. It’s clear, when you pile it all together as you do, with striking visuals and beautiful cinematography of the people you’re interviewing, that there’s something going on. 

So I guess the question is: What is it? 

Leslie Kean says in her book UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go on the Recordthat 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 and Mars, meteors and meteorites, space junk, satellites, swamp gas, spinning eddies, sun dogs, ball lightning, ice crystals, reflected light off the clouds, lights on the ground or lights reflected in the cockpit window, temperature inversion, lenticular clouds. And the list goes on. 

So what we’re really talking about here—and you’ve very adroitly put this together—is that remaining five to ten percent that really stands out. 

If we can agree that 90 to 95 percent have prosaic explanations, what do we do with those anomalies? In the history and philosophy of science, it’s always the anomalies that drive new revolutions and discoveries. The old theory doesn’t account for this, so what does? 

Maybe we just say, “I don’t know.” But somebody must know. This isn’t like some paranormal or supernatural phenomenon, like whether there’s a god or not. NASA isn’t going to find out if there’s a god. But NASA could find out if aliens have come here, in principle. 

Marco Rubio was in your latest film, and I’d like to think that if we had something he could tell us, he would tell us what it is. 

Fox: It’s certainly interesting when you think of someone at his level within government. He’s not retired. He’s current. He was a senator at the time of the interview. 

I remember interviewing Jimmy Carter. I think I was one of the first people to get Jimmy Carter on camera admitting that he had looked into UFOs during his presidency. He also had a sighting, which he talked about when he was running for president. 

Then I got to interview President Gerald Ford. And then the Clinton’s Senior Advisor John Podesta. And, indirectly, President Bill Clinton. And all of them said they tried to get to the bottom of the UFO phenomenon, and one of the things I walked away with was along the lines of what Rubio said: presidents are often kept out of the loop. Carter said that they made inquiries and essentially weren’t happy with the answers they were getting. 

John Podesta said the same thing during the Clinton administration. I don’t know if you remember this, but Lawrence Rockefeller was putting some serious pressure on the Clinton administration for transparency on the UFO topic. In fact, he went as far as saying, “If you don’t, I will publish an article about it in every magazine, state to state.” So Clinton said, “Okay, give me a case you want me to look into.” 

They came back and said, “Roswell.” Evidently, the Clinton administration made a serious effort to look into it, and they weren’t happy with the answers they were getting. They felt they were just getting the runaround. 

Of course, I don’t have a president directly saying, “I was kept out of the loop.” But I have President Ford saying he wasn’t happy with the answers he was getting. Carter said they made inquiries, but the responses were all over the place. And I know the Clinton administration, according to Podesta, wasn’t happy either. They felt they were getting the runaround. 

Let’s just say, for a moment, that we suspend judgment. If there were some unknown government agency—not elected officials—operating in complete secrecy, and if they did have, hypothetically, in their possession a non-Earth origin spacecraft or nonhuman intelligence and wanted to keep it secret for whatever reason, I probably wouldn’t tell the president either. 

Elected officials come and go every four to eight years, so it kind of makes sense that if you wanted to keep a secret of that nature, you wouldn’t want to give it all to the president. I don’t know. That’s just speculation. I’m told—and I could be wrong—that the last president who had a pretty good or bigger picture of the UFO topic was President George H.W. Bush. 

Skeptic: Well, Trump’s latest statement on this is that he’s talked to a lot of people who seem convinced there’s something there, but he hasn’t seen anything that convinces him. Maybe it’s what you’re saying, that presidents just don’t know everything. 

Fox: It really makes you wonder. When I was still on the fence about what UFOs represent, I went to the 50th anniversary of Roswell in 1997. I am interested enough to be out there poking around and asking questions, and I met many people who had been firsthand witnesses to the event when they were in their 20s or 30s. Now they were in their 70s and 80s, and across the board they told me on camera that their lives were threatened if they spoke up. They literally said that not only would they be picking their bones out of the desert, but their family’s bones as well. I’m not saying I categorically believe that just because they said it. But the different people I met seemed genuinely convinced that those threats were coming from above. 

Skeptic: Why don’t the whistleblower laws we have in place protect those people now? 

Fox: I don’t know. I’ve tried to get them to come forward to participate in different films I’m doing, but something is causing many people to not want to go public with what they know. That said, I agree that the more extraordinary the claim, the more extraordinary the evidence has to be to believe it, so at the very least you want them to talk or reveal details that can be verified. 

This chart, Appendix I to Project Blue Book Status Report No. 8, shows the frequency of unidentified flying object (UFO) reports during the months of June, July, August, and September 1952. (Credit: U.S. National Archives)

David Grusch has made some pretty extraordinary claims, and if they’re true, the implications are profound, not just for the United States, but globally. These people seem legitimately fearful, not just about losing their security clearances, but about their personal safety. 

I’ve met some of them behind the scenes. Maybe they’re lying to me. They didn’t come to me; I came to them through other people. But they’ve said the protections are not in place. There isn’t enough security for them. They believe they’ll lose their clearances, lose their jobs, and some even fear they could lose their lives. 

In the 1950s, you had the massive flyovers of Washington, DC, over two consecutive weekends. You had orders to scramble jets to intercept these.

I’m not saying I believe that or don’t believe it. But that fear is a legitimate concern among the individuals I’ve met with. In 2023 they tried to pass the UAP Disclosure Act, which included whistleblower protections. It passed in the Senate but not in the House. 

Skeptic: In your film The Phenomenon, you end with an interview with Gary Nolan at Stanford. He says he’s seen stuff and he knows stuff. You ask him: “All right, can you tell us what you saw?” And he says he’s not going to say one way or the other. 

Why would a tenured college professor be worried about telling you what he saw? Aren’t there protections in place for freely speaking his mind? 

Fox: This is what I’ve been told: because it’s national security, people can just be picked up. There’s no due process. You can be taken and put behind bars. It doesn’t have to pertain specifically to UAPs or UFOs. It could be nuclear secrets or something like that. The concern is violating NDAs or anything related to national security. 

Skeptic: I asked Garrett Graff about this. He has a 500-page book called UFO: The Inside Story of the U.S. Government’s Search for Alien Life, Here and Out There. He’s a good journalist and historian. He wrote books on the FBI, 9/11, Watergate, and Raven Rock—about the government’s Cold War doomsday plan, where the heads of the cabinet would go to underground bunkers. 

He said, “The problem I have with government conspiracies is that they presuppose a level of competence that is not on display in the rest of the work the government does. I just don’t believe the government is capable of keeping a secret at scale like this for any meaningful period of time.” 

He gave an example from his next book, a history of D-Day, Operation Overlord, the biggest and most important secret the U.S. government ever had. There were six, eight, maybe ten complete breaches of secrecy in the six to eight months beforehand. One guy accidentally mailed a copy of the invasion plans to his mom in Chicago. One officer got drunk and started talking about the invasion at a cocktail party. Another officer left a briefcase with invasion documents on a bus and had to chase it down the street to get it back. 

As Graff concluded: “That’s one operation over six months. So to me, I don’t see the capability of the U.S. government to keep meaningful secrets about a UFO program over such a long period of time.” 

Fox: That’s a really good point, and I do have a response to that. If you think about it, in the 1940s there actually was an admission that something of non-Earth origin was recovered. It was announced as such, and then it was covered up within 24 hours. 

A lot of the people directly involved later went on the record and said the original press release was true. They said, “I was there. I touched the debris. My son touched the debris.” You can believe them or not. 

In the 1950s, you had the massive flyovers of Washington, DC, over two consecutive weekends. You had orders to scramble jets to intercept these objects, with authorization to fire if they could. Then you had the huge press conference with General John Samford. It was the biggest press conference since the end of World War II, and he said quite a bit. 

After that came the CIA-sponsored Robertson Panel, where the policy of ridicule was adopted. In the 1960s, The New York Times published an article quoting former CIA Director Roscoe Hillenkoetter, saying that publicly they were making fun of it but privately they were taking it very seriously. 

In the 1970s, there was a United Nations event where people who had officially investigated UFOs for the U.S. Air Force participated, along with other witnesses. 

So, there have been leaks for decades. People have come forward and tried to get the truth out. I think what’s different today is that in 2017 a handful of intelligence insiders, in protest of excessive secrecy, walked evidence into The New York Times, which published it on their front page. That changed everything. 

You also had former Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid confirming that he launched an investigation into UFOs. So people at high levels were taking it seriously. 

But I think the policy of ridicule, adopted around 1953, really stuck. It was a very effective campaign by the Air Force and the CIA. If you think about it, when military or commercial pilots report things that don’t make sense, that should be taken seriously. There’s nothing funny about that. 

So that’s my response—it has been leaking. 

And that doesn’t even touch on the reports of close encounters of the third kind. You have close encounters of the first kind, second kind, and third kind. That classification was designed by Dr. J. Allen Hynek, who investigated UFOs for the Air Force from 1947 to 1969. Close encounters of the third kind are when witnesses claim to see occupants associated with the craft, whether on the ground or otherwise. 

Skeptic: Okay, so the three hypotheses on the table are ordinary terrestrial explanations like balloons, birds, aircraft, and so on. Then extraordinary terrestrial explanations, like the Chinese military or our own agencies developing superadvanced technology. And the third option, the “other,” maybe extraordinary extraterrestrial, but what would go into that category? Space aliens? 

Fox: I like “other” because I don’t know. Maybe it’s us coming back from the future. Maybe they’re right here. Who knows? 

Skeptic: None of us knows for sure, but in your work you do come across as fairly confident that this is probably not ordinary terrestrial or even extraordinary terrestrial, so that leaves … aliens. 

Fox: I’d put my life on it at this point. I’m at 99 percent that something extraordinary is whizzing around in our airspace. What it is, I don’t know. But I’m absolutely convinced of that. And I didn’t start out that way. 

Skeptic: So, what do we make of eyewitness accounts? 

Scott Kelly, the astronaut and pilot, was asked at a NASA press conference about pilots reporting UAPs, meaning trained professionals saying they saw something. 

Kelly said, “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.” 

He told a story about flying off the Virginia Beach Military Operating Area. His radar intercept officer in the back of an F-14 Tomcat was convinced they’d flown by a UFO. Kelly didn’t see it, so they turned around to look again. It turned out to be a Bart Simpson balloon. 

He also said that his brother Mark Kelly, when he was commander of STS-124, saw something in the payload bay while preparing to close the doors. They thought it was a tool or a bolt and considered doing a spacewalk to retrieve it. Before doing that, they took a picture. When they enlarged it, they realized it wasn’t a tool at all—it was the International Space Station, 80 miles away. 

Kelly said there are cases where pilots have tried to rendezvous with a buoy because they thought it was their wingman. He concluded that it’s a very challenging environment to work in, especially at night. 

Fox: No question—many cases fall into those categories: misidentified aircraft, misidentified objects. That’s why I generally like to focus on mass sightings. 

For example, I investigated a case in Australia. I went in with the same skepticism I have with most cases, because my initial reaction is often, “It can’t be, therefore it isn’t.” It seems implausible that you could have a mass sighting and the whole world not know about it. 

But I investigated this case. I met with some of the witnesses almost 50 years later. The incident happened in 1966 at a school just outside Melbourne—Westall High School—and the primary school nearby. According to the teachers and students, there were almost 400 people outside in broad daylight. 

There was a disc hovering above the school, doing things it shouldn’t be doing. Teachers were watching it, including the science teacher, Mr. Greenwood. Then it came down and landed. 

At that point, you have to say either everyone is hallucinating, everyone is lying, or something extraordinary happened. There’s no real ambiguity. The kids ran up to it. They got within six or seven feet of it. It was sitting on the ground in broad daylight. They described it as a disc. 

Those are the cases I like to dig into. You have a large number of people with everything to lose and nothing to gain. They’re not selling books. They’re just saying, “This is what I saw.” 

Skeptic: Those cases are compelling because you can’t explain them away as one person having a hallucination or a nightmare. 

I’m at 99 percent that something extraordinary is whizzing around in our airspace. What it is, I don’t know. 

Fox: You don’t have to believe Grusch. You don’t have to believe Eric Davis, or anyone else individually for that matter. But how about this? Why don’t we lock arms, as a community of civilians, and see what we can do to rattle the cages of our elected officials? 

Why not try to create an environment where immunity is provided to these individuals making these outrageous, incredible claims? The implications are global. Maybe there’s a way to create a platform and call their bluff. 

We could say, “Okay, Mr. President, wave the magic wand. Provide immunity. Let’s have an open congressional hearing. Let’s bring this out.” If we could make that happen, it would be extraordinary. And why wouldn’t we at least try? Because if it’s true, then it has to come out. And if it is true, it would be the biggest story of the modern era. I can’t think of a bigger story. 

Skeptic: Agreed. All the SETI scientists—people like Carl Sagan—they’ve all said this would be the greatest discovery in the history of humanity. Not just the history of science. 

When you think about how fast technology advances, it’s staggering. Look at what we’ve done in a century—from the Wright brothers to the moon. From 1903 to 1969, we went from the first powered flight to walking on the moon. Or look at computers and Moore’s Law, where everything keeps doubling. 

If you extrapolate that out a thousand years, or a million years, an advanced civilization could do things we can’t even imagine. Avi Loeb points out that aliens could have visited Earth two million years ago and we’d have no idea because all evidence of their visit would be erased by time. 

But going back to the second hypothesis—extraordinary terrestrial—the reason to be skeptical that it’s Russian or Chinese technology is this: if Russia had something that advanced, we’d see it in Ukraine. And if China had something that far ahead, how would that even be possible? If you look at cell phones, laptops, jets, everything is roughly on par. Nobody is decades ahead. It’s not like we’re flying biplanes and they have stealth bombers. We all spy on each other. Tech companies compete fiercely, but nobody is more than maybe a year ahead of anyone else. 

How would anyone develop something this advanced without the rest of the world knowing? 

Fox: I remember Christopher Mellon saying to me, “Do you have any idea how our government would respond if these incursions over supersecret military installations had a Russian or Chinese flag on the tail?” He said it would be a full emergency response. 

Skeptic: So if it’s real—if it’s not an illusion or misperception—it can’t be extraordinary terrestrial. It would have to be extraterrestrial. You’d need thousands of years of technological development here on Earth to do what’s being reported. 

Fox: I interviewed a World War II pilot who also had a role with Project Blue Book. He had a sighting in 1955. His name was Colonel William Coleman. He later worked at the Pentagon and was a public spokesman for Project Blue Book before it was terminated. 

He was flying a B-25 bomber in 1955, in broad daylight, over Alabama. I think he was either heading to Florida or coming back—I don’t remember that detail. He had a couple of engineers with him, I believe from Lockheed and Boeing. 

They saw an object off in the distance and were observing it through the canopy. Then it crossed right in front of them. According to Coleman, they were completely gobsmacked. It was a disc-shaped object with no wings. 

He said, “I decided to chase it.” So he pushed his B-25 to maximum continuous power. He said, “If I went any faster, the engines would blow up.” 

Either everyone is hallucinating, everyone is lying, or something extraordinary happened. 

They started out around 9,000 feet and ended up at treetop level. He told me, “James, we were looking out of the cockpit, and this thing was right there. We thought we were going to collide with it.” 

Weird Science-Fantasy #26. This special issue was written as a challenge to the U.S. Air Force regarding alleged cover-ups of documented UFO sightings. (Credit: © 1954 EC Comics, CC BY-SA 4.0) The comic panels that follow appeared in this issue.

He said he was so low that if he turned right to avoid it, the wings would have hit the treetops. So he had to pull up first, gain a little altitude, then bank to the right. He lost sight of it briefly. When they leveled off, he looked out the window and saw this disc-shaped object moving across a recently plowed field. 

He said it was stirring up dust in spirals on either side of it. Then, when it decided to take off, he said it was gone in the blink of an eye. 

What’s interesting is that if his account is true—and I don’t know why he would make it up, given that he was a colonel in the U.S. Air Force and a former World War II pilot—you hear the same description of the technology over and over again. It parallels what someone like David Fravor describes: no wings, no tail, maneuvering in ways that shouldn’t be possible, disappearing instantly. 

You hear these accounts again and again. It really makes you wonder what on Earth these people are seeing. 

Skeptic: Now, back to Roswell. What’s wrong with the explanation that it was Project Mogul: high-altitude balloons with acoustic sensors designed to detect Soviet nuclear tests? That became the official explanation later. 

This comic relates to a July 19, 1952, series of multiple sightings of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) over Washington, DC. Excerpted from Weird Science-Fantasy #26 (© 1954 EC Comics, CC BY-SA 4.0) via U.S. National Archives.

Fox: If you look at Project Mogul in 1947, it was essentially a series of conventional weather balloons tied together with a sensor box. Intelligence officer Major Jesse Marcel said, “I dealt with weather balloons every damn day. I know what a weather balloon looks like.” 

Later, in the 1950s, Project Mogul became more advanced and looked more exotic. You could maybe argue that explanation then. But not in 1947. Back then, it was just multiple weather balloons strung together. 

We really dug into that distinction when we made The Phenomenon. We had two of the three key people involved: General Roger Ramey, Colonel Thomas DuBose, and Jesse Marcel. 

Jesse Marcel said it was not from Earth. DuBose said the weather balloon explanation was a cover story for what they actually picked up in the desert. He said it was so highly classified that it was beyond anything else. 

There’s no single witness with a photograph that makes you say, “Okay, this is definitely alien.” But when you put all the different pieces of the puzzle together, in my opinion, it was something truly extraordinary. 

Skeptic: That’s the problem. It’s almost impossible to disprove. No matter how many people you talk to—Marco Rubio says he looked into it and found nothing—you can always say, “Well, he wasn’t in the loop.” 

So what would it actually take to get a final answer? Short of Marco Rubio standing in a hangar with a spaceship, with a CBS News film crew, saying, “Here it is.” 

Fox: Okay. Let’s say I have a pretty good idea that photographic evidence exists—not just from doctors, but from military, firemen, police, and crash-recovery personnel. I interviewed the Chief of Police. He told me there was definitely photographic evidence. At one point, he himself had a photograph. 

Now let’s say I got my hands on one of those. Maybe a short video shot in 1996. I have it analyzed, and specialists say it checks out. I put it in the film, along with all this testimony. 

Would that make a difference? Or would people just dismiss it anyway? 

Skeptic: Would that make a difference? Yes. But because this is such an extraordinary claim, the evidence has to be commensurate with that. 

I don’t need to see it with my own eyes. I never saw the Chinese spy balloon myself, but I believe it was real because it was covered everywhere: the Pentagon, the Secretary of Defense, the President. We all saw the footage, the debris, the confirmation. 

Something like that. That’s why Avi Loeb and I have our thousand-dollar bet. We agreed that two out of three major scientific institutions—NASA, the National Academy of Sciences, or the American Association for the Advancement of Science—would have to say, “Yes, we have confirmed extraterrestrial intelligence.” 

This interview, by Michael Shermer, has been condensed and edited for style and clarity.

James Fox is a film director widely regarded as one of the leading voices in UFO filmmaking. He is known for documentaries such as The Phenomenon, The Program, and Moment of Contact, several of which are frequently cited among the best UFO documentaries ever made.

Understanding, at a deep level, the differences between legitimate science and pseudoscience is increasingly critical in our modern world. Science, in my opinion, is perhaps the most powerful tool humans have collectively developed for understanding the universe in which we find ourselves. (I would clarify that it is complementary with philosophy which is important to ensure that we are thinking clearly, rigorously, and consistently.) Pseudoscience pretends to be scientific but is essentially doing it wrong. There are many underlying reasons for the existence of pseudoscience – it is sometimes just poor quality science due to poor training or sloppy technique, it may result from a motivation to achieve a desired result rather than letting the empirical chips fall where they may, researchers may not appreciate their own biases, or it may be part of a dedicated campaign motivated by profit, politics, ideology, religion, culture, or just wishful thinking.

I spend a lot of time studying and writing about certain classic pseudosciences because I think they are especially instructive, and acupuncture is definitely on the short list.  I just wrote about it last week, specifically about a gullible article in the NYT which has bought into the pro-acupuncture propaganda. That piece resulted in lots of feedback, some of which doubled-down or extended the pseudoscientific arguments often made for acupuncture, so I wanted to reply to some of those and further clarify my position.

One common feature of pseudoscience is the use of vague or fluctuating definitions. Science requires unambiguous definitions, which is why it so often relies on technical jargon which evolves to be incredibly precise. This is one of the things I love about science, and why I think everyone should study it to some degree, at least enough to become functionally scientifically literate. Science forces you to think clearly, precisely, and consistently. If we take a seemingly simple question, for example, such as “does acupuncture work”, we first have to operationally define “acupuncture” and also “work”. You also have to include – work for what? I am usually careful to do so when addressing this question.

“Acupuncture”, as defined by just about every source I have ever consulted, is defined as a technique that involves sticking needles into acupuncture points. That seems to be a universal and necessary component to “acupuncture”. The points themselves often differ. There are different traditions, different locations, and different functions of the alleged points. There are other traditional elements to acupuncture, such as the existence of a distinct life force (Qi) that flows through specific channels in the body known as meridians. There is also sometimes described a “de-Qi” sensation, which is itself vaguely defines, but is claimed to indicate when a needle has been placed in the correct location to an adequate depth. Acupuncture may also include moxibustion, which is the burning of herbs on the needles, or “electroacpuncture” which involves electrically stimulating the needles after insertion.

Each of these alleged phenomena must be tested by themselves, controlling for all variables as much as possible. It is possible (speaking hypothetically), for example, that some acupuncture points exist but others do not, or that the points exist but de-Qi is not necessary. Each variable must be isolated as much as possible – the points, needle insertion, electrical stimulation, the patient interaction, etc.

Further, when medical scientists ask whether or not a treatment “works” they are usually talking about “efficacy” (and this is the technical term they will use in the literature and to other experts). Efficacy means that there is a specific beneficial effect established beyond any non-specific or placebo effects. Efficacy can generally only be well-established with double-blind placebo controlled trials. But to be fair, there is a lot of nuance here. Many interventions cannot be ethically blinded (like whether or not someone undergoes surgery), and so efficacy must be inferred from multiple different study types controlling for as many confounding variables as possible. It also helps to use objective outcome measures (such as survival). But it is virtually impossible to make efficacy claims based only on subjective outcomes of unblinded interventions. However – acupuncture can be blinded, so much of this nuance is not relevant here.

So – we can technically restate the question “does acupuncture work” as “do acupuncture points have specific efficacy?” Again, this question must be asked for each potential indication. This question has been investigated with hundreds of trials for dozens of indications, many of which are reasonably rigorous with sham acupuncture or placebo acupuncture controls and reasonable double-blinding. The totality of these studies strongly show that there is no efficacy to any acupuncture points for any indication. We can add this clinical data to what we know about scientific plausibility. It has never been established that acupuncture points exist. There is no physiological or anatomical underlying basis for their existence. There is no reason to hypothesize that they exist outside of cultural beliefs. There is no internal consistency to their number, location, or effects – which follow patterns of cultural tradition, institutional and personal preference. As a scientific concept, acupuncture points are a dead end that have been sufficiently ruled out and should be completely abandoned. We can say the same thing about Qi as a distinct life energy or force, and of meridians as channels through which Qi (or whatever) flows.

It therefore does not matter how desperately one retcons or redefines “acupuncture”. Some respondents tried to say that “Qi” really just refers to known energies, like heat and electricity. That is classic pseudoscience, and historically clear retconning, but it also doesn’t matter. They are stuck in an unscientific approach to the question “does acupuncture work”, which they think they can rescue by redefining acupuncture. Regardless of any definition for the broader concept, science does not work that way. We need to operationally define and isolate specific elements, and we can say that there is no Qi, meridians, or acupuncture points. It is also common to try to redefine “works” as including placebo effects (and then falsely touting how amazingly powerful placebo effects are). Again – this is slight-of-hand, and doesn’t matter to the real question – does sticking needles in acupuncture points have specific efficacy. The answer is clearly no, whatever your thoughts about the practical use of placebo effects in medicine (that’s a separate article).

We can also ask – does sticking needles in the skin have specific efficacy. The answer here also appears to be no – at least in properly controlled trials poking the skin without penetration was as effective as penetrating the skin to a depth typical in acupuncture treatments. In fact there is now a treatment referred to as “dry needling” which is an attempt to divorce the sticking of needles in the skin from any concept of Qi, acupuncture points, or meridians. Is there established efficacy for dry needling for any indication? No. Meta-analyses and systematic reviews show mixed but mostly negative results. It may not be possible yet to rule out a short term mild effect for pain, but that’s it (and even there, some reviews find it is worse than placebo).

But acupuncturists (including some responding to me) insist that dry needling is contained under the umbrella of “acupuncture” (while dry needlers insist it is not acupuncture). This is all a semantic game – and it doesn’t really matter from a scientific perspective. As I discussed – it doesn’t matter how you play with these definitions. Scientifically you have to state a specific, ideally operational, definition and a specific question. When we do this – none of the possible components of acupuncture seem to exist or have specific efficacy.

The post Retconning Acupuncture first appeared on NeuroLogica Blog.

Once rules are introduced, they are difficult to change—especially when they’re of the bureaucratic variety.

What got me thinking about this was a recent trip where security forced me to throw away an assortment of fancy hair products. They did not conform to the rules, I was told. I spent the rest of my vacation enduring perpetually bad hair days. Thanks, TSA. You’re the reason I’m still single.

What made things worse: if you were to combine all my liquids into a single container, they would have fit within the limit. But the individual containers were too large to all squeeze into the delicate plastic bag presented to me. Illegal, apparently. The monotone security agent surveyed my belongings and even labelled some solids as liquids. I was in no position to argue. But my inside voice screamed: This is dumb. Like I’m going to kill someone with my extra 5 mL of eye cream, mixed with 10 mL of hair gel and 20 mL of deodorant.

The truth is, on this particular trip, I was unlucky. It’s not the first time I’ve crammed a bunch of tiny containers into my carry-on. It’s a bit like Russian roulette: will they let the items through, or won’t they? Travel sure is fun these days.

Historically, airport security rules have been reactionary—instituted in response to specific terrorist threats or plots, and once implemented, nearly impossible to walk back. But not always. After nearly two and a half decades, the TSA ended the “shoes off” rule in July 2025, and Canada said it would follow suit. Though, enforcement remains somewhat airport and even security lane dependent.

The shoes off policy was directly linked to Richard Reid, an al-Qaeda operative, who in 2001 boarded an American Airlines flight from Paris to Miami with plastic explosives hidden in his shoes. He attempted to ignite them mid-flight before passengers and crew overpowered and restrained him. So not only did Reid try to murder people, his legacy is years of stinky security lines.

The liquid restriction traces back to a 2006 transatlantic aircraft plot, in which terrorists planned to smuggle liquid chemicals onboard disguised as drinks or toiletries and mix them in-flight. The plot was foiled before it even got off the ground: MI5 and police had spent months gathering intelligence and monitoring suspects. The attack was stopped through investigation—not airport checkpoints. And yet, almost overnight, a global 100 mL / 3-1-1 rule was put in place.

Could the attack have succeeded? Yes. And that’s the argument for keeping the rule. Surely the inconvenience of restricting toiletries and buying overpriced airport water is worth it if it saves lives, right? It’s a reasonable position.

Except that technology has largely made it unnecessary. Some Irish airports installed advanced 3D CT scanners capable of analysing the chemical composition of liquids, briefly allowing passengers to carry larger quantities onboard. Standardization and certification issues led the EU to temporarily reinstate the 100 mL limit in 2024, but Dublin fully lifted the restriction again in September 2025.

Some UK airports briefly tested relaxed liquid rules before the government paused the rollout in 2024, but as of January 2026, Heathrow Airport is allowing passengers to bring up to 2 L of liquids in their carry-on and not have to take out their electronics.

The direction of travel (so to speak) points toward eventually relaxing these rules globally—but the journey has been slow, contingent on the widespread installation of standardised 3D CT scanners, and complicated by cost (the tech upgrade at Heathrow cost around $1.35B).

Perhaps most instructive is Israel … the focus is on the person, not the contents of their bag. Security officers ask probing questions to profile each traveller and assess behaviour.

Australia permits liquids above 100 mL on domestic flights, which are considered lower-risk; the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation focuses on early plot detection, while airports use randomised screenings, explosive residue swabs, advanced scanners, and behaviour-trained staff.

Perhaps most instructive is Israel. Given the constant threat of terrorism, security at Ben Gurion Airport is extraordinarily rigorous—and yet the 100 mL rule isn’t applied particularly strictly. The focus is on the person, not the contents of their bag. Security officers ask probing questions to profile each traveller and assess behaviour. Low-risk passengers are processed faster with fewer restrictions; higher-risk passengers face far more thorough inspection. There are also multiple security layers, including checkpoints before you reach the airport and an embedded security presence within the terminal itself.

Profiling—which is done in all airports to different degrees—isn’t always so considerate of deontological ethics, weighing utilitarian security above that of individual rights or fairness. As those who tend to frequently be picked for additional searches and checks know, they are rarely as random as is claimed—and not always particularly comfortable (ask me how I know!). People are generally profiled on two things: behavior (like signs of stress, fear, agitation, deception) and demographics (real or perceived). The latter cannot be helped. It is, of course, not fair for the individual traveller to be profiled based on their race, religion, appearance, or age—and in practice people get wrongly sorted into these categories all the time as well. At the heart of the debate is the collective benefit versus the violation of certain rights for groups or individuals.

There are also, of course, debates on the effectiveness of profiling and whether it provides a false sense of security when we should be instead investing in better security systems that don’t rely on neither discrimination nor human intuition, as security expert Bruce Schneier argued in his widely publicized debate with Sam Harris. Harris argued that profiling is reasonable given the strong likelihood that threats of terrorism come predominantly from Muslims and urged Schneier not to underestimate the “talent that neurologically intact observers (not to mentioned trained screeners, like those who work for El Al) have for spotting high-risk individuals.”

The problem is that once a safety rule exists, removing it becomes its own political liability. Imagine a politician signing off on lifting the liquid restriction—and then someone detonates a plane using liquid explosives.

Ultimately all security requires us to complete a cost-trade analysis. What’s the cost? What’s the level on the infringement on universal and individual rights? Potential for abuse? Discrimination?

I, for one, have no interest in undergoing a strip search every time I fly. But I’m willing to undergo a scan at the airport, even if it doesn’t make me particularly enthused. Such are trade-offs.

What’s striking is that most of these measures were introduced as temporary responses to threats the public could understand as credible. The problem is that once a safety rule exists, removing it becomes its own political liability. Imagine a politician signing off on lifting the liquid restriction—and then someone detonates a plane using liquid explosives. Their political career would be over.

“The reason why once a rule is introduced, it stays is because there is a slanted accountability system in airport security,” says Justin Crabbe, commercial pilot, travel expert, and CEO and founder of private jet booking platform Jettly. “Regulators face grave repercussions if restrictions are removed. But they are not punished for retaining inconvenient rules. Security agencies know they would be blamed if an attack occurred after a rule was dropped.” Bureaucratic inertia compounds this, he argues: “Coordination between the TSA and ICAO takes years. Any change in protocol must be thoroughly tested and backed by solid evidence.”

Security theatre also plays a role: the visible performance of safety makes people feel protected, giving politicians a further incentive to retain policies even when their practical value is limited. And frustration, Crabbe notes, won’t actually drive change—because it won’t keep people from flying. “The industry would rather avoid regulatory battles than focus on customer convenience,” he says.

So for now, we put up with the inconveniences.

A Review of This is Not Real Life by Lauren Southern

Before the social media platforms Twitter and Facebook took the extraordinary step of banning a sitting U.S. president, before recommendation engines decided who deserved an audience, before the internet hardened into a set of gated timelines where each tribe watches its own curated reality, there was a brief, chaotic era of online media that felt radically open.

A loose coalition of independent journalists, pundits, comedians, and provocateurs built a parallel public sphere alongside (and often against) the mainstream media. The barrier to entry was low: a camera, an opinion, and the stamina to upload relentlessly. In return came virality, fame, and a kind of influence that traditional institutions did not yet know what to make of—let alone counter. In that ecosystem, “top charts” on platforms like YouTube were closer to what they claimed to be—rankings based largely on raw views rather than finely tuned behavioral targeting that operates today. A creator could rise to popularity because millions of people actively showed interest in their work and clicked, not because an algorithm decided the content fit a retention profile or a desirable political angle.

One of the most visible figures to emerge from that era was Lauren Southern, a young Canadian YouTuber who rose to prominence in her early twenties. In the mid-2010s, Southern often reached audiences in the millions, regularly rivaling and eclipsing the viewership of “legacy” giants like CNN or the Canadian CBC. She did it through a blend of commentary videos, on-the-ground segments, and documentaries—“content” designed to feel more immediate than studio news and more transgressive than polite opinion columns.

An Alt-Press Corps

Lauren Southern’s peers were the era’s rotating entourage of culture-war entrepreneurs and dissidents: some left wing or liberal, like Destiny (Steven Bonnell) and Tim Pool, but most a new-kind of conservative, among them Mike Cernovich, Stefan Molyneux of Freedomain Radio, Tommy Robinson, Paul Joseph Watson, and many others. Collectively, they made the internet feel like a new kind of political machine. They produced street interviews and documentary films, wrote bestselling books (mostly self-published on Amazon), staged public debates, and toured college campuses like a counter-establishment roadshow. They cast themselves as outsiders “speaking truth to power,” and millions of viewers agreed—especially because mainstream institutions kept stepping on the same rake: a mix of selective coverage, performative moralizing, and a growing disconnect from how people experienced the world offline.

This was also the moment when online politics began to feel less like discourse and more like spectacle. The incentives were already there, with outrage and dunking performing better than nuance. But the rules had not fully tightened yet. And in that liminal period—between the old broadcast order and the algorithmic empires of the 2020s—figures like Southern could function as a new mix of celebrity, activist, journalist, personal brand, and political instrument.

Southern’s biggest hits followed a now-familiar template: pick a story the mainstream media either undercovered or framed in a way her audience distrusted, then package it as a mix of first-person journalism and activist theater. In her viral video The Great Replacement (2017), she covered demographic and cultural shifts driven by mass immigration, emphasizing differential birth rates, unsuccessful assimilation, and what she framed as elite ideology and policy choices disconnected from the wishes of the electorate. 

The Internet “freezes” people … locking them into versions of themselves that no longer exist.

In a documentary film Farmlands (2018), which garnered significant attention after then-President Donald Trump posted it on Twitter, Southern traveled through South Africa to build a portrait of a country in crisis. The film threads together interviews with volunteers who document farm-attack crime scenes (“Blood Sisters”), segments with preparedness-minded Afrikaner groups warning of civil conflict, and visits to places like Orania as an example of separatist self-governance, while also touching on post-Apartheid racial land reform and the ANC’s “Kill the Boer” anti-White minority rhetoric.

And in another one of her films, Borderless (2019), Southern moved beyond a single country case study to a route-based travelogue of Europe’s migration system. Filming across multiple locations, she built the story through interviews with migrants (often young men), smugglers, locals, and NGO workers. Throughout, she focused on the widening gap between the notion of “Europe as a promised land” and the brutal reality of camps and informal settlements—alongside recurring allegations about criminality and extremist infiltration among the migrants traveling to Europe from the Middle East and Africa.

Not all of Southern’s breakout content was packaged as “field reporting” or documentary. A substantial share of her reach came from shorter, more playful—and strategically lightweight—culture war videos that borrowed the tone of early YouTube commentary pioneered by atheist YouTubers like The Amazing Atheist and Jaclyn Glenn: jump cuts, jokes, deliberately cheeky provocation, and a posture of “I’m just saying what everyone’s thinking.” Her viral Why I’m Not a Feminist video, for example, worked less as formal argument than as identity signaling and onboarding for her fan base. She framed feminism as humorless, status driven, and hostile to ordinary women; “common sense” gender politics as rebellious; and positioned herself as the fun, sane dissenter against an earnest, scolding establishment.

Those less serious pieces functioned as a sort-of gateway genre. They lowered the stakes, widened the tent, and translated abstract ideological disputes into personality-driven entertainment built on parasocial attachment to a charismatic influencer. In the precensorship internet, this was exactly the kind of content that could travel beyond explicitly political circles, letting her funnel viewers toward more overtly political work.

That mattered because Southern was also selling a new kind of right-wing politics, at a moment when the term “alt-right” was still contested and fluid in online usage. Southern—alongside creators like Paul Joseph Watson and Mike Cernovich—often tried to frame it as a countercultural, punk-adjacent style of politics: irreverent, secular, and “common sense,” rather than religiously conservative or explicitly ethnonationalist. That definitional fight didn’t last. The label quickly became associated, in public discourse, with something far more specific—and far more radioactive. And then the environment changed altogether.

The purges and policy shifts arrived in waves, sometimes justified, sometimes sloppy, and often propelled by a genuine fear that the internet had become an ungovernable amplifier for extremism. Social media platforms, under pressure from governments, advertisers, and activist campaigns, began to police content more aggressively and deplatform more readily.

Southern, like many of her peers, disappeared—at least in the way that matters online. That is why her return, through a memoir rather than a rebrand as an influencer, feels unusually revealing. This Is Not Real Life (self-published, 2025) is a firsthand account of the foundations (or early saplings) of this decade’s political psychosis: a period when online identity, partisan performance, and media incentives fused into something that looks, in retrospect, like the dress rehearsal for our current zeitgeist. Southern’s story is not only about her personal arc; it is also about the characters, factions, and forces that shaped that era. The book reads like a guided tour through a lost internet, one that helped build the world of today, even as it vanished from view.

It also offers something rarer than punditry: a case study of what the internet does to the people who rise to popularity within it.

Audience Capture

At its core, This Is Not Real Life is about identity—how it is formed, negotiated, and, in Southern’s case, outsourced. She traces how the persona she crafted online spun out of her control, taking on a life of its own in the minds of her audience. Over time, she describes becoming a “false performative identity”: a self that exists primarily to satisfy external expectations, calibrated to audience appetite and platform incentives. This is also where Southern’s memoir becomes more than gossip or political archaeology and becomes a portrait of how online media influences its influencers.

This is not unique to one creator or one ideological lane, as Southern writes, but more of a structural feature of online fame. Influencers are not simply people with opinions—they are feedback machines. They quickly learn what draws approval and what triggers punishment. They start to anticipate the crowd’s desires before the crowd expresses them. Their content becomes a kind of real-time referendum on their worth.

One of the book’s most interesting threads is Southern’s retrospective account of how the views she helped amplify—many of which she says she no longer holds, including immigration-critical sentiment—often did not originate as reasoned disagreements about policy, nor simply as heroic “speaking truth to power.” In her telling, they crystallized through the following dynamic: a young creator with missionary energy builds a massive audience in near-total isolation, without the editorial friction of peers or institutions; she then learns what “lands” not from a discussion or debate, but from the most fervent slice of her audience—the perpetually online commenters and quote-tweeters. Over time, that feedback selects for certainty and narrows the range of permissible nuance. The content becomes increasingly one-sided not necessarily because the creator set out to radicalize anyone, but because the attention economy (even in its infancy at the time Southern was professionally active) rewards the strongest signal and punishes hesitation.

Southern describes that feedback loop with unusual clarity. Likes, shares, and comments did not merely reward her; they shaped her. The constant attention created an almost irresistible pull toward escalation: more provocative, more polarizing, more engaging. Not necessarily because the creator becomes more knowledgeable or convinced, but because the system teaches the creator what “works.” And once a creator’s livelihood, status, and identity are bound up with that loop, “what works” becomes hard to distinguish from “what is true.” On a personal level, as Southern reflects, if you have been defined through the audience’s mirror long enough, the absence of that mirror can feel like erasure.

This brings to mind René Girard’s mimetic theory, which holds that desires do not arise spontaneously; they are borrowed, copied, and transmitted socially. What Girard described as mimetic contagion—our tendency to want what others want—maps unnervingly well onto online dynamics, where desire is quantified and broadcast. A trending topic is not merely information but a signal about what others crave. The comment section is not merely reaction, it is a template for what one is supposed to feel.

In one of the few interviews promoting her book, Southern said she was familiar with Girard and agreed that his ideas fit her experience. This is quite significant because it reframes the common story of internet radicalization, which is that creators manipulate audiences. The Girardian version is both more nuanced and more plausible: audiences and creators manipulate one another, locked in a mutual imitation of desire until both lose the thread of what they originally cared about. 

If the internet could do this to someone who “understood the game,” what is it doing to the rest of us who live inside the same machinery?

In contemporary terms, this resembles a mix of social proof (the tendency for people to look to others’ behavior to guide their own), intermittent reinforcement (unpredictable rewards create stronger behavioral persistence than consistent rewards), and group polarization (group discussion or interaction shifts opinions toward more extreme versions of the initial shared leanings)—mechanisms that produce escalation even without anyone consciously intending it.

In that light, the escalating cycle of political content begins to look less like a deliberate march toward extremity than like an arms race shaped by attention. Outrage becomes contagious because it is socially rewarded. Certainty spreads because it is easier to rally around. Humiliation becomes entertainment because it cleanly assigns winners and losers. “Truth” becomes whatever keeps the crowd together.

What makes this feel particularly tragic is that we already built systems such as editorial review, fact-checking, proportionality, and the routine exposure to dissenting perspectives, which are meant to interrupt exactly this process. Yet legacy journalism institutions failed twice in that era. First, by leaving obvious, emotionally charged topics undercovered or condescended to, and second, by responding late with a mixture of gatekeeping and moral panic rather than the kind of rigorous, evenhanded reporting that might have met the societal demand.

The book’s reception proves a point.

Both The New York Times and Rolling Stone chose to report only on the book’s most disturbing allegation: that in 2018 Southern was drugged and sexually assaulted by Andrew Tate, years before he became a manosphere celebrity. Whatever one makes of that claim, the way it has dominated coverage is itself revealing.

It illustrates a brutal rule of media, described in detail by Southern in her memoirs: complex stories are often reduced to a single high-gravity event. A memoir about identity, audience capture, self-radicalization, and the psychological costs of online fame becomes “the Tate allegation book” in the public imagination because that is the simplest headline and the most clickable hook. Even when a claim is serious and newsworthy, it can function like a trapdoor: everything else falls through it.

In that sense, the coverage becomes a meta-example of the phenomenon Southern is describing. Nuance is not merely unpopular but inconvenient.

You can’t escape it, so what do you make of it?

Southern’s rise belongs to a particular political and technological moment when social media still felt like a frontier. Creators like Southern and her peers often insisted they were correcting blind spots in mainstream coverage—immigration, crime, cultural conflict, and institutional hypocrisy. Sometimes they were. Sometimes they weren’t. But the more important point is that they convinced huge audiences that they were the only ones willing to say what everyone else was afraid to say. That posture—truth-teller against a corrupt establishment—became the core myth of the era, and it proved potent enough to mobilize electorates and reorder institutions, even if its direct persuasive effects are harder to measure.

In hindsight, it is tempting to treat this as an anomaly. Southern’s memoir suggests something else. That era did not end—it metabolized. Its tactics were absorbed into mainstream politics, marketing, and media. Its techniques—weaponized irony, clip-based outrage, identity branding, and audience capture—are now standard and universally adopted across the board. What changed is not that the internet became less political (quite the contrary) but that it became more managed. The memoir is compelling because it captures what it felt like before that consolidation, when people still believed the internet might replace the old gatekeepers rather than become gatekept itself.

It is thus, in a strange way, an elegy for a vanished internet. Not because that internet was healthier (it often wasn’t) but because it was less automated and therefore more visibly human. You could see the conflicts, the incentives, and the improvisation. With today’s algorithmic feeds, you often cannot even tell why you are seeing what you are seeing. The machinery has become controlled by systems that no one can fully audit or understand. Whatever one thinks of Southern’s politics, there is clear value in a firsthand account of how the early architecture of online influence helped produce the polarization and unreality that now saturate public life.

Southern’s narrative is also, unmistakably, a story about exit—her attempt to escape the chaos of online fame and reclaim a sense of self, grounded in reality and faith. That element will land differently depending on the reader. For some, the turn toward faith will read as an evasion. For others, it will read as the only coherent response to a world that offers only chaos, echoing recent public conversions by figures such as Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Charles Murray.

But either way, the attempt “to exit” is central to the book’s thesis. Because the internet is not simply a platform; it is a metaphysical environment. Leaving that behind is not like quitting a job. It is more akin to leaving a country.

Southern describes the cost of living as part flesh-and-blood human, part digital persona long enough that the digital persona starts to feel more real than the human. That inversion, where the performed self becomes the “true” self simply because it’s the one everyone recognizes, may be the book’s most distinctive theme. The internet “freezes” people, she argues, locking them into versions of themselves that no longer exist.

For most people, the name “Lauren Southern” denotes one of those frozen identities: a digital fossil that cannot apologize or mature in the ordinary ways humans do. The audience doesn’t want a person. It wants a symbol. And symbols are not allowed to change. So fans still perceive Southern—now a mother in her 30s—as the same person she was way back then.

Most people will never become famous, but millions of people experience a smaller version of the same distortion: curating an online identity, monitoring feedback, adjusting beliefs and aesthetics to match the expectations of peers or employers. In that broader sense, Southern’s story is not only about the politics of the 2010s. It is about what happens when human identity becomes primarily legible through a digital world.

If you come to Southern’s memoir looking for a neat political conversion story—villain to redeemed heroine, or extremist to repentant moderate—you may leave unsatisfied. The book is a portrait of how an era produced certain kinds of people, and how many of those people struggled with what the era demanded, making it much more interesting.

A decade from now, many more public figures will publish memoirs like this—attempts to explain how they became characters in a story the internet wrote for them. Southern’s book arrives early enough to still feel like a dispatch from the source. It captures a digital world that shaped the real world (down to her testimony in the Canadian House of Commons) and then disappeared, leaving behind only artifacts, screenshots, and “frozen identities.”

The book also leaves the reader with an uncomfortable question: if the internet could do this to someone who “understood the game,” what is it doing to the rest of us—those who never chose fame, but live inside the same machinery all the same?

From 17th century France to Nova Scotia and all the way to the bayous of Louisiana, one particular cryptid has had a far longer run than most. The rougarou is said to be the werewolf of the swamps, stepping out of Cajun folklore and into your nightmares. Where can we find the rougarou, and what role will it fill for centuries to come?

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