Critical Thinking Feed

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.

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.

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!

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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.

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

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

Introduction

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

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

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

Belief Without Evidence 

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

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

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

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

Who Reports UFOs and What This Tells Us

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

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

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

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

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

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

How Non-Scientific Inquiry Impedes Productive Investigation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This is the argument I think Tyson should have made.

Non-Falsifiability in UFO Culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

What the Book Does Well

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

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

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

The Future of Aliens

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

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

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

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

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

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

Bruno Richard Hauptmann The Crime 

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Conspiracies 

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

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

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

The Evidence 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Conspiracies 

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

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

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

The Evidence 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

♦ ♦ ♦

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Political Normalization on the Right: The Return of Conspiratorial Antisemitism 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Convergence: How Opposite Narratives Produce the Same Result 

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

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

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

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

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

Internal Validation and External Weaponization 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Institutional Courage and Consistency 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some say artificial food dyes are killing us. The truth is a lot more nuanced.

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Here we go again.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here is the full caption:

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

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

Figure 1

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

Figure 2

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

Figure 3AFigure 3B

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

Figure 4

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

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

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

Figure 5AFigure 5B

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

Figure 6A

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

Figure 6B

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

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

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

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

Figure 7AFigure 7BFigure 7C

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

0:00 /0:13 1×

Figure 8

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

Figure 9AFigure 9B

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s left? Not much.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Suffering of Being the Exception

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

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

These questions are not abstract or hypothetical to me.

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

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

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

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

Nonbelievers often conceal their views to avoid social ostracism.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imposed Identity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Origin of the Universe and Intelligent Design

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Near-Death Experiences

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

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

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

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

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

C.S. Lewis and the Moral Sentiments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Historicity of the Gospels

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

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

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

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

The Shroud of Turin

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

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

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

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

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

Whither Murray

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

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

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

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

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

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