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When my older adult son was going through a particularly rough patch, what concerned me most was his lack of curiosity. He was inquisitive as a child, but as he entered his teens, those qualities declined. After graduating from high school, he decided to drop out of college after his first year and struggled for a few years. As he was figuring out what he’d do for a living, we’d often have debates on all kinds of topics. But he rarely showed genuine interest or intellectual curiosity beyond getting his opinions verbalized and expressed. Over time, his situation improved, and I found our conversations more balanced, less intense and less confrontational. He still doesn’t ask a lot of questions, but he shows more curiosity than he did during the years when he struggled. It’s progress.

This always stuck with me for some reason.

Outside my family life as a father to two GenZ sons, a husband to my wife, and a dual dog owner, I probably spend too much time immersed in the tech world, both at work and off the corporate clock. I spend time reading and writing about humanity’s relationship with technology and, of course, how AI is changing the game before our very eyes. I find myself having philosophical conversations with all kinds of colleagues, friends, and even the president of the practice I work in, and oftentimes, when talking about the impact of AI on our work, society, and world—I sometimes feel pressured to “pick a side”; i.e., view AI primarily through the lens of flowery optimism or dreary pessimism.

This instantly makes me feel uncomfortable. While so much of what’s presented in the media about AI often does feel like one extreme or the other, the polarization of thought just feels too simplistic and inadequate. I remember telling our president, who is also a friend, at a time when there were several big AI stories all of our peers were talking about, that I remained curiously skeptical...

I am generally an advocate for AI. I recently launched my first Claude Code project, and the technology feels like magic to me in so many ways. I’m also skeptical about the long-term tradeoffs that come with it. I become skeptical when I see utopian OR dystopian visions of the future. In my nearly fifty-five years of life, if I have learned one thing, it is that life rarely fits into the clean and tidy partitions and frameworks we want to assign to it. It’s far messier, human, imperfect, and unpredictable.

Intellectual sparring with the sword and shield of curious skepticism

Being curiously skeptical sounds like an Oxymoron—as if the two are incompatible with one another, like Jumbo Shrimp, bittersweet, or deafening silence, but they actually go really well together, and we’d be well-served to combine them when we dare discuss and debate issues of consequence. Permission to use a flawed metaphor, but for some reason, I was compelled to talk about this using the example of a sword and shield, which, taken at face value, makes this feel like we’re going into battle.

Well, no and yes.

Think of the Sword of Curiosity from a sparring perspective, where the goal is to improve yourself and test your opponent in friendly “competition”. A sword can be used to push, probe, and understand how your opponent functions. How will they “attack and defend” themselves? Where are they most formidable? Where are they most vulnerable? Again, I want to reinforce the context: sparring vs. a life-or-death battle.

In the context of intellectual sparring, the Sword of Curiosity is a diagnostic tool instead of a weapon meant to cause damage. Rather than dealing a finishing blow, you use it to map an opponent’s logic through:

- Probing: Tapping their guard to test structural integrity—seeing if their stance is built on solid evidence or assumptions.

- Binding: Maintaining contact with their strongest points (steel-manning) to “feel” the weight and intent of their convictions.

- Feinting: Using hypotheticals to observe cognitive agility—discovering if they double down under pressure or pivot with grace.

This is the “gym,” not yet the “coliseum,” the goal is a mutual refinement of skills where the “salute” ensures the relationship survives the exchange.

Now let’s take a look at the Shield of Skepticism, where, again, in my highly imperfect metaphor, I am framing it within a certain context. Here, our shields represent “cognitive reasoning”. Think of our shields of skepticism as filters, with a default setting that keeps our minds’ “lids” at the halfway point between open and shut. Sometimes our shield of skepticism is used just enough to ensure we don’t take things at face value, and other times, we are fully protecting ourselves from nonsense we feel like we have enough facts, evidence, and, yes, intuition to counter, which requires us to protect our own intellectual resilience. A shield of skepticism is useful for:

- Tactical Parrying: Deflecting bad-faith arguments or logical fallacies once intuition or evidence confirms they are non-viable.

- Neutral Quarantine: Using the shield to “catch” and hold foreign concepts for inspection without immediately integrating them into your core beliefs.

- Resilience Preservation: Fully closing the lid when necessary to guard against cognitive overload or bad-faith exhaustion.

A call to arms

Here’s where I am going to shift from the training gym to the coliseum. There is an opponent, but it’s not who you think. Depending on the content of Hot Takes, you might think it’s Adam on some days, or someone like him. You may think it’s the person who shares political beliefs or even societal values that are in opposition to yours. Or maybe it’s just an AI expert hustling to get you to buy their training course while they evangelize the utopian world of automation to come. The call to arms I’m talking about is a resistance movement against a world that reduces every complex thought to its lowest common denominator.

Forget soundbites, we’re way past those. We’re now operating in a world where nuance is practically extinct, people only talk past each other (if they talk), and the media only demonstrates skepticism when covering a story that challenges their core beliefs, and that goes for the bifurcation of media because there really isn’t objectivity in media anymore — it’s more of a reinforcement of strongly held beliefs by the viewer/reader/listener which media gladly reinforces.

There’s a saying I keep seeing more of online these days: "Idiocracy was a documentary.” The sword and shield of curious skepticism is my call to arms to combat that, as imperfect an analogy as that might be. Staying curious is how the resistance ignites and grows, while learning when, where, and how to remain skeptical is how we preserve our intellectual resilience over time.

If I had to design a medieval-style crest for myself these days, this would be it.

“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”

—Winston Churchill

I saw a fairly alarming stat the other day: 62% of Americans under 30 now express a favorable view of socialism, according to a Cato/YouGov survey. This is not just one survey, the results are similarly mirrored by data from GALLUP, and if you’re observing what’s happening around us (some American politicians explicitly promoting socialist ideas tried and failed in the Soviet Union) it could actually be around this high. Two-thirds of young Americans warming to an economic system with a body count that dwarfs history’s worst catastrophes is …concerning to say the least. Some of you might be sitting here wondering why, although I don’t think it’s particularly mysterious.

At least one main answer is obvious: we’re failing to educate young people about the global successes of capitalism, both in school and in the culture. As a story in the Wall Street Journal by Samuel J. Abrams, a professor at Sarah Lawrence College and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute recently noted, students are, and I’m quoting from the article: “arriving to campus not only skeptical of free markets, but openly embracing socialist ideas. The problem isn’t that students have rejected capitalism. It’s that many have never been taught how it works or why it matters.” This is a generation that was handed one (continually failed) side of a debate and had it branded education, never having the full story. In just 2 centuries, capitalism has driven extreme poverty down from over 80% of the world to under 10%, doubled global life expectancy and lifted billions out of subsistence, arguably the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. And people think this is evil!

Sober professors across the country are starting to admit the problem. Jonathan Zimmerman, a 30-year Penn faculty veteran, recently wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education that despite universities' stated commitment to "critical thinking," they "typically present one side of an issue — the left-wing side, almost always — and call it a day." He calls it not just political bias, but "a mark of bad teaching." Predictably (and depressingly) his colleagues responded to his call for self-examination at a conference with silence, followed by a language policing session. An institution that can't handle one dissenting professor in a conference room has no business claiming it's training students to think freely. Just read this passage from the story and see if you can honestly say these people haven’t lost the plot (it’s almost like they’re cult members). It’s perfectly emblematic of the problem, and it’s widespread across our universities and in the broader culture. Yuri Bezmenov tried to warn us.

We’ve talked about the academic bias data before, where a peer-reviewed Oxford study of roughly 600,000 social science abstracts found that approximately 90% of politically relevant research leaned left, in every discipline, every year studied. And we shared analysis of Buckley Institute’s undergraduate survey, where 46% of students think nations like Cuba and the Soviet Union offer a better economic model than the United States. Cuba, where the average monthly salary is around $20. Venezuela, which sat on the world’s largest proven oil reserves and still managed to produce mass starvation, empty supermarket shelves, and a refugee crisis of millions. The Soviet Union, which killed tens of millions of its own people through engineered famine, gulags, and political terror before collapsing under the weight of its own inefficiencies. These are the destinations that central planning reliably reaches. This is real socialism, and it’s been tried.

What's particularly striking is that the socialist sympathies don't exist in isolation, they're part of a broader ideological package students absorb on campus (and online, before they graduate high school). As we've covered in the DEI era's postmortem, the dominant campus framework in many universities for the past decade has been fundamentally Marxist in structure: society divided into oppressors and oppressed, America cast as a colonial villain, and Western institutions treated as the root of all suffering rather than the source of most of the world's hard-won freedoms. When that's the water you swim in, rooting for authoritarian socialists is where you can easily end up. A generation trained to see their own civilization as uniquely guilty is naturally more sympathetic to regimes that oppose it, even when those regimes would jail or kill the very students championing them. It’s how you get kids openly rooting for terrorists and sympathetic to regimes that are openly hostile to liberal democratic values.

As commenters here have pointed out before, and I agree with them on, most students thankfully don’t grow up to become political zealots (note how it’s mostly senior citizens who even go to protests, as one example). But it’s naïve to ignore they are at the very least being nudged one particular direction, the data from pretty much every source reads this cleanly. Anyway here’s what normal students actually want, and we should work to deliver on: they want affordability, fairness, and economic security. About three-quarters of Millennials and Gen Z see the costs of healthcare, college, and housing as a serious problem for a stable society, and all of those costs have risen considerably in real terms. The frustration is real and it deserves serious engagement.

But the answer to expensive housing isn’t a system that produces no housing. The answer to unaffordable healthcare isn’t a system that produces no medicine worth having or starts promoting a system like Canada’s MAID program (so incredibly dystopian). The answer to inequality isn’t a model whose primary historical output has been equally distributed misery. Ironically, it’s forms of government intervention of free markets, poor policy decisions and artificial restriction of supply that cause most of our problems. Capitalism is great and what actually works, when our leaders and institutions don’t get in their own way.

The students aren’t the problem. The gap in their education is, as are institutions which continually spread anti-capitalist messaging and mistakenly believe their own country is evil and oppressive. A generation that genuinely understands what markets do (how they allocate resources, generate innovation, lift living standards) and what happens when governments replace them, would not be this confused. The data is in, and it’s been in for decades. Cuba, Venezuela, the Soviet Union ran the experiment at enormous human cost so we wouldn’t have to. The least we can do is teach it, so we are not doomed to suffer through this historic mistake.

I previously wrote about how social science research is 90% ideologically uniform. A new Nature piece shows something else: a massive seven-year project examining 3,900 social-science papers found that researchers could replicate the results of only about half the studies they tested.

The initiative, called SCORE, funded by DARPA and involving 865 researchers across 62 journals, tested three things: reproducibility, robustness, and replicability. The results at each step were unflattering. Of 600 papers where researchers attempted to reproduce the original data, only 145 contained enough detail to even try, and of those, just 53% matched precisely. Among the subset of studies that were fully replicated from scratch, only about 49% held up with statistical significance.

This isn’t a surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention and seen odd stories shared online. I mentioned the replication crisis briefly in my last piece, and here it is in full color. The question is whether people are willing to connect the dots between the two stories, because they are deeply intertwined.

When a field is ideologically homogenous, and we established that social sciences lean left with a correlation so tight it’s essentially a monoculture, you lose the adversarial pressure that makes science work. A heterodox researcher asking uncomfortable questions, demanding better methodology, or refusing to accept a fashionable conclusion is exactly the immune system science needs. Remove that person through self-selection and you get a literature that feels like it’s settled but isn’t. As one Stanford meta-scientist put it, the SCORE results are “not surprising,” consistent with every smaller study before it. The field has known. It just hasn’t fixed it.

Part of the failure is lack of care: many papers simply don’t share enough data or detail for anyone to verify their work. Publish fast, publish positive, don’t invite scrutiny. But ideology and sloppiness compound. When peer reviewers share your priors, a weak study with the right conclusions will clear the bar. When your entire discipline does, the weak studies accumulate into a body of “evidence” that informs policy.

And that’s why this matters beyond the ivory tower. Research on immigration, education, criminal justice, housing, all of it flows downstream into real decisions affecting real people. If the underlying literature doesn’t replicate, the policy built on top of it ends up harming all of us.

There’s a sliver of hope: a separate analysis found that papers from 2022–23 reproduced at 85%, suggesting newer transparency norms are helping. But that progress doesn’t rehabilitate decades of literature already embedded in textbooks, policy briefs and what people believe when they talk about many topics online and in person. And if you sit and think about it for a moment, you realize the bias piece and the replication piece aren’t really two separate scandals. They’re both part of same one.

I previously wrote how short form video, TikTok and Instagram in particular, are intellectual poison (and even more so for the youth). Then I shared research on how SFV is a cancer of the mind, a meta-analysis of 71 studies covering 98,000 participants linking heavy use to attention deficits, anxiety, addiction-like behavior, and declining academic performance. Someone linked me to even more new research we’ll go through today that was pretty interesting.

Researchers published a brain imaging study in npj Science of Learning putting participants in fMRI machines to see what’s actually happening neurologically when people consume multiple short videos versus a single continuous one. Two groups watched the exact same content about a relatively obscure tourist destination, one as a single continuous 10-minute video, the other as 7 short clips formatted in the style of typical SFV you’d see while scrolling. The only difference was the fragmentation. Immediately after, both groups were put into fMRI machines and given a memory test while their brains were scanned in real time, the imaging capturing blood flow to reveal which neural regions were actually firing during recall.

This matters because short video is essentially constant context switching: one topic, setting, or style bleeding into the next with no time for your brain to breathe. Anyone who's felt mentally drained after a scrolling session knows this intuitively. That relentless turnover makes it far more difficult to build strong, unified memories, whereas a continuous narrative over a longer timeframe gives the mind the connective tissue to link new information into something retrievable.

The results were stark. The continuous video group recalled about 66% of what they watched. The short video group? 43%. That’s your brain being measurably broken by the delivery format alone.

But the brain scan data is the more interesting part of this story. Short video viewers showed reduced activity in three distinct regions during memory retrieval: the claustrum (which integrates sensory details into coherent memories), the caudate nucleus (which drives goal-directed focus and motivated searching of memory), and the middle temporal gyrus (which connects language to deeper thematic meaning). The connectivity between these regions was weaker too, the brain’s executive control and information integration systems simply weren’t talking to each other properly.

As I wrote in the first two links above, these platforms function like a digital Skinner box, training users to crave fragmented dopamine hits at the expense of sustained thought. Now we see what that looks like on a brain scan, and it shows the story within our physiology. The neural architecture required for memory, focus, and deep comprehension is literally being undermined by the format itself before you even consider the content, the algorithms, or the hours lost. And speaking of the video content fed to Americans on TikTok and Instagram, well, you don’t need a research team to tell you about this.

The researchers also noted that people who already struggle with self-control around media had to exert extra neural effort just to achieve basic recall, a strained, low-efficiency adaptation to high levels of exposure to a toxic media format. You’re working harder to remember less.

This is your mind on short form video. Delete the apps and free your cognition. You’re severely harming yourself in the knowledge economy until you do.

The WSJ recently ran a story about people opposing new housing in Yountville, California, a town of 3,400 people where the median home value is $1.3 million, median income is $51,000/year, and people drive 50-mile daily commutes because they can’t afford to live near their job. There’s another story on it in MSN if you need a link without a paywall which says about the same thing. It’s classic California, a place where they pretend to care about “the people” yet do everything they can to hose them, at least when it comes to real estate.

The town wants to build a paltry 120 housing units on a shuttered elementary school site. Thomas Keller, owner of The French Laundry, where dinner starts at $425 a head showed up to oppose it. So did Gary Jabara, who paid around $300 million for The Estate Yountville resort. Their primary concern? Studios are “too small” (despite quotes from local employees in the WSJ story saying these would be fine).

But here’s the thing: the objection itself isn’t the point. Whatever the proposal, there will always be another reason to push back. Not because it can’t be fixed, but because fixing it isn’t the goal. The goal is delay, and objection is just the tool used to achieve it.

I watched this exact playbook run for many years when I lived in San Francisco. Environmental impact reports weaponized to freeze projects for a decade. Parking studies commissioned to buy another year. “Community character” invoked to mean, essentially, not more new people. After 23 public meetings in Yountville the opposition still wants more studies and data. The process is the weapon against progress.

This is the banality of evil made real. The mustache-twirling cartoon villains or supposedly heartless corporations (willing to bet you most large companies are YIMBY) are rare. The actual villains that walk among us are at zoning meetings with a packet of objections that will be replaced by new objections the moment the first ones are addressed.

California NIMBYs have turned hypocrisy into a civic identity. People in $3M craftsman bungalows benefiting from total boomer luxury communism attend vigils for income inequality, then file appeals to block apartment buildings down the street. They rage against corporations and capitalism while doing everything possible to freeze housing supply and protect their own asset values. They aren’t ‘fighting the system,’ they are the system, and it’s simply a racket to screw over anyone who isn’t landed gentry.

I live in Austin now, it’s a much better model where the city actually builds, and the results are not subtle. Rents have been falling for several years running because we embody the American ethos of growth instead of crying in meetings about “the character of the neighborhood.” The barista and the line cook and the grocery clerk can afford to live a reasonable distance from where they work. A city where service workers can live near their jobs is a city with shorter commutes, stronger neighborhoods, more rooted communities, lower turnover, and frankly better restaurants, because the person cooking your food isn’t exhausted from hours in a car before their shift starts. Austin isn’t perfect, but it has demonstrated the core truth that the NIMBY coalition refuses to accept: supply and demand rules everything around us. They simply pretend not to understand this.

In the housing debate, the free market is on the right side. Developers want to build, builders want to do their job. The town manager in Yountville put it plainly: “Is someone really suggesting that no one will rent a studio among the 2,000 people that come to this town from across the Bay Area?” in response to Jabara saying there wouldn’t be demand for the new units. Imagine how much you’d have to hate your own staff to oppose this.

A referendum has now paused the project until voters decide in November, because of course. Meanwhile, staff members drive 100 miles a day to work round-trip. The housing crisis is not some great mystery, it’s the entirely predictable outcome of people with power using it to make sure nobody else gets what they already have.

TL;DR: when not writing or working in tech I create and mix music, and just published a new project for 2026 you can check out here. If you’re a longtime reader you already know what the rest of this will say, so just go listen and enjoy.

I like to complain pop is dead and public spaces like restaurants and malls are constantly pushing slop on us. But just complaining by itself is useless, so the useful thing I try and do is help people discover new creative by hand-curating works of artists producing actually cool projects.

I try to surface interesting and unique musicians and mix their work thoughtfully to tell a larger story, in the hopes of showing people music is quietly going through a renaissance. There’s a massive long tail of creatives taking risks and experimenting with the art form in new and interesting ways, if you seek it out.

Anyway, finished a new project for 2026 with this in mind, I’d invite you to sign off and take a walk and listen.

Stream on SoundCloud here, direct 320kbps mp3 download here.

Shadows & Light - TRT 1:34:10

T/L:

1. Bayonne - Solo
2. The Orielles, Emma Anderson - Bend The Round
3. Roland Kleinenberg - Mesmerized
4. Pig and Dan - Blowback
5. Zero 7 & Lou Stone - Take My Hand
6. Ben Böhmer - Rust
7. Rezident - Shapeshift
8. Four Tet - Into Dust
9. Cinematic Orchestra, Grey Reverend - This Fantasy
10. Infected Mushroom - Animatronica
11. Andy Bell - Pinball Warrior
12. Hybrid Man - Midnight Drift
13. Royksopp, Fever Ray - What Else Is There (DJ Tennis Remix)
14. Brexton - Track II
15. Bayonne - Is It Time
16. The Tapeaters - I Feel Good
17. Tom Middleton, Sienna - YNTOO
18. Seba, Ulrich Schnauss - M7
19. M83 - Sunny Boy
20. Jonah, Ben Bohmer - Caught Up In The Fire
21. Zero 7, Jen Cooke - Swimmers

I support all of these artists by purchasing their work from Beatport, vinyl when I can find it, and hope you’ll do the same in addition to attending live shows.

If you’d like to hear more, I’ve made original both live/studio mixes for over two decades with music in a variety of genres, and also compose original artist albums available to stream/download on SoundCloud or on Bandcamp (free and open to all).

Hopefully this one makes your weekend better.

I’ve previously written on the problems with AI and creativity, the rise of AI nihilism, how people are building AI spam companies and where AI actually does make sense, along with related topics. But two recent stories on the state of AI deserve to be read together and notice something else interesting: the people building AI have convinced themselves apocalyptic messaging is a feature, not a bug. Of course this is a terrible idea, and the longer this goes on the more damage it does. Let’s go through this topic briefly as I think it’s instructive.

The first story from Noah Smith: AI has the worst sales pitch I’ve ever seen

Noah opens with what might be the most damning analogy I’ve read about the current state of AI comms:

“Hi. Do you have a moment? I’m from the Cursed Microwave company. Our product is much better than a traditional microwave. Not only can it automatically and perfectly cook all your food, it also microwaves your whole body, so you and your family are paralyzed and unable to ever work again. Don’t worry, though, because when everyone has a Cursed Microwave, our society will probably implement Universal Basic Income, and you and your children can just go on welfare! Oh, by the way, we estimate that there’s a 2 to 25 percent chance that our microwaves will put out so much radiation that they destroy the entire human race.”

It’s absurd on its face but also metaphorically accurate. When the CEOs of the most powerful AI companies voluntarily attach extinction probabilities to their own products in public interviews, something has gone very wrong, in strategy and also basic judgment.

The second point Noah makes in his story on job displacement is perhaps even more important. Executives keep racing to be first to say the most alarming thing possible about labor market disruption, and Noah correctly identifies why: they’re playing to investors, not to users. When your primary audience is a room full of capital allocators, “everything will be disrupted” sounds exciting. When that same message escapes into the mainstream and reaches regular people, as it inevitably will, it just sounds like a threat. That’s a self-inflicted wound, and I’d also argue communications malpractice.

It’s another case study in what happens when the professional-managerial class runs comms. I’ve written before about how the marketing industry has largely been captured by bureaucrats optimizing to avoid blame instead of moving people. Tech is no different, just with a different flavor of dysfunction. In traditional marketing you get soulless rebrand committees, in tech you get founders who bypass the communications function entirely because they’re engineering-led, go directly to a Bloomberg interview, and announce their product has a 25% chance of ending civilization. Neither approach works and both reflect an industry that has lost the plot on what marketing is actually supposed to do. I’m somewhat more sympathetic to the tech sector marketers, because frequently they’re ignored and then later have to play damage control. Still, it’s our job to advise and stay ahead of things.

The second story from Ashley Mayer: We need better stories about the future

Ashley’s piece goes into the structural reasons this is happening. She puts it plainly:

“As an industry, we’re collectively failing at our primary narrative objective: to give people a reason to root for the future.”

The industry has a narrative crisis, and she’s right for the same reason Noah says: the big players are talking to investors far more potently than users. The apocalyptic framing makes capex numbers make sense to shareholders in the near-term, but unintentionally helps undermine public trust (so will hurt them in the long-term). I thought Silicon Valley didn’t like short-termism, but maybe that’s just the part of the cycle we’re in.

The other point Ashley makes has the right insight for marketers: the best brands have historically made someone else the hero of their story. Apple celebrated the creative misfit. Nike celebrated the everyday athlete. When you cast your company as the hero and everyone else as the recipient, you’ve at best turned your potential customers into supporting characters and at worst made them feel like obstacles. That’s a catastrophic branding error, and the biggest names in AI are making it in real time. Ashley also puts the opening on startup founders to fill the vacuum, which could very well be the right call, if the incumbents have truly boxed themselves in and can’t find a way out.

The irony here is thick: AI companies possess genuinely transformative technology with real upside for real people, yet they’ve somehow packaged it as the most anxiety-inducing product launch in modern history. This only could happen if the communications function at these brands is either captured by people who don’t know how to tell a human story, or are being bypassed entirely by founders talking directly to capital markets and forgetting everyone else exists.

A better story is right there: cures, productivity, access, abundance. Someone just has to want to tell it, and hire people who actually know how. The opportunity is clear as day.

A new peer-reviewed study published in Theory and Society analyzed roughly 600,000 social science abstracts published between 1960 and 2024 across 11 disciplines, 6 decades, and hundreds of journals. The findings are something many have pointed out over the years, because it’s plain to see. Approximately 90% of all politically relevant social science research leaned left, and the mean political stance of every single discipline was left-of-center every single year of the study period. Economics was the least skewed, with a mean score of 5.7 out of 10 on the left-right scale. Gender studies clocked in at 7.6. The ideological dial only turns one direction here.

And it’s getting worse. All 11 disciplines showed further leftward movement between 1990 and 2024, with an acceleration point identifiable around 2010, incidentally right around when your social media feed started feeling like a reeducation camp. This is a documented, measurable trend that will hopefully help the few holdouts understand most of our education system that affects culture, particularly social sciences, skews heavily left-biased. Some might be fine, but this is so extreme it’s clear many of us who went through the education system have been steadily fed a specific information diet.

What makes this study harder to dismiss than the usual rebuttals is the methodology. The researcher, a doctoral student at Oxford, used large language models to score each abstract against a fixed 2025 ideological reference scale, with anchor points running from Far Right to Far Left, with Joe Biden rating as a 6 out of 10 center-left. The LLM reliability metrics were strong and the findings held across multiple alternative datasets and a battery of robustness checks. People like to continually say educational bias is “a FOX News” or “right wing” talking point but this is a very robust dataset published in a sociology journal with peer review. Not everything is propaganda, and just because someone you might not like or agree with says something doesn’t necessarily invalidate it (this is really how children or cult members process the world).

There’s another detail buried in the findings that deserves more attention than it will get: the disciplines that lean furthest left are also the most ideologically homogenous. The more extreme the orientation, the less internal dissent. So that means things like gender and ethnic studies don’t just skew a bit left, they’re essentially a monoculture. And the mechanism driving this isn’t professors changing their minds over time. It’s self-selection: new, more ideologically uniform academics entering the field, generation after generation, gradually flushing out heterodox thought. As always, the people who preach diversity are the least diverse intellectually.

This also connects directly to what I wrote about the state of college students, that the ones leaving these campuses with alarming views on free speech and soft spots for economic systems that don’t work at best and cause mass starvation at worst. When the research outputs of your professors are 90% ideologically aligned in many fields and that alignment is hardened over decades, you don’t need to formally indoctrinate anyone. The air itself becomes indoctrination. A student swimming in this water for 4 years doesn’t know they’re wet, as the famous graduation speech from David Foster Wallace goes.

The study’s author is careful to note this doesn’t prove bias corrupts research conclusions. Maybe, he allows, sustained inquiry into social phenomena just happens to produce left-coded results. That’s a generous interpretation at best and feels like something you have to say when you publish this type of research. But actual findings in the paper are less charitable: separate controlled experiments cited in the literature showed that, as brief examples, pro-immigration research teams estimated more positive effects of immigration on public programs, and historians rated abstracts higher when they aligned with the reviewer’s own ideology. So bias can bleed into answers, and into who gets published (this also explains why some pranksters were easily able to get multiple fake papers published, merely because they were ideologically aligned).

One other thing I want to point out is there’s a massive replication crisis in the social sciences, and while that itself might not always be due to one political ideology or another, the vast majority of the people responsible are in fact left-leaning. Many findings don’t replicate (often fewer than half) and effects frequently shrink or disappear. Add incentives like p-hacking and a bias toward positive results, plus ideological homogeneity, and you get a literature that looks settled but isn’t. This would not occur as often if there were more people to provide an adversarial perspective, something good science requires. And if you can’t be in the room with people who disagree with you, I’m not sure if you’re really cut out for this type of work.

Someone asked me the other day why I care about what’s going on in universities and about them remaining neutral. It’s kind of a nihilistic question because we all should care. But I’ll answer here again: it’s important academia gets things right, because the implications extend far beyond campus walls. Research informs public policy, shapes medical guidelines, and drives decisions in business and economics. When the underlying findings are fragile or skewed, the downstream effects show up in real lives, real costs, and real tradeoffs. Our institutions should strive to be politically neutral arenas for inquiry, where conclusions are earned through evidence and not aligned in advance with ideology. Scientific results should be durable, replicable, and open to challenge, not purely persuasive in the moment or convenient to prevailing views. If we lose that standard we undermine the quality of the decisions built on top of it.

What we have now is an academic ecosystem that mostly produces politically uniform research, trains students who emerge afraid to challenge professors and peers, and presents its outputs to the public as neutral expertise. It isn’t, the research says so, and the data is coming from inside the house. In a way it feels like the church has clawed back educational control, just a different kind. And if any of today’s post bothers you, I want to reiterate that both liberalism and education thrive from critique, not shying away from it. I still remain optimistic we can do better.

In 1968, Paul R. Ehrlich published The Population Bomb and helped ignite one of the most influential intellectual panics of the modern era. The thesis was stark: there were simply too many people on Earth, meaning resources would run out, hundreds of millions would starve, and civilization would begin to crack under the weight of human reproduction.

The book sold millions of copies, universities embraced the thesis, television programs booked Ehrlich constantly, most famously on Johnny Carson's Tonight Show, where he appeared to such fanfare that the book shot up the bestseller lists after each appearance. Policymakers listened, and our media and academic institutions elevated a hyperbolic (and false) warning by a malthusian crank into something many believed was scientific fact.

Now Ehrlich has died at 93, and obituary writers faced a problem: history happened. The Times elected to describe his predictions as “premature.” But that word rewrites what actually occurred, because Ehrlich’s predictions weren’t “premature.” They were wrong, and not slightly wrong, but flat out hogwash. This entire obituary, likely along with many in the academic and media community will glaze a man in the near-term who history will look back on as a textbook example of the banality of evil (expert edition).

It’s worth going a few of his ideas, so you can get a sense of just how wrong this gentleman was (and the impact of a false prophet). He predicted mass starvation in the 1970s and 1980s as population growth overwhelmed agriculture. He wrote that India “couldn’t possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980” and called food aid to the country “hopeless.” Instead, the opposite happened. The Green Revolution, driven by scientists like Norman Borlaug, transformed global food production so dramatically that India, the very nation Ehrlich had written off, became a net food exporter. Global population grew dramatically, and yet calories per person increased. The catastrophe Ehrlich treated as inevitable never arrived.

In 1980, economist Julian Simon challenged Ehrlich to a bet: Simon wagered that a basket of five commodities (copper, chromium, nickel, tin, and tungsten) would be cheaper in 1990, adjusted for inflation, than in 1980. Ehrlich took the bet, confident that surging population would exhaust resources and drive prices up. Simon won decisively. Every single commodity was cheaper a decade later. Human ingenuity, it turned out, was itself a resource, and an inexhaustible one.

And yet perhaps no failed prediction is more illustrative than this: in 1971, Ehrlich confidently declared that England would “not exist in the year 2000.” When pressed on it afterward, he shrugged: “When you predict the future, you get things wrong.” That was his entire defense.

The most striking thing about Ehrlich isn’t simply that he was wrong. Smart people are wrong all the time. What makes Ehrlich remarkable is that he seemed completely unbothered by his wrongness. He did not revise his worldview in any meaningful way when proven incorrect, nor did he display any humility, he simply kept forecasting collapse and dug in to being a permabear. In a 2004 interview, he acknowledged some predictions hadn’t yet materialized but said he felt “little embarrassment.” As recently as 2022, 60 Minutes gave him a primetime platform to proselytize civilizational doom, and was roundly ridiculed for it.

Over the years, Ehrlich lashed out at his opponents, calling them names like “right wing” even though skeptics of his ideas came from all over the political spectrum (we’ve talked about this phenomenon before, a clear indicator someone isn’t being objective and has lost their sense-making abilities).

And the stakes were never merely academic. Ehrlich openly advocated coercive population control policies, including forced sterilization. In his 1977 book, he proposed adding sterilants to drinking water or staple foods so that governments could dial population fertility “up or down” as technocrats saw fit. As recently as 2012, he called involuntary mass sterilization “a great idea.” This was all far worse than simply the musings of an eccentric crank because it was by someone promoted heavily who wielded enormous institutional influence.

The era of promoting population growth fears had consequences. In India, during Indira Gandhi’s Emergency period of 1975–77, population control campaigns escalated into government programs that forcibly sterilized millions. In 1976 alone, more than 8 million men and women were sterilized, many forcibly, with reports of entire villages being cordoned off by police while men were dragged in for surgery. World Bank President Robert McNamara praised it, saying, “At long last, India is moving to effectively address its population problem.” In China, the later one-child policy, shaped by the same global anxiety about overpopulation, resulted in decades of forced abortions and sterilizations affecting millions of families.

Ehrlich does not see himself as responsible for any of it. This, too, is part of the record. But again if you listen to his actual words, he was in full support of such programs (and was influential on the global stage about them). In 1970 Ehrlich said plainly, that large families should be treated negatively on television, that the government should “legislate the size of the family” and “throw you in jail if you have too many kids” reflecting the unflinching authoritarian logic at the center of his worldview.

When critics continued to raise objections, they were often portrayed by media as backward, ideological, or anti-science. Today the obituary framing is even stranger: pieces go out of their way to mention that “conservatives” opposed Ehrlich’s ideas, as though skepticism about mass sterilization needed to be politically categorized.

Not only did Ehrlich’s predictions fail to materialize, his rhetoric contributed to the opposite problem. Across the developed world, birth rates have collapsed below replacement level. The crisis isn’t too many people, it’s too few. Countries with aging, shrinking populations face unsustainable pension systems, labor shortages, and cultural decline. Interestingly, Israel stands as one of the rare first-world exceptions: a developed nation with a fertility rate above replacement, and arguably a more instructive model for the future than any doom merchants would consider.

The deeper problem here isn’t Ehrlich himself. Every era produces prophets of doom. The real failure is institutional platforming of someone spreading a form of malthusian mental illness in the population. A functional media environment should immunize the public against these psychopaths and their fear-porn prognostications. Instead, because much of our media operates in a subprime attention economy, it fans the flames. Apocalyptic predictions drive clicks, prestige, speaking invitations, and bestseller lists. When the predictions fail, the same publications that promoted them quietly soften the edges and proclaims false predictions “premature,” not “wrong.” It’s just incredible to me how consistently they allowed him to promote his ideas even after empirical evidence regularly proved him wrong. At some point there should be consequences, simply in the form of no one taking the person seriously. At least he had to live for several decades seeing his ideas not come to fruition and watch much of the intellectual community turn against him.

The correct lesson from Ehrlich is actually simple: if someone claims civilization is headed for collapse, the burden of proof is on them. It can’t just be “vibes.” It also can’t be “moral urgency” or useful idiots like Greta Thunberg yelling in anger. People should have real, falsifiable predictions that survive contact with reality. If they can’t do that, their credibility should be exactly what Ehrlich’s now deserves to be historically: zero. Let’s hope his eco-pessimist, dystopian ideas die with him.

Just the other weekend, two ISIS-inspired terrorists came within a hair’s breadth of mass casualties near Gracie Mansion. They packed their devices with bolts and screws and tried to hurl them into a crowd of protesters. One suspect told police he wanted it to be “bigger than Boston,” a reference to the 2013 attack that killed three and injured hundreds. The bombs, mercifully, failed to detonate. Both men were apprehended on the spot and spoke freely to police, proudly claiming ISIS as their inspiration. Only their own incompetence prevented Saturday from being one of the darkest days in recent New York history.

Here is how CNN initially framed it:

Read that again. Slowly.

They deleted it after the internet did its job. But CNN was hardly alone. The New York Times described the incident as “Smoking Jars of Metal and Fuses Thrown at Protest Near Mayor’s House.” NBC called the devices “suspicious.” The Daily News foregrounded the pig roast. Even New York City’s own Deputy Mayor Brad Lander, tweeting after the suspects’ names and ISIS affiliation were already public, managed to condemn “Islamophobia” without initially acknowledging that the people who threw bombs that day were Islamic terrorists. Mayor Mamdani himself opened his statement denouncing the rally’s bigotry, then vaguely condemned “what followed” as “even more disturbing,” at the time omitting any specifics about who, exactly, had done what.

National Review’s editorial board put it plainly: the media were “employing all of their creative writing skills to craft craven, obfuscatory headlines that aim to deceive by omission and suggestion.”

This is a textbook specimen of what I’ve been calling the subprime attention bubble, and its most corrosive variant. Not only do they publish clickbait, but what we have here is institutional framing-as-product, where legacy outlets with genuine reputational capital to protect spend it in service of ideological narrative management. The facts were not hidden, they were available to anyone who read past the headline. But many people consume news in headline form, not article form. The framing is the product. And the product here was deliberate misdirection.

The subprime mortgage crisis happened because people confused packaging for value: the logos, the ratings, the prestige all intact while the underlying asset quietly rotted. The same dynamic is playing out in media. The mastheads are still there, the checkmarks are still there, the inheritance of decades of institutional credibility is still being spent. But many people haven’t marked it to market yet.

They will. They always do. The only question is what you’re holding when the correction comes.

One recent chart (of many that look just like this) in the FT tells a clear story: one party radicalized, moderates and the other mostly didn’t, and the country has been paying the price for this rift ever since. We’ve spent time here examining what went wrong on the progressive left: the managerial class that turned institutions into ideological enforcement zones, the DEI regimes that replaced merit with a stack ranking of groups, the classrooms plastered in slogans instead of equations. That critique stands, and if you are still actually liberal you would encourage that critique. You also don’t get to ignore that it’s a real phenomenon, because at this point it genuinely threatens liberalism, and it’s also unpopular. I don’t even care about people disagreeing, they’ll eventually catch up, but something you’ve not seen is I’ve even received personal threats for the sin of simply noticing any of this which is just so strange and honestly kind of telling. At least I understand now better how things like the Salem Witch trials happened (where social pressure silenced moderates) and how it took nearly two decades for people to admit a hysteria had taken place.

I mostly talk about the left because as someone in a creative sector I have to deal with the consequences of this shift professionally all the time. Leftist ideologs are embedded in everything from pop culture to academia to media (just watch any awards show). Still, a complete picture demands we look at what’s rising on the other side, because the pathology is not unique to the left. The same virus can infect different hosts, including the right. I’ve mentioned this in passing in previous stories, but several readers asked me to talk about it in its own post, so today we’ll do that.

The concept of the “woke right” is not a contradiction in terms, though it sounds like one. As James Lindsay and his collaborators at New Discourses have argued, “woke” at its core is not fundamentally a left-wing phenomenon but a worldview, specifically the belief that society is organized around an irreconcilable conflict between oppressor and oppressed, and that this conflict justifies any tactic in the service of the aggrieved group. The content of the grievance changes but the core structure does not. When right-wing actors adopt the same oppressor/oppressed framing, the pattern is familiar. They position themselves as a dispossessed majority, wrongfully displaced by corrupt elites, globalists, or some shadowy enemy. Then they reach for the exact same tools: moral grandstanding, purity tests, cancel culture, and mob harassment. This is functionally woke, whatever they call themselves.

We’ve seen what this looks like in practice. The New Discourses piece opens with a real-world example: a conservative watchmaker speaks out against the antisemitism flooding his social media replies and is immediately subjected to a coordinated online pile-on from self-described “New Right” accounts. Not for any policy failure, but for the sin of insufficient extremism. A principled conservative questions whether a maximalist position is electorally viable and is branded a “cuck,” a “RINO,” a shill. We watched the left do this for a decade to anyone who stepped off the approved script. The woke right has simply retargeted the same apparatus. Jew hatred and conspiracy theories are a clear example of the horseshoe I’ve personally experienced many times, post October 7th they’ve been everywhere.

This matters for reasons beyond aesthetics. As I’ve written about before, the way out of our current crisis is not to replace one orthodoxy with another. There is a physics to culture that the zealots on both sides refuse to acknowledge: every overcorrection generates a backlash, and doubling down on the extreme version of your team’s position doesn’t break the cycle, it perpetuates it. The woke left created the conditions for the woke right by making so many people feel excluded, humiliated, and lied to. If the woke right manages to take the wheel in a serious manner, it will do the same thing in the other direction, and we will have learned nothing.

Fueling all of this is a podcast-industrial complex that has turned outrage into attention. Figures like Candace Owens and Nick Fuentes aren't serious political commenters, they're performers optimizing for clicks and shares by constantly escalating to the most extreme position available. The algorithm rewards unhinged takes, so they deliver them, every time, consequence-free. They traffic in conspiracy theories, antisemitism, and manufactured grievance not because they've thought carefully about the world but because it gets attention. Every pile-on they orchestrate, every "enemy" they identify for their audience, every outrage cycle they spin up is just content. The tragedy is that some of the people drawn to this grift have real and legitimate grievances: they were failed by institutions, lied to by media, and condescended to for years. They deserved something better than a new class of grifters willing to monetize their anger while making everything worse.

The Lindsay framework offers a useful diagnostic for the problem. Woke, in any form, is identifiable by four traits: moral absolutism that frames disagreement as betrayal, group identity politics that demands collective loyalty over individual judgment, victimhood consciousness that sees systemic oppression as the organizing fact of society, and social control through shame and mob enforcement. You don’t need pronouns or a DEI statement to check all four boxes. The “New Right” influencer calling everyone a a “Jew shill” or “goyim” checks all four. The online ecosystem running what Lindsay aptly calls struggle sessions against conservatives deemed insufficiently radical checks all four.

I mentioned this already but it’s worth repeating, what’s tragic is that the woke right draws recruits from the very people the woke left failed most conspicuously: young men who were told their instincts were suspect, who graduated into a world of loyalty oaths and ideological audits, who eventually concluded that the institutions had been captured and could not be trusted. Their anger is legitimate. Their diagnosis is often correct. But the answer being offered to people failed by the woke left is essentially: adopt the same structure, reverse the targets. It’s the same disease in a different wrapper.

The standard I apply to the left applies here too. I don’t want ideological enforcement from the right any more than I want it from the left. I don’t want purity spirals, struggle sessions, or the policing of acceptable thought, regardless of which direction the orthodoxy runs. A society organized around competing tribes of the aggrieved, each convinced they are the righteous victims and their enemies are the oppressors, is a society consuming itself.

The actual way forward, the only way forward, is to insist on individual over collective, merit over identity, open debate over enforced consensus, and principle over tribal loyalty. These aren’t “moderate” positions in the sense of being weak or unprincipled. They are, in fact, the most demanding positions available, because they require you to apply the same standard to your own side that you apply to the other. That’s harder than joining a mob. It’s also the only thing that actually works.

Reject the woke left. Reject the woke right. Hold the line on the actual Western tradition: rigorous, honest, and genuinely open and self-critical, which built the world worth preserving. You could be an honorable person who leans either left or right on specific issues who rejects the mob and holds these ideals. And again, please don’t pretend like both these things aren’t happening and aren’t real. You might live in a filter bubble without such extremists (good for you, honestly, be free) or perhaps you swim in the waters of one of these extreme groups telling you it’s normal. It’s not. And I get the urge of some conservatives to not wish to self-critique after seeing what happened during the great awokening. But I don’t even think these people are genuinely conservative in any meaningful sense. They’re just crazy. And if you don’t like the “woke right” label and want to reply with a different descriptor, I’m open to hearing it.

There’s a rule many on the modern left have quietly adopted but don’t say publicly: if you’re deemed oppressed, you can do anything. Murder civilians at a music festival, commit crimes of varying severity throughout a city, the so-called “oppressed” get a blank check to do pretty much whatever they want. But if try to defend yourself or take corrective action, you’re the monster. It is really another form of luxury beliefs because if the world was fully run this way, there would be chaos.

America and Israel share something that makes a certain class of people deeply uncomfortable: they both punch back and ignore this inverse morality. To be clear, plenty of liberals remain firmly supportive of both countries, so today’s post isn't an indictment of everyone left of center (although I think more of them should be less afraid to speak up). But for those who have absorbed this framework wholesale, the act of fighting back is seen as a betrayal of the script.

And that script is rigid. The framework requires a permanent victim class and a permanent oppressor class, and once those roles are assigned, they cannot be renegotiated: not by elections, not by body counts, not by evidence. Israel is cast as the colonial power, so October 7th gets rationalized, minimized, or reframed as “resistance.” The images of families burned in their homes, young people massacred at a concert, none of it moves the needle, because the roles were already decided. And when Israel responded with the predictable force of a nation-state that just suffered its worst single-day death toll since the Holocaust, the information machine kicked into overdrive to make the defender look like the villain. This is the only way to achieve their goal of eliminating Israel and their broader goal of removing Jewish people entirely. Over the last few years I’ve watched everyone from the media to individuals who I thought were intelligent spread everything from AI content to obvious anti-Israel propaganda (which was later retracted, but at that point the damage was done). It’s truly been astonishing.

Watching this same crowd’s reaction to the US-Israeli strikes on Iran this weekend was predictable. This is a regime that has been the world’s leading state sponsor of terrorism, that funds Hamas and Hezbollah, that’s been racing toward a nuclear weapon, has attacked us and our allies for nearly 50 years, and spent decades chanting “death to America” with the enthusiasm of a sports team. The response from the ideological left (and also the “woke right,” which horseshoes around to about the same beliefs) wasn’t to consider what a nuclear Iran actually means for the region or the world. It was immediate, reflexive sympathy for the regime. Not the Iranian people, many of whom were literally celebrating in the streets of Tehran when news broke that Khamenei was killed, but the theocratic government that has oppressed them for decades. The regime that murdered protesters, that polices how women dress and violently prosecutes LBGTQ people, they stanned for that.

It’s the same move they made with Venezuela. When Maduro finally fell, leftists didn’t cheer for the Venezuelan people who had been ground into poverty by a socialist regime that wrecked one of Latin America’s wealthiest countries. They mourned the revolution. They found ways to blame America. The actual oppressed people, the ones fleeing, starving, celebrating in the streets were invisible, because they didn’t fit that story. The dictator had the right politics, so the dictator received support and sympathy. They never actually cared about the oppressed people. Instead it’s about the ideology, or as has been said “the issue is never the issue, it’s always the revolution.”

If you watched the post-October 7th propaganda campaign run in real time and felt something was off, it’s clear why. It’s actually what would happen if 9/11 occurred today. The same people who now create content defending Hamas’s “context” would have been posting threads about America being an “evil colonial state” before the towers finished falling. The same activist ecosystem that demands no judgment of attackers, only endless interrogation of the attacked, would have found a way to make the hijackers sympathetic. In today’s world, countless educators teaching your kids now wholesale side with terrorists who embody actual evil, something many in the West continue to not think is real as they’ve never had to live under it.

This ideology doesn’t stay contained to foreign policy. It shapes everything domestic too. It’s why a city can watch someone get pushed onto subway tracks, shrug, and spend more energy debating the attacker’s mental health needs than the safety of everyone on the platform. The victim hierarchy means the perpetrator outranks the victim, and policy should follow. Don’t punish harshly. Don’t enforce. Don’t judge. The result is a permanent underclass of actual victims whose suffering doesn’t fit the narrative, so it simply doesn’t get processed. If you’re actually paying attention to base reality, it’s clear we are all far more subservient to the bottom 10% (including violent criminals) than we are to the continually vilified top 1%.

DEI is the institutional formalization of this same logic. Distribute power not by merit or results, but by identity category. Install the “right” people in media, corporations, and government, then insulate them from accountability, because criticism is simply more oppression (ironically, October 7th was the event that forced many of these beaurocrats to finally have some accountability).

What’s striking is how much of this ideology is sustained by people living in remarkable peace and safety. Comfortable places, stable zip codes, no real proximity to those who would actually like to harm them. It’s easy to cosplay solidarity with groups that want to eliminate liberal democracies when you’ll never be in range of the consequences. The Israelis living within rocket range don’t have the luxury of that abstraction.

Standing up to bullies, actual, murderous, civilization-threatening bullies, used to be uncontroversial. But groups suffering a moral inversion of reality repackaged this as aggression, colonialism, disproportionate response. The goalpost on “proportionate” shifts constantly, because the argument was never really about proportionality. It was about whether you’re allowed to fight back at all. America and Israel both decided the answer is yes. That answer still stands.

And if you've arrived at the conclusion that America and Israel are the primary sources of evil in the world, it's worth pausing to ask where that belief came from and whether it survived any contact with reality. America has contributed more to global poverty reduction, disease eradication, and post-war reconstruction than any nation in history. The Marshall Plan rebuilt Europe. American-led institutions created the international order that produced the greatest reduction in interstate warfare humanity has ever seen. Israel, a country roughly the size of New Jersey, built the only liberal democracy in its region with a free press, Arab citizens serving in its parliament and Supreme Court, and LGBTQ protections that would get you killed in virtually every neighboring state. These are not the facts of an evil civilization. If your moral framework has led you to lionize theocratic regimes that hang dissidents and execute gay men while condemning the countries that would grant those same people asylum, the problem isn't with the West. The problem is with the framework. And the framework didn't build itself, it was constructed, deliberately, by people who understood if you control how someone sees the villain, you never have to win the argument on its merits. You've been told what you’re supposed to see. The question is whether you're willing to look past it and live in base reality instead.

Step outside your feed or turn off the news for 5 minutes and you’ll see something simple: most things aren’t political, and normal people do not define themselves by their politics. When someone says “everything is political,” what they’re confessing is that politics has become their primary obsession. And when that obsession follows them into every room, it only succeeds in making that person quite insufferable while ruining the chances for great work. Everyone like this also seems to be somewhat anxious and depressed, truly a prison to live this way.

In over 20 years of studio work I’ve never talked politics with anyone I’ve collaborated on music with. We talk about the craft. We fight about whether the synth lead is too bright or the percussion flows nicely. No one stops a take to debate policy or talk about whatever the news is obsessed with that day, we just don’t care, we have more important things to worry about in the moment.

Any functional workplace is like that too. In offices, in code, in product meetings, you see the same thing with highly-competent teams. People obsess over UX flows, social strategy, ad creative. The daily effort of making and marketing something useful doesn’t care what’s happening online. And the people on your team who are political-brained and constantly obsessing over these things are a giant distraction and just slow things down. 9 times out of 10 they’re also people you really just want to get away from.

Friendship runs on the same rules if it’s normal and healthy. It means dinners, jokes, kids, enjoying nerdy movies, the way someone tells a story. Sometimes politics enters the chat, but with friends who aren’t broken it’s quite brief, then the conversation shifts away from the political circus. And anyway, grown‑ups can disagree and still break bread. Civilization thrives on peaceful disagreement and people seeing things differently coming together amicably.

But lately, some people reinterpret everything through this one narrow lens. They think every ad, every song, every corporate logo redesign must have some kind of political statement (or shouldn’t be created unless it has one). Or that athletes and celebs must constantly state their politics. To them, art turns into messaging, business turns into signaling, friendship becomes “alignment.” This is truly a silly way to process the world, it’s something closer to being in a cult.

Of course some things are political: law, power, justice. But politics isn’t the center of reality, it’s simply one layer of it. Also note, the people who do force every single choice through some kind of political filter end up badly harming the end product. We see examples of this constantly, a recent one is the new Star Trek, which quite obviously was processed through a Kathleen Kennedy-esque 2015 socialist checkbox media filter, which simply ruins the work and destroys any IP it touches. And it’s not like you couldn’t make something good with a political message (like promoting a healthy conservative or liberal worldview, or simply both sides coming together). But you have to actually be able to write to do that, and it turns out the people who process everything through politics as a priority are quite bad at that. Star Trek: The Next Generation very clearly was promotional of a liberal-utopian future, but it focused on storytelling, morality and aesthetics as prime directives so it actually worked. The latest trek, Starfleet Academy, doesn’t care about any of this, and is instead a slop world demoralization exercise. If you’re a trekkie and you looked at both the new vs the old Star Treks and you’re being intellectually honest, I think you can easily see the difference.

Healthy adulthood means knowing when to shift gears and when personal politics comes into play. It’s really simple actually: you can talk policy with conviction, then walk into the studio and only care about the track, you can vote one way and build something with someone who didn’t, you can sit across a table, disagree, and stay human. You can have different viewpoints during creative brainstorming sessions and meet peers in the middle of ideas to produce something everyone enjoys. I think the people who relentlessly promote their politics and are unreasonable about compromise will ultimately find themselves socially and professionally ostracized, and for good reason. And if you’re a media company actually serious about making anything worth sharing, hire proper creatives as leaders, not bureaucratic ideologs.

Most of life is creative, relational, practical, and human long before it’s political. And honestly, your personal morals and ethics, center of right and wrong, what is true based on observed reality, what is objectively beautiful, all this should supersede any politics of the day. Especially if you hope to make any creative work of consequence, and not throwaway slop-propaganda no one wants to sit through, that will never be seen as timeless.

This will come as no surprise to readers here, as I’ve noted about the media’s subprime attention bubble and open disdain for users and the internet previously, not to mention ongoing promotion of Marxism. When your core product is a mix of ideological signaling, contempt for your own audience and “fiat news” optimized to be first/cheap instead of accurate, no one should be terribly shocked when the public eventually stops trusting them. It’s not a good situation for anyone, and I genuinely hope great reporters and publications help turn this around instead of fighting against anyone trying to at least do something different.

Since it’s a self‑inflicted wound, it is fixable when the sector wants to have an honest assessment of its practices. That would mean: stop chasing low quality clicks and attention, stop treating the open internet as a threat rather than a core distribution channel, and actually reward reporters who get things right over time instead of those who “go viral” or generate outrage.

On the other side of the trade that should also care about this loss of trust, marketers working on ads supporting the media need to address major issues too. If you keep funding low‑trust properties with junk metrics, user-hostile environments and allocate to spam operations, you’re doing something worse than simply wasting money: you’re helping extend the time institutions act in a way your customers already told you they don’t believe in. We should all encourage them to improve instead.

While the continued trend of loss of trust in this institution is real, and concerning, it does also present an ongoing opportunity for people reading this. If you are an honest broker, if you are willing to treat your audience like adults and do genuinely great work, it’s never been a better time to start a media brand. While you can’t replace entire newsrooms (which we still need, and we hope they do better and rebuild trust) it’s still a blue ocean to seek truth without trying to please certain ideologies or use cheap shortcuts.

The way to proceed is: be honest, correct yourself publicly when you miss, resist low quality/spam tactics, and don’t secretly hate the people you’re talking to. In a landscape where over half of Americans say they don’t have much confidence in journalists, anyone willing to build a high‑trust audience over years instead of chasing cheap short-term attention can play a better game.

For most of human history, babies slept near their mothers. Not because of a theory. Not because of a study. Because in social mammals, the cries of a helpless infant reliably trigger caregiving responses in nearby adults. It’s a natural, deeply evolved behavior across much of the animal kingdom, particularly among mammals and birds (though not most insects).

Across cultures and centuries, from hunter-gatherers to agrarian villages to extended families in close quarters, infants were attended to when they cried. Sometimes immediately, sometimes imperfectly, sometimes exhaustedly. But the baseline assumption was simple: a crying baby is a clear signal to soothe.

Then, very suddenly in historical terms, “we” decided this was wrong.

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as industrialization reorganized life around schedules, efficiency, and predictability, a new class of experts emerged to help families “modernize.” Among them was Dr. Luther Emmett Holt, whose book The Care and Feeding of Children became one of the most influential parenting manuals of its era. Holt advocated strict feeding and sleeping schedules. His advice to parents confronting a crying infant was blunt: “let them cry it out.”

Not because babies were manipulative. Not because parents were cruel. But because order had become the highest moral good, without questioning when it made sense to apply. Order for adults might be great. But babies are different.

Around the same time, John B. Watson, founder of behaviorism, extended this logic into psychology. Children, Watson argued, were not developing souls to be nurtured but systems to be conditioned. Too much affection risked dependency. Too much responsiveness risked weakness. His guidance to parents was famously austere: avoid hugging or kissing your child, a handshake would suffice.

It’s easy to caricature these men as villains, but that misses the point. They were not monsters. They were products of factories, of assembly lines, of a culture newly obsessed with control. Their ideas didn’t spread because they were obviously true. They spread because they fit the moment.

Some ideas are Lindy because they’re durably good. Others continue merely because someone made them up and they were adopted. For thousands of years, responsive caregiving survived because it worked. Babies who were soothed survived. Families who stayed attuned endured. No peer-reviewed journals required. The environment itself was the filter.

But the industrial age introduced a strange new force: theories that could temporarily outcompete reality. Ideas that sounded scientific, clean or optimized. Ideas that made life easier for systems, even if they made it worse for humans. “Let babies cry” was one of many of those ideas.

It solved real problems. Parents were exhausted. Nuclear families were isolated. Work schedules were unforgiving. The advice promised rest, structure, and authority: three things modern life was suddenly short on. And so it stuck, not because it had stood the test of time, but because it aligned with the incentives of the moment. This is the danger zone for expertise.

Unlike some other people, I don’t think these experts were intentionally evil. But expertise is contextual. It is downstream of tools, economics, and cultural pressures. When those pressures change, yesterday’s “best practices” can, without fanfare, become today’s bad habits.

What’s striking, in hindsight, is how confidently these ideas contradicted common sense. You didn’t need longitudinal data to feel that withholding affection felt wrong, against nature even. And yet, many parents deferred anyway. Because who were they to argue with “the science™.” This is how bad ideas persist: not forever, but long enough to matter.

Watson’s own family life later became a tragic footnote. Several of his own children struggled deeply and one even died by suicide. The irony is hard to ignore: the man who warned against affection left behind a legacy that raises uncomfortable questions about what happens when theory outruns humanity.

These ideas didn’t die fully, they were simply rebranded. Today, we use softer terms like “graduated extinction” and “sleep training methods.” The language is gentler, but the premise is the same: instinct is treated as something to be overridden in favor of optimization, across parenting, work, education, and health. It’s interesting how long these things can persist in our culture.

This post is not an argument against experts. But is an argument against expert supremacy.

Common sense is not anti-intellectual. It’s accumulated wisdom that survived without needing to explain itself. When an expert claim directly contradicts a behavior that has endured for millennia, that’s not a reason to panic, but it is a reason to pause, and most importantly, think for yourself.

Some ideas deserve their Lindy status. Others are temporary ideas that only seem permanent or official. The trick is learning to tell the difference, being able to think from first principles, and reject that which is clearly misguided.

We should hear what experts have to say about new discoveries, particularly when they have novel insights that might improve our lives, but still never outsource our judgment to them. Especially when their advice requires us to suppress something primal, relational, or deeply human. And most especially when it asks us to ignore signals we evolved to see or hear.

Progress isn’t about rejecting the past wholesale. It’s about keeping what worked, testing what’s new, and having the humility to discard what turned out to be a dead end, even if it once wore a lab coat. Doctors used to recommend certain brands of cigarettes. Hospitals do not practice bloodletting anymore. It was once recommended we eat sugar-filled cereals for breakfast. We get things wrong all the time (I still think the modern atheist movement is wrong, we are misguided putting deodorized industrial lubricants in so many foods, we should be cautious how domesticated we become as other examples). A really interesting thing is you will face pushback here, because everyone is so conditioned to worship expert supremacy. This is why we need a society with healthy open discourse, so we can debate things in earnest.

Of course, not every old idea is good and not every new one is bad. But when common sense and expertise diverge sharply, history suggests a simple rule of thumb: pay very close attention to which one has survived the longest.

“He who knows only his own side of the case knows little of that.”

—John Stuart Mill

Occasionally, a friend will tell me something along the lines of I “don’t talk about or promote liberals enough.” The subtext here is I never criticize conservatives. Don’t worry if you think this is you, I am not singling you out — more than one friend has said this to me before which makes it all the more interesting. The implication however is obvious: if you’re not evenly distributing critique, you must be biased, have some kind of agenda, etc (my only agenda is towards all of us having a better time here, to truth and reality, and achieving excellence).

Regardless, I find the framing odd and misunderstands both what I actually do and also what liberalism is supposed to be.

First, the technical claim isn’t true. I promote liberal voices all the time. I share links to and promote liberal ideas, podcasts and videos every day both in public and dark social directly to friends. Recently I even wrote an entire story recommending one of Ezra Klein’s podcast episodes as its sole content to my 15,000 subscribers. Klein’s arguably the most influential liberal thinker in America right now, shaping how educated liberals talk about politics, institutions, and tradeoffs. I vehemently disagree with him on certain things, as I do most people, because I have my own unique set of beliefs. This doesn’t stop me from sharing his ideas, or sharing ideas from conservatives who I also agree with and disagree with on certain issues. Everyone can do this, it’s not hard, and this would be legitimately liberal.

But this last paragraph is the boring part of this topic anyway, because it shouldn’t matter if I fulfill some imaginary quota of promotion (or critique). An actually liberal society revels in critique, it encourages it even.

Because liberalism — real liberalism — is supposed to be self-correcting. It’s built on doubt, pluralism, and revision. It’s never treated any sacred cow as beyond question. Mill, Berlin, Popper… the entire tradition comes from the idea that the truth survives pressure. Classical liberalism is a concept I’m pretty confident most of you subscribe to, whether you vote liberal or conservative in any election.

But what we have today increasingly looks a lot less like this sane variety of liberalism which very much embraces heterodox thinkers and ideas. You don’t get a new Hayek or Hume without people who are willing to dissent from orthodoxies of their time whether religious, political, or economic. Today’s leading liberals frequently feel more like managerial orthodoxy, that also constantly caves to extremist, unpopular ideas from activists who have infiltrated the party, some of whom even make it to senior governing positions. And that’s not a good sign.

If you look around, unflinchingly managerial state liberals run many of the institutions that shape elite opinion: media, universities, corporations, philanthropy, nonprofits, Reddit, even the top 50 Substack newsletters are pretty universally some strain of liberal/left. These aren’t some insurgent scrappy forces anymore. They’re the establishment. And when any worldview becomes institutional, stagnation follows unless it keeps its capacity for self-critique alive. When pushback is treated as some kind of betrayal, you simply get groupthink or worse. Honestly this is where it starts to feels more like a cult to me, or perhaps something like CCP light.

I am far from the only one to note all of this. That’s also why Tom Edsall’s recent New York Times column matters, which you should read if you haven’t. It isn’t some conservative polemic. It’s a sober analysis drawing on centrist and liberal thinkers — including Steven Pinker, Yascha Mounk, Matthew Yglesias, Noah Smith, and others — who argue that Democrats and liberal institutions have developed a serious credibility problem with the public. Poll after poll shows voters, including Democratic voters, describing the party as weak, out of touch, and obsessed with symbolic politics at the expense of material concerns. I looked around online and as usual, some people didn’t like these things were pointed out. More “don’t notice that” type commentary. But the reality is liberals cannot improve their popularity with normal people without first turning against the extremist, identitarian left who seem more psychotic than liberal. And given they are embedded within institutions, we can’t simply ignore them. Of note, I pointed a lot of this out after the 2024 election and find it interesting we’re still having this discussion.

Anyway, commenting here isn’t “attacking liberals.” It’s taking them seriously, because you understand how much they control what we see and hear in the creative marketplace, how our kids are educated, how the news is presented, etc. There’s a real case you could make that the party that actually listens to feedback from the public with an open mind deserves our trust, to drive culture, and win elections. And there’s also a case to be made the party which blocks out popular, moderate opinion and doubles down on crazy ideas deserves to lose all this. And yes, this part is very bipartisan. On so many topics open debate and discussion would have prevented us from getting to a point some kind of corrective action was taken that wasn’t fun for anyone. America wants to be sane and moderate.

What’s wild is how often even raising these ideas gets spun into a morality play about motives. Instead of debating what’s true, people want to psychoanalyze why you brought it up. The whole “why aren’t you harder on conservatives?” thing is a distraction, and a pretty revealing one. If your immune system attacks the critic instead of the claim, ask yourself why that is. Especially with people who don’t let the politics du jour control their moral compass.

My audience here for sure skews liberal. They don’t need another rundown of conservative critique, they’re swimming in that 24/7. What’s harder, and I think way more valuable, is asking whether liberal institutions are still behaving liberally. Do they still prize open inquiry over moral posturing? Do they still put individual rights before group identity? Do they still trust argument more than administrative enforcement? Do they believe biology and genetics are real? Are their personal relationships and family more important than their political tribe? Have their rank and file become openly antisemitic? Is there widespread fraud in their cities that goes ignored? Are they actively trying to censor online discussions? Do they still believe in boarders, or even countries as a concept? I could keep going, but it’s not great I even have to ask these questions in the first place.

I don’t think my politics are particularly controversial, they’re basically what any 1990s moderate liberal or conservative would’ve recognized. What’s shifted is the Overton window, not me. But somehow, that’s now read as heterodox, even risky. Which kind of proves the point.

Liberalism doesn’t die because someone from the right lands a punch. It dies when it forgets how to argue with itself. That’s what’s happening now, and that’s why people like me critique it. The political landscape isn’t that complicated by the way. If you want republicans to win, liberals should just keep being more extreme and pretend none of this is happening. If you want democrats to win, have them expel the extremists who promote anti-American ideals and act sane again like they did before the great awokening, when everyone mostly got along and the country was united. It’s not exactly brain surgery.

There’s a true story from the 1970s about a public university program that got shut down for doing something radical: changing people’s lives. Not by making them more employable or “market ready,” but actually nourishing their souls and opening their minds.

The Integrated Humanities Program at the University of Kansas didn’t preach or proselytize. No catechisms, no altar calls. It just asked students to do small, old-fashioned things: memorize poetry, read Homer and Plato and Dante slowly, learn folk songs, look up at the stars together with no telescope and no commentary, just quiet awe. Incredibly, it worked.

The students, many fresh from the anti-institutional haze of the ’60s, started converting to Catholicism. Others didn’t convert but found themselves wrestling with the kinds of questions that usually precede conversion: What makes a good life? What’s worth loving? What’s real, and why does it move me?

Administrators got nervous. Journalists started poking around. Investigations followed. Nothing was found, no evidence of classroom evangelism, but the program was quietly killed anyway.

The usual version of this story frames it as a culture-war clash: religion versus secularism, tradition versus modernity. But that’s not really the heart of it. The real scandal wasn’t religion. It was beauty.

Beauty, it turns out, isn’t neutral.

People pretend it is, especially in academia. Beauty’s treated like a decorative side dish: nice if you like that sort of thing, but ultimately subjective, maybe even suspicious or “patriarchal.” You can enjoy a poem, sure, just don’t let it tell you anything true. You can feel awe, but don’t trust it. You can sense transcendence, but keep it far away from “reality.” Meaning, we’re told, is something you must create, not something you stumble into or simply observe to be true. Everything must be constantly analyzed and deconstructed until nothing is left, and all joy is gone.

The IHP accidentally broke that rule. Its premise was simple, even naïve: that spending time with what is true, good, and beautiful actually changes you. That argument matters less than attention. That wonder comes before belief. The professors didn’t talk students into faith, they just handed them the kind of things people have loved for centuries and trusted that genuine love is never arbitrary.

That’s precisely what made the program dangerous.

Institutions that pride themselves on being “neutral” can’t handle anything that forms the heart as well as the mind. If students start loving the “permanent things,” as Russell Kirk called them, they get harder to manipulate. They stop worshiping novelty. They become less marketable and harder to sell to.

And here’s the unsettling part: those conversions weren’t a glitch. They were the system bumping into reality itself.

Stargazing isn’t purely physics. Poetry isn’t just words. Great books aren’t only relics. They’re tools for shaping attention, and attention is upstream of belief. When you train people to look steadily at what’s beautiful, you’re telling them that some things are worth revering. And once reverence enters, relativism doesn’t stand a chance.

That’s why the program didn’t die in flames. It died on paper. Restructured, defunded, absorbed. No scandal, no show trial, just death by procedure. The modern way of declaring something wrong without ever admitting it or giving it attention.

The lesson here isn’t that universities are scared of religion. It’s that they’re deeply uncomfortable with anything that hints meaning might not be negotiable. Beauty implies order. Order implies hierarchy. Hierarchy implies obligation. And obligation implies that freedom isn’t just doing whatever you want or subscribing to strange postmodern versions of reality, it’s aligning yourself with something transcendental and timeless. This is all similar to my previous essay on how the modern atheist movement is wrong, by the way.

All this is a chain reaction the modern university isn’t built to contain.

We live in a culture that wants the upside of beauty without the price tag. We want aesthetic pleasure without commitment, awe without authority, transcendence without transformation, functional institutions without morality. The IHP proved, unintentionally, that you can’t have one without the others. You can’t let people swim in beauty and expect them not to ask where it leads.

So the program had to go.

Not because it taught religion, but because it whispered that life isn’t just something to manage. That a soul set free can’t be demoralized. That once wonder and independence wakes up, it doesn’t stay politely within the syllabus.

This is why the story still lingers, it’s part legend and part warning. It touches something people instinctively know: that persuasion changes opinions, but love changes people. And once love is educated, once it knows what to love and what is exploitive, there’s no stopping it. And that “what” isn’t a political party or ideology modern academics tend to subscribe to.

Beauty converts people to a different set of beliefs way ahead of any doctrine. And any system that claims neutrality while quietly shaping desire will always fear the day desire wakes up and demands to know where it’s headed, or simply realizes the value system being promoted to them is at odds with our nature.

Today’s post is a quick reminder about something most everyone who reads or writes on Substack understands, but I continually see others outside this place do not. I’m writing today so I have something to point to people elsewhere. Maybe helpful for you to have in your pocket, too.

Modern debate is broken because people have retreated into specific positions and can’t see outside them. But, a well-rounded person deliberately exposes themselves to many viewpoints, not just ones that feel comfortable or flattering. Growth doesn’t come from staying inside echo chambers or completely locking yourself out of what half the country thinks, or worse, thinking those you disagree with couldn’t possibly ever be truthful. It comes from friction, curiosity, and the willingness to listen without immediately preparing a comeback.

Calm debate is a skill, and like most skills it takes practice. It means engaging ideas on their merits rather than attacking the person holding them. Ad-hominem insults are almost universally a sign that someone has run out of arguments, or never had one to begin with. Disagreeing respectfully doesn’t mean you’re weak, it means you’re confident enough in your thinking to defend a position without acting like a jerk or derailing the conversation to another topic. When did so many people become unreasonable, or think ideas different from their own are off limits? That’s not the liberal world I grew up in.

The main thing I feel is lost in modern discourse is the understanding that many issues genuinely do have multiple sides. In some cases, there may be data supporting more than one interpretation. In others, the disagreement persists because the issue isn’t empirical at all: it’s moral, cultural, or even quasi-religious. You can often tell when this is happening, because no amount of evidence or claim seems sufficient to move the conversation forward. If you yourself are unwilling to move on an issue even if additional evidence is presented, ask yourself why this is. It’s also telling if your position exists because of your personal upbringing, or something the “current thing” crowd believes. If you were raised well, the former is likely a better reason to hang onto it. Some ideas and beliefs should be held onto across time, and are worth re-litigating calmly, should the need arise. Also, understand that certain debate topics are perpetual (topics like God and if aliens exist). Know what kind of debate you’re in.

This is also where patience becomes essential. For ideas that feel obviously incorrect to you — ideas that seem extreme, irrational, or detached from reality — it helps to remember that mass belief systems don’t dissolve overnight. History offers plenty of examples. After the last person was hanged during the Salem witch trials, it took nearly 20 years for the people of Massachusetts to publicly acknowledge what they experienced was mass hysteria. At the time, the accusations felt real, urgent, and morally necessary to those participating. Clarity only arrived later, once distance allowed reflection. There’s a lot like this today, that if you are able to take a sober view you’ll see we will move past. I can think of a few areas this is true, as I’m sure you can too. But to some, even the suggestion something is a hysteria, or even just groupthink sends them into a tailspin. You should be able to consider this possibility too, and if you can’t, ask yourself why a few times until you get to an answer. Having friends and exposing yourself to ideas across the ideological and political spectrum is a strong immunization against this, by the way. This is also why open discussion matters, because it’s really only when some ideas are suppressed that we allow groups with strange beliefs to destabilize things. This is why calm and open discussion is so important, and I’m passionate about it.

Which brings us to emotional control, something that matters far more than most people want to admit. And this is absolutely a both-sides problem. If an opinion (or even simply seeing facts or statistics) sends you immediately into rage, mockery, or contempt, that’s a sign you’ve personally lost rationality. Being able to stay composed while discussing difficult topics is one of the clearest indicators of maturity and intelligence.

None of this is novel. It’s basic, almost boring, but worth repeating. Listen. Think. Respond thoughtfully. You don’t have to agree with everyone, but you should be able to understand them, be able to develop a mental model for those on the other side of a debate topic, and remain human while doing so. I really believe we can have better debate and discussion, if we decide we want that.

Over the past few weeks, two political earthquakes hit within days of each other: the sudden fall of Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela and the wave of protests shaking Iran to its core. At first glance, they look like unrelated stories (one about a failed socialist regime, the other about a theocratic one). But both point to the same deeper shift: ordinary people rejecting the ideological mash‑up that has quietly united parts of the Western extremist left for years, a kind of Marxist‑Islamist alliance built on shared opposition to “the West.”

This coalition had what they felt was a powerful narrative. Islamist movements denounced Western values and power structures. Post‑colonial theorists framed that critique as part of a global struggle against capitalism. And Western radicals found moral and emotional fuel in adopting those struggles, especially through the lens of Israel‑Palestine. The result was a loose transnational story about “resistance” that made Caracas, Tehran, and Gaza part of the same moral project.

But on the ground, that project is breaking apart. Venezuelans flooding the streets after Maduro’s removal weren’t cheering for some grand leftist victory. They were celebrating the end of a government that wrecked their economy and hollowed out their institutions while insisting it represented “the people.” Liberation, for them, meant freedom from the so-called revolution.

In Iran, the rupture is even more existential. What started as anger over inflation turned into open rebellion against the theocracy itself. These aren’t Islamists demanding reform: they’re young people, workers, families shouting for an end to a system that polices thought, gender, and belief. It’s a generational revolt against the very form of religious authoritarianism that Western radicals treat as an “authentic” alternative to Western secularism. If the left was actually with the people, they would be on the side of the Iranian citizens, not its oppressive government. But the extreme ones aren’t, and that kind of gives away the game.

So now we have Caracas and Tehran: two societies rejecting, in real time, both pillars of the supposed global resistance: failed socialism on one side, failed theocracy on the other. The “Islamo‑left” discourse built in academia and activist circles predictably is disconnected from the people it claims to champion. The hypocrisy, of course, is palpable.

And while all that’s happening, the moral attention economy that once glued this alliance together, above all, the Israel–Palestine issue, is losing its centrality. After a year of saturation coverage, attention is fragmenting again. There’s only so long you can power an ideology on outrage and propaganda alone.

None of this means radical leftism is done, or that solidarity movements vanish overnight. But it does mean that movements claiming to speak for “the global south” are being tested by the actual south, and the results don’t match the theory. Real change isn’t happening in seminars or solidarity statements. It’s happening in the streets, where people are saying, clearly, they want something much simpler: dignity, competence, freedom.

Caracas and Tehran are reminding the world of a lesson every movement eventually learns: you can’t build an ideology that outruns the people living under it.

A friend pointed me to a story of when The host of This American Life once tried to raise a pit bull with his now ex-wife that I think is worth sharing, as there’s some important broader lessons for our society.

This isn’t a made up tale or internet rumor. Ira Glass has talked about it himself repeatedly in interviews that are painful to read in retrospect. Painful because it’s so obvious what’s happening, and was also all so avoidable.

Ira’s wife, Anaheed, had owned a pit bull before they were married. Sadly, that dog died shortly before the wedding. It had been a rescue, so they decided to rescue another. The main motivation here was about doing what they felt was the right thing.

The new dog came with the name Marley, what Ira later called its “slave name” and they renamed him Piney. Almost immediately, Piney began exhibiting “allergies” to his food. To find a solution, one vet became two. Two became four. Soon, Ira and his wife were spending more time cooking for the dog than for themselves.

And here’s where the pattern becomes impossible to ignore: Piney appeared to develop allergies to every new meat he was given. Chicken, beef, lamb, no good. Piney cycled through a series of exotic single‑protein diets, including things like ostrich and bison. Ira had to take regular hour-plus trips just to source fresh, exotic meat for the dog.

At some point Ira admits he started fantasizing about what life might be like if he didn’t have Piney. He talks about the dog not as a pet, or even a responsibility, but as something helpless, dependent, precious. Something that required constant self-sacrifice.

But Piney wasn’t simply “high-needs.” Piney was violent.

He attacked people arbitrarily. He broke skin. He went in for serious bites. Ira knew this, and still referred to them as “nips.” Trainers were hired. Medications were prescribed. Piney ended up on anti‑anxiety and psychiatric pharmaceuticals while excuses multiplied and their justifications calcified.

Listening to Ira describe it, he sounds like an abused partner. The dog controlled his life. He couldn’t leave for long. People couldn’t come over, his social life collapsed, his home became a hazard. And yet, he kept explaining it away.

What’s especially striking is that this dog did not even appear to love Ira. It may have bonded with Anaheed, but it saw Ira as a threat, an aggressive male who shouldn’t be near his own wife. The dog was not misunderstood, it was not misjudged, it was doing exactly what it was wired to do. Biology and genetics are real things, combined with how the previous owners had treated it.

Eventually, Ira and Anaheed divorced. In a later interview, he confirmed what’s obvious to any outside observer: Piney contributed to the marriage failing.

From the outset, the entire project was delusional. Ira and his wife didn’t actually adopt a dog, they adopted a cause. They wanted to prove that pit bulls were unfairly maligned. That with enough love, enough care, enough sacrifice, you could redeem a creature the world had decided was bad.

Why they believed this is easy to guess. They were addicted to the feel-good narrative. The story where they were the good people, protecting an innocent underdog, rescuing a sweet, misunderstood animal from a cruel world that hated it for no reason.

But that story wasn’t true. They weren’t saving Piney. Piney was destroying them.

As others have noted about this story, it is incredible to watch a man who is so perceptive about culture, media, and human behavior become completely blind in the face of his own moral vanity. Any rational person should have put the dog down or found an aggression-experienced animal rescue. Instead, Ira and Anaheed sacrificed their time, their relationships, their peace, and ultimately their marriage.

And they’re not unique. Many people whose kids get mauled, whose neighbors get attacked, whose lives are permanently altered are in this same situation. They have misplaced compassion for something that cannot be rehabilitated. They refuse to accept that some animals have earned their reputations and are simply not good pets.

The lesson is this: Ira and Anaheed were addicted to the feel-good notion that they were protecting an innocent animal, saving its life from a world that hated it. But really, it was simply ruining their life. They let their empathy be exploited. You have to understand, some things are just not compatible with civilized life. And without the strength to know this in earnest, and take appropriate action (or hopefully make the right decision before action is needed) you are not a fully mature adult.

There’s some broader lessons from this story at the civilizational level, by the way. A major one is it’s clear some people have no limiting principle in terms of tolerating crime or bad behavior, because they think they are morally required to live like that. This even extends to judges who release violent, repeat offender criminals who then go out and kill someone which is a recurring pattern in America. "Three strikes and you're out" laws get a lot of pushback, but the approach is essentially correct. The goal should be to remove super-predators from society forever, but to give one-time criminals a stern and decisive warning. There’s more. I’m sure you can think of them.