Astral Codex Ten

Hillary Clinton

82 min read

Hillary Clinton

Article

Hillary Clinton is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 14 times across 14 issues between March 10, 2021 and January 21, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “Ted Cruz said he was against Hillary Clinton’s “New York values""; “Trump administration does not initiate extra prosecution of Hillary Clinton”; “Consider: Hillary Clinton, a historic first woman candidate”. It most often appears alongside Trump, Donald Trump, Joe Biden.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 14
  • Issue count: 14
  • First seen: March 10, 2021
  • Last seen: January 21, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Trapped Priors As A Basic Problem Of Rationality
March 10, 2021 · Original source
I want to tie this back to one of my occasional hobbyhorses - discussion of "dog whistles". This is the theory that sometimes politicians say things whose literal meaning is completely innocuous, but which secretly convey reprehensible views, in a way other people with those reprehensible views can detect and appreciate. For example, in the 2016 election, Ted Cruz said he was against Hillary Clinton's "New York values". This sounded innocent - sure, people from the Heartland think big cities have a screwed-up moral compass. But various news sources argued it was actually Cruz's way of signaling support for anti-Semitism (because New York = Jews). Since then, almost anything any candidate from any party says has been accused of being a dog-whistle for something terrible - for example, apparently Joe Biden's comments about Black Lives Matter were dog-whistling his support for rioters burning down American cities.
Inline links: one of my occasional hobbyhorses, various, news, sources
Mantic Monday: Grading My Trump Predictions
April 19, 2021 · Original source
41. Donald Trump remains President at the end of 2017: 90% 42. No serious impeachment proceedings are active against Trump: 80% ***43. Construction on Mexican border wall (beyond existing barriers) begins: 80% 44. Trump administration does not initiate extra prosecution of Hillary Clinton: 90% ***45. US GDP growth lower than in 2016: 60% ***46. US unemployment to be higher at end of year than beginning: 60% 47. US does not withdraw from large trade org like WTO or NAFTA: 90% 48. US does not publicly and explicitly disavow One China policy: 95% 49. No race riot killing > 5 people: 95% ***50. US lifts at least half of existing sanctions on Russia: 70% 51. Donald Trump’s approval rating at the end of 2017 is lower than fifty percent: 80% 52. ...lower than forty percent: 60%
In SSC Endorses Clinton, Johnson, Or Stein I wrote about my reasons for opposing Trump. There's a lot in here and I'll try to extract relevant-prediction-shaped things - but be sure to read the post to see how honest you think I'm being in my extractions.
Inline links: SSC Endorses Clinton, Johnson, Or Stein
Needless to say, none of that happened. White supremacist activity in the United States never went beyond normal levels. After Charlottesville, the media tried to convince everyone that this was the promised spike in white supremacist activity, but it wasn't: there had been a bunch of white supremacist rallies larger than the Charlottesville protest throughout the Clinton, Bush, and Obama presidencies - the media just hadn't signal-boosted them as hard. 500 Nazis rallied at Lake Tahoe in 1996; 125 at Yorktown in 2005; 2000 in Budapest in 2009. Charlottesville's couple hundred were kind of par for the course - and all of these numbers are around the same number of people who eg attend Satanist rallies. After Charlottesville there were no further large white supremacist rallies, with an attempted Charlottesville II attracting about 20-30 people.
Inline links: at Lake Tahoe in 1996, Yorktown in 2005, in Budapest in 2009, attend Satanist rallies, attracting about 20-30 people
The Rise And Fall Of Online Culture Wars
May 10, 2021 · Original source
I'm not sure when racial issues completely eclipsed gender-related ones, but it must have happened by 2016. Consider: Hillary Clinton, a historic first woman candidate. Her opponent, Donald Trump, a man who has been accused of sexual misconduct by "at least 23 women since the 1980s", and who was caught on tape saying he liked to "grab [women] by the pussy". While this angle wasn't exactly ignored, it took obvious back burner to a massive and coverage-dominating debate over the possibility that Trump might be racist, based mostly on his position about immigration plus a few ambiguous remarks that he later denied meaning.
The term rose to prominence on August 26, 2016, when Hillary Clinton gave a major speech declaring the online alt-right to be a growing threat. This was obviously a ploy to link her opponent, Donald Trump, to a growing threat, but the ploy worked, and everyone agreed they were threatening.
I'm not sure whether white supremacy became more popular in 2016, or whether the percent white supremacists online has always stayed constant but people got more interested in them. After 9/11, we heard about every single Muslim terrorist group in the world, and every Muslim group that seemed like it might be sort of terrorist-adjacent, and every Muslim who seemed likely to found a group that might be sort of terrorist-adjacent. It wasn't obvious that there were any more Muslim terrorists than before, but Muslim terrorism was suddenly getting 100x or 1000x as much airtime. Hillary Clinton and the growing racial turn might have done the same for online white supremacy. This would explain what I consider one of the great mysteries - how come as soon as anti-racism became more popular than feminism on the left, the MRAs vanished and we got the alt-right instead on the right?
California Gubernatorial Candidates From Z to Z
May 24, 2022 · Original source
#Progressive #antiwar #AntiNazi #Democratic (socially #Libertarian!) / #LOVEparty! #Abolitionist pro-#democracy #candidate for #president! (I've been working last 3 years on filing Supreme Court case , just filed 6/24/19, but have to refile in next few days!, to make #Hillary Clinton president, b/c #SheWon, but LOST case on Oct. 15, 2019, w/ J. Roberts NOT voting b/c I was suing him f/ swearing in trump, originally suing to block him from swearing in trump b/c he lost to Hillary Clinton by 3m votes, so not who we elected f/ president, so should have sworn in Hillary!!!)!
Update: Hillary Clinton has hinted she now has changed her mind and supports arming police with military weapons, but only to fight terrorists. So, all her experience led her to the wrong conclusion on this issue until police proved they needed to use combat weapons and armor in the recent murders of police in Dallas Texas, which we all still mourn. so, i don't want to hear how my "lack of experience" should prevent me from holding office, when i am right consistently on issues that save lives, and Hillary (and trump certainly!) are wrong on issues that would kill so many here and abroad
22
October 18, 2022 · Original source
An "art dealer . . . lifelong philanthropist and activist focusing on promoting women's and LBTQ+ rights...on the board of a nonprofit organization founded by Hillary Clinton"
Inline links: An "art dealer
My California Ballot 2022
November 04, 2022 · Original source
This got me thinking: I make fun of Gavin Newsom a lot. I say he has no characteristics except good hair and the ability to pander to every interest group the exact right amount. But Newsom is favored as the Democratic nominee in 2024 if Biden chooses not to run again. Why? Usually people who become a major party candidate for President have some positive quality that has helped them get that far. Donald Trump is a master showman and figured out how to tap a vein of populist anger no one else could. Joe Biden has folksy charm and 75,000 years of experience in the Senate. Hillary Clinton had stratospheric name recognition and the support of the Democrats’ best political machine. If Gavin Newsom becomes President, or even a nominee, to what will we attribute this? I have lived in his state for four years now and I am baffled. He is a mystery, a gaping void where a candidate statement and photo should be, certain of victory with no explanation.
Inline links: make fun of Gavin Newsom
Highlights From The Comments On The Media Very Rarely Lying
January 11, 2023 · Original source
Did anyone in your family (as per your best guess) die of COVID vaccine side effects? I got 917 responses so far. On Kirsch’s original poll, the answers were 3.5% and 7.9%; on my survey, they were 6.8% and 0.9%. I think my higher rate of COVID deaths was because I carelessly changed “household” to “family”, which includes eg extended family. But why did I get so many fewer vaccine deaths? Looking at these people's other responses, they did not show a consistent tendencies to make things up or say outrageous things (except for one who listed their religion as “Satanist”). That having been said, they did have an atypical response pattern; most ACX readers are white male Westerners, but these people were 38% female, 38% nonwhite, and 88% non-American. Highest degree was 12% high school, 25% college grad, and 63% postgrad; IQs were listed as extremely high, just like everyone else who gives their IQs on my survey. Politics were significant for 25% Marxist (otherwise a rarity in my survey), but otherwise typical, and did not lean right-wing. They were slightly, but not overwhelmingly, more likely to distrust the media and dislike strong COVID responses than other survey respondents. Overall I don't feel like I learned too much from examining them. The survey is still open (take it now if you haven’t already!) and I'm hoping to get more data on this later. 5: Comments Pointing Out Very Clear Examples Of Media Lies Several people agreed with the wider point, but tried to find a counterexample - a media lie so explicit that nobody could ever deny it. Some people noted that the term “fake news”, when invented in 2016, was originally applied to a very specific kind of fake article, often from weird Macedonian article mills, that were saying utterly fake stuff in a way that even Infowars didn’t. Robert Stadler: This was what was interesting about the phenomenon of "fake news" during the 2016 election, before that term was successfully hijacked by Donald Trump to mean "news stories I don't like." There was a wave of what looked like news articles, spread largely via Facebook, that were entirely fictitious. The people writing those "articles" were not journalists and were not trying to be journalists. They made up the stories out of a mix of rumor and complete fabrications, either for political purposes or just as click-bait (this has never been entirely clear to me). It's unfortunate that the term "fake news" has been so thoroughly tainted, because the existence of those articles was genuinely noteworthy, and it's now harder to talk about them . . . I don't remember any myself (since it's been 6 years), but here's a study which has some specifics - http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf After some searching, Benjamin Jest (writes As Fair A Name) was finally able to produce a specific example - Nancy Pelosi Hanged At Gitmo - which does, indeed, claim that leading US Democrat Nancy Pelosi was hanged at Guantanamo Bay for “treason and conspiracy” on December 27, 2022. It seems to suggest that the order was given by Donald Trump, who is still President, and that Hillary Clinton had already been executed in the same manner in April 2021. I will admit this is definitely an example of a “news source” making things up rather than just stretching the truth. The source, RealRawNews, claims on its About Page to be a “parody site”, but this outside article about them says they go back and forth between claiming to be a parody and claiming to be real. Some of their claims are more plausible than the Gitmo one - for example, that many Air Force pilots were resigning because of the COVID vaccine mandate - but equally false. They seem to go back and forth between “things that some conservatives might believe to be true” and “things that are obviously false but maybe gratify conservatives’ id”, adding or subtracting the “parody” label based on which one they’re doing at the time. It’s a fascinating business model, and I guess the term “fake news” fairly applies to it. Yug Gnirob writes: I don't know how to find them, but I definitely remember several completely fake articles about Trump during and immediately after the election. One of them was him citing "an ancient law" that prevented President Obama from doing... some liberal thing, I don't remember what. The most memorable one was immediately after the "Muslim Ban", where they claimed it had resulted in the arrest of a high-priority terrorist on day 1. I feel like that one showed up on one of the fact check sites, but I'm not seeing it on Snopes. I remember Stephen Colbert reporting the articles had been tracked down to a couple of Macedonian teens, who had discovered that writing fabricated pro-Trump articles was an easy way to make money. 6: Comments Making Other Claims Of Media Lies And Misdeeds — Beowulf888 on the LA Times and COVID: Well, there are media outlets that propagandize—but I think it boils down to if it bleeds it leads. Most corporate media outlets have the economic incentive to increase the readership by grabbing one's attention with scary headlines and articles. The perfect example of this phenomenon was in April 2020 when the LA Times interviewed an atmospheric chemist at Scripps. She made the claim that SARS2 virus particles in sewage were being carried back to land by sea spray. The reporters and editors uncritically relayed her comments as if she were an expert with the same credentialled expertise as a virologist or epidemiologist. There are numerous reasons why this would be very very low on the threat level even with what little we knew about the SARS2 virus at that time. This story was picked up by the media everywhere, and county health officials (either because there was public pressure to do so, or because they really believed her) shut down beaches up and down the coast of California. Did the LA Times and the news media really have any motivation to promote the closure of public beaches? I can't imagine they did. But they did have a scary headline that would promote readership and spread LA Times as a news source. Some weeks later the LA Times did a retraction, but by that time it had entered the popular imagination that beaches were a potential vector for COVID infection. I’m developing an allergy to the word “uncritically”. Being able to fact-check scientists is a rare skill - I’m not surprised nobody at the LA Times had it ready to deploy for this exact article. — Mike Mulligan writes: The pushback is largely because you are doing a false equivocation between the New York Times (who you hate and have a vendetta against) and Infowars (who you are pretending does basically the same thing as other outlets). And you know this, but on your own metric it won't count as a lie, because you just selectively misrepresented things. On the two articles in this series, I’ve included phrases like “This doesn’t mean these establishment papers are exactly as bad as Infowars; just that when they do err, it’s by committing a more venial version of the same sin Infowars commits” and “Again, my goal here isn’t to . . . say NYT is exactly as bad as Infowars” and tried to explain the exact way that two things can both commit a similar error without one being exactly as the other (Hitler and someone who shot a robber in self-defense both committed a similar action called “killing people”, but this doesn’t mean they both killed exactly the same people with exactly the same level of justification). Still, I got numerous comments getting angry at me for saying that I was calling NYT exactly as bad as Infowars, and saying I was being deceptive / lying because of this. This is why I’m so convinced people are erring on the side of too mistrustful - you can fill your articles with sentences about how you’re not claiming X, and people will still find ways to accuse you of lying because you said X. — Garrett writes: [The way Infowars covered Obama’s birth certificate] isn't any different from eg. mainstream media coverage of anything which involves firearms. They make (or promulgate) so many stupid technical errors I've stopped paying attention to them at all. They could have 1 person on staff who's responsibility is to understand firearms and run everything past them. But they don't. To what should I attribute this continual stream of errors? Is mainstream media coverage of firearms honestly flawed? Is it “reckless disregard for truth?” Is it a “lie of egregious sloppiness?” I think your answer to this question will depend more on how bad you want to accuse the mainstream media of being, relative to other forms of media, than on how you define these inherently slippery terms. — Jeremy Goldberg writes: There's an outright lie right now on the Washington Post homepage. A caption above a graph showing the inflation rate over time states, "Elevated prices coming down, annualized rate shows." The chart shows the current inflation rate is 7.1 percent, down from a high of around 9 percent. Elevated prices are not coming down at all. They just aren't elevating as fast anymore. I asked Jeremy to guess the probability that this was an honest mistake vs. malice. He said (thanks for giving a clear answer!) 60-40 in favor of malice. I think this is pretty high, given that I had to read Jeremy’s comment several times before I realized what the error was supposed to be, but I’ve already said I lean towards the “all the rest of you are extremely paranoid” side of things. — Jiro writes: I opened a thread on dsl: https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,8430.0.html People brought up several examples there. You can read the thread. One of the more famous examples was saying that Kyle Rittenhouse crossed state lines with a weapon. There are also a bunch of cases where the media says there's "no evidence" for something that has evidence. Someone also brought up your own example of people "tested for drugs" when they were actually just asked if they used drugs. I would count that as an outright lie, even though you don't. I disagree that being asked if someone used drugs is a "test". Oh god, if saying there’s “no evidence” for something counts as a lie, then every media source in the country stands hopelessly condemned. I did write an article (here) on what the people who use that phrase might be thinking (if you can call it that). I agree the Rittenhouse situation was pretty egregious, though commenters bring up that since he went across state lines and had a weapon, it wasn’t unreasonable for people to assume he brought the weapon across state lines. Still, you wonder whether news sources would have repeated reasonable-sounding-but-didn’t-actually-check slanders about someone they liked. I do think this is a good antidote to some of the “mainstream media is actually very careful and fact-checks everything in their original reporting” takes in the comments section. — David Riceman says: How about Richard Landes's new book "Can the whole world be wrong?" about the many lies in the cognitive war against Israel (e.g. Muhammad Al Dura) See his discussion here for why he thinks this is a good example. — FractalCycle writes: I'm collecting examples from other people, will post ones that seem like real counterexamples as I get them. Here's one from recently: https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jsByfxvNA4x23stLY/a-letter-to-the-bulletin-of-atomic-scientists Yes, I included this issue with the Bulletin Of Atomic Scientists in my last links post, and they really do come out looking very bad here. See here for more discussion. — Hank Wilbon (writes Partial Magic) writes: I think the false Rolling Stone story a decade ago about the frat gang rape counts as the media explicitly lying, particularly as Rolling Stone is historically known for good fact checking (It is a plot point in the movie Almost Famous), however I think that counts as a "very rare" case and that Scott's claim is correct. I asked “Why? A woman said she had been raped, and Rolling Stone believed her. The woman was making it up, but Rolling Stone wasn't” and Deepa commented “Isn't it the job of a reporter to investigate? And be good at it?” I don’t want to pick on Deepa, but this is what happens when you have an overly expansive definition of “lie”! — TorontoLLB writes: The most straightforward counterexample I can think of is the NBC manipulation of the George Zimmerman 911 call. For example this: "The 9-1-1 operator then asked: "OK, and this guy, is he black, white or Hispanic?", and Zimmerman answered, "He looks black." was changed to: ""This guy looks like he's up to no good. He looks black." In another segment they combined completely separate parts of the call to create an audio clip that presents him as saying ""This guy looks like he's up to no good or he's on drugs or something. He's got his hand in his waistband, and he's a black male." There was other bits of reporting from the major networks that appear to be closer to fraud than selective amplification or choosing what not to report. Enough so that in Twitter threads asking people how they got "red-pilled" person after person refers to the media response to the incident. I haven’t looked into this and I can’t confirm or deny that this is true. I hope everyone finds at least one of these comments obviously fair, and at least another obviously unfair, in a way that encourages you to think more about these issues. 7: Other Comments — Paul writes: What's funny is the Weekly World News - the supermarket tabloid with headlines declaring Bigfoot had been found, and married to a local man's sister!; JFK was still alive, etc. - would pass muster under this analysis. They always had sources report stories to them. Those sources were just batshit crazy. Their strategy was simply not to question them skeptically to poke holes in their story as an ordinary reporter/person would, but to encourage them - "Wow, really, a wedding; what was Bigfoot wearing?" I don't mean to entirely dismiss the distinction you make. But in insisting that not a single story - not even one of the most egregious stories by the most irresponsible, disreputable, of barely-extant publications - is a lie, I think you try to prove too much. In doing so, you retreat so far that you defend only a weak and emasculated position, not any of the broader or more meaningful points implicated by your piece. Thanks for this - I always wondered what those tabloids thought they were doing, and for some reason this matches my model of human psychology better than my previous theories about “maybe they just made it up” - though I bet they do some of that too. — John Buridan writes: I used to have very low priors against conspiracy theories and so was willing to hear out the arguments at length and go back and forth for many weeks and months on a single theory. I would say my conspiracy theory expertise is in creationism and government conspiracies, especially ones involving either Catholicism or Judaism. And I'm okay on one's involving fluoridation, chemtrails, and GMOs etc. One of my housemates was a senior when I was a freshman in college gave me the Adobe illustrator birth certificate shtick, and we went through it together. We downloaded the birth certificate, uploaded it to Adobe illustrator, and saw the weird things. Then I went back to my day job where I was learning Adobe Illustrator. This is maybe 2 weeks later. And what do I find but that when I do this with any PDF, Illustrator renders it in the same janky way? Conspiracy dissolved. I grew up surrounded by people who believed conspiracy theories, although none of those people were my parents. And I have to say that the fact that so few people know other people who believe conspiracy theories kind of bothers me. It's like their epistemic immune system has never really been at risk of infection. If your mind hasn't been very sick at least sometimes, how can you be sure you've developed decent priors this time? Of course, this just all goes back to the dark matter beliefs of people in our outgroup. And the eternal question of where do good priors come from? How do some people's beliefs get so messed up? Thanks for this. I agree that a little bit of experience personally believing conspiracy theories, or knowing people who do, goes a long way. When I was a teenager, I flirted with a lot of pseudoarchaeology theories - think Graham Hancock, underwater pyramids, that kind of thing. I got better, but it left me with a visceral understanding of how people can genuinely believe weird things - not be lying about it, not be secretly making some kind of emotional point about how they hate the system, not be deliberately trying to be as sloppy as possible because you’re a bad person - just genuinely believe it because you tried to reason about it and failed. I think if you haven’t had that experience, then it’s really hard to understand people who have. 8: My Actual Thoughts I should probably try to say, as clearly as possible, what I think. It seems like all of these are different things: Reasoning well, and getting things right
Inline links: take it now if you haven’t already!, Robert Stadler, http://web.stanford.edu/~gentzkow/research/fakenews.pdf, Benjamin Jest, As Fair A Name, Nancy Pelosi Hanged At Gitmo, claims on its About Page, this outside article about them, writes, the LA Times and COVID, in April 2020 when the LA Times interviewed an atmospheric chemist at Scripps, writes, writes, writes, said, writes, https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,8430.0.html, here, says, here, https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/jsByfxvNA4x23stLY/a-letter-to-the-bulletin-of-atomic-scientists, here, Partial Magic, writes, writes, writes, writes
What Ever Happened To Neoreaction?
December 07, 2023 · Original source
The alt-right was originally a bunch of Stormfront type people who were not cool at all. But in 2016, Hillary Clinton gave a speech against them that sort of made them sound cool, and lumped them together with 4Chan in order to inflate their numbers. 4Chan was kind of cool, so the alt-right went from a handful of weirdos in jackboots to an umbrella term for any kind of weird edgy conservatism full of exciting young people. Also, they had the funny frogs.
The Psychopolitics Of Trauma
January 25, 2024 · Original source
I want to tie this back to one of my occasional hobbyhorses - discussion of "dog whistles". This is the theory that sometimes politicians say things whose literal meaning is completely innocuous, but which secretly convey reprehensible views, in a way other people with those reprehensible views can detect and appreciate. For example, in the 2016 election, Ted Cruz said he was against Hillary Clinton's "New York values". This sounded innocent - sure, people from the Heartland think big cities have a screwed-up moral compass. But various news sources argued it was actually Cruz's way of signaling support for anti-Semitism (because New York = Jews). Since then, almost anything any candidate from any party says has been accused of being a dog-whistle for something terrible - for example, apparently Joe Biden's comments about Black Lives Matter were dog-whistling his support for rioters burning down American cities.
Inline links: one of my occasional hobbyhorses, various, news, sources
Your Book Review: Real Raw News
July 26, 2024 · Original source
The lack of evidence that all this is happening is entirely explained through coordinated media silence as well as the widespread use of body doubles and clones. The heart of Real Raw News, and the source of most of its entertainment value, is its accounts of the supposed secret military tribunals occurring at America’s Guantanamo Bay Naval Base in Cuba, better known as Gitmo2. For more than three years, the site has produced one article after another describing the arrest, trial, and execution of dozens of major and not-so-major figures in American life. Hillary Clinton? Arrested, tried, executed. Bill Gates? Arrested, tried, executed. Dick Cheney? Fled the country via a secret underground tunnel to a CIA airfield, but then returned to America on vacation for some reason3, arrested, tried, executed. George W. Bush, Hunter Biden, Anthony Fauci, Gavin Newsom, Mark Milley, Victoria Nuland, Tom Hanks (?), Brian Stelter (???) – All arrested and executed, in turn4. Almost all defendants are hanged, which actually is not the method prescribed by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but has the advantage of being far more cinematic. It would be easy for all of this to get old, but like with variations in classical music, subtle differences to each iteration enrich the whole. Some defendants desperately try to deny responsibility for their crimes. Some arrogantly taunt the tribunal, assuming until the very end that they are untouchable. Some literally scream as though demon-possessed. Some fake senility or amnesia. But crucially, all of them face justice, one way or another. An entry published just before this contest’s deadline is a lovely example: Representing himself, [Fulton County Superior Court Judge Scott] McAfee in opening remarks talked himself into an early verdict. He said no one and nothing, not even imprisonment, would prevent him from destroying the Trump family. Handcuffed at the defense table, he glared at the panel and said he would topple the Trump empire, building by building, brick by brick, and wouldn’t rest until every Trump supporter was behind bars or dead. “Then I’ll take care of the people here and this place,” McAfee said. “Mr. McAfee, I’m told you are of sound mind and know where you are, right?” Admiral Stephens asked5. “I’m in a Kangaroo court in the Banana Republic of Trump, staring at a guy who couldn’t hack it in the real world, couldn’t run a private practice, get a partnership, or sit on a real bench, so he went into the military,” McAfee said. “Have you ever heard of Trump Derangement Syndrome, Mr. McAfee?” the Admiral asked. “Because you have the worst case I’ve seen, and I’ve seen several.” “Trump is finished. He’ll be in jail soon, and when he is, your house of cards collapses,” McAfee said. “It might seem that way, but it only seems that way,” the Admiral said. “You might as well find me guilty. I’ll never stop hating Trump and I’ll never stop working to demolish everything he stole. He was born guilty, and he’ll be guilty until the day he dies. That’ll be the only word on his gravestone: GUILTY!” McAfee shouted. The lead panelist, a Marine Corps major, politely interrupted: “Admiral, sir, we don’t have to hear any more. McAfee mocks this court, and we find him guilty of the treason charge. Additionally, we are in agreement he should hang for his crimes.” Admiral Stephens nodded contemplatively. “I side with these fine officers. Mr. McAfee, you are hereby sentenced to hang for treason against the United States of America.” His execution is scheduled for May 15. Yes, this is the judge of Trump’s criminal case in Fulton County. In the Real Raw News world, Trump’s various legal adventures are both real and fake at the same time. Apparently, Trump could completely ignore these proceedings, and the military in fact begs him to do so, but he chooses to place himself in danger from some unseen, Christ-like self-sacrificial motive. That motive, it appears, is getting evil judges to expose their bias by ruling against him, so that they can be arrested and executed for treason. The site often offers an alternative narrative regarding events in the official, Deep State-backed news narrative. When Colin Powell died, RRN was there to explain that he actually committed suicide, fearing arrest by the military. When former Tom Hanks co-star Peter Scolari died of cancer, RRN swooped in to attribute his demise to an unexpected military tribunal6. This pattern is one of the chief reasons fans cite for believing the site: Isn’t it incredible, they say, how some of the same people RRN reports the executions of just happen to have recently died or been hospitalized in the mainstream press? What are the odds? Perhaps surprisingly, the star figure in Real Raw News’s tapestry of blood is not Donald Trump; like Gandalf or Dumbledore, he is a heroic but distant and largely off-screen figure. Instead, the primary hero is Rear Admiral Darse Crandall, who dispenses lethal justice with shocking efficiency while always being ready with a good quip: Admiral Crandall ordered [Arizona Governor Katie] Hobbs not to intimidate the witness. “You lack decorum, detainee Hobbs, and your insouciance ends here. We revoke your right to further question this witness and ask the panel to render a verdict on the charges against you.” The admiral dismissed Jane Doe, and the panel unanimously found Hobbs guilty, recommending she hang to death. “I won’t let you do this to me,” Hobbs screeched. “It’s already done,” said Admiral Crandall. “And have a Merry Christmas—in whatever afterlife you wind up in.” He scheduled her execution for December 22. Adm. Crandall is in fact a real person, currently serving as Judge Advocate General of the Navy. Admiral Crandall seems like a nice and professional fellow, and I badly want to know what he makes of his alternate persona. I like to hope that he enjoys it; maybe he jokingly warns his subordinates to do their jobs right or else they’ll be arrested and executed. If anybody knows otherwise, please do not disabuse me of this fantasy. Lesser fake news auteurs will puke out lame one-and-done articles about the moon landing or JFK or whatever, with zero internal consistency. Baxter is better. His military tribunals are reported out in detail. Even the most minor figures receive dedicated articles for their arrest, their trial, and their demise, but the biggest names receive genuine weeks-long productions. Hillary Clinton’s tribunal spans five days, until damning testimony from her former aide (and lover) Huma Abedin sends her to the gallows. Former president Bush’s arrest and tribunal is a ten-part epic lasting nearly two months, and includes details that are eccentric even by 9/11 truther standards: Supposedly, the real death toll of 9/11 (which Bush orchestrated) was 7,000, but Bush deemed this number too high to win reelection, so the real number was suppressed and 4,000 families were silenced with enormous bribes that also served to stimulate the economy. Good thing all the plotting was caught on tape, or he might have gotten away with it. Baxter never rushes things. Remember how the Colorado Supreme Court tried to kick Trump off the primary ballot in late 2023? Lesser fake newsers might have had the entire 4-vote anti-Trump majority arrested at once, but Baxter is cannier. In his reporting, one justice was arrested immediately, but the other three went on the run , and took months to capture. As of this writing we’re still waiting for their tribunal. I hope it’s a barn-burner! Baxter knows that while crass wish fulfillment is easy, truly great stories need formidable villains. Amidst the many arrests and hangings of Baxter’s saga are cinematic setbacks. Sometimes, the Marines don’t get their man: [Biden White House Covid-19 response coordinator Ashish] Jha was five feet away from his vehicle when two Marines with an arrest warrant approached him, informing him that he was being placed under arrest on charges of mass murder. Jha erupted in laughter, saying, “You don’t even know who we are.” He exploded in a crimson fireball that blew his and the Marines’ bodies to bits throughout the parking lot. […] The Marines brought what remains they could to Fort Bragg, where medical examiners deduced that Jha was not Jha, but a clone in which someone had planted a subdermal detonator connected to HMX explosives. And then, there is the looming presence of RRN’s chief villain: Former U.S. President Barack Obama. Members of the deep state make a warped pledge of allegiance to “The United States of Ukraine” and to “one world under Obama.” Other arms of the deep state might be taken down, but Obama himself always lurks in the shadows, controlling and commanding. The occasional attempt to take him down runs into the kind of problems you’d expect: “Why?” Obama gurgled and died. Inexplicably, the body spontaneously combusted, starting at both hands and spreading to the arms and chest. Special Forces tried extinguishing the flames with sand and water, but their efforts were in vain—the flames were rapidly charring burnt flesh. “Check his feet,” the Special Forces lead, who had been trained to spot body doubles and clones, called out. They swiftly yanked off Obama’s socks and sneakers and saw he had flat feet, and that his sneakers had been augmented to fit people with fallen arches. They pulled down his pants; Obama had no genitals, a telltale indicator of cloning. The body became too hot to touch and was soon consumed by fire. Like Bob Ross, Michael Baxter has no mistakes, only happy little accidents. In late 2021, RRN reported on the conviction of the late Chelsea Clinton’s husband, Marc Mezvinsky. Being only a lackey in the Clintons’ plot to abduct children and sell them on the black market, Mezvinsky received a comparatively lenient life sentence. But wait! Two months later, Gitmo’s chaplain mentioned in passing that he had attended Mezvinsky’s execution. Eagle-eyed readers saw the discrepancy and cried foul. But Baxter didn’t miss a beat. When Baxter reported on the arrest of former Obama adviser David Axelrod, only to publish no follow-up, he had a ready explanation a year later: Axelrod had been executed without trial by being thrown out of an airplane, and it took months for Baxter to learn the truth. I’ll admit, I find Baxter’s efforts to maintain narrative integrity incredibly charming, given how they clash with the latent absurdity of the whole endeavor. Like most fictional universes, the Real Raw Newsiverse crumbles if you think about it too hard. If there are White Hat and Black Hat partitions of the military, how does military procurement work? How do newly-enlisted personnel know which faction they are joining? Do the two factions have separate recruiters? And when literally everyone carries a basic video camera in their pocket, and social media access is universal, how are major battles being fought on American soil with zero video evidence anywhere? At the meta level, the entire construct gets even sillier. The conceit of the site is that Trump has secretly left power to entrap his foes…yet then his allies go and blab the entire “real” story to an online blog. The cover for this is that the masses simply don’t believe it, but you know who would definitely know whether the blog is accurate? The Deep State! Yet despite this, in RRN lore sinister actors from Andrew Cuomo to Oprah are always caught off guard when Delta Force7 smashes down their door and zip-ties their hands for a one-way trip to Cuba. Okay, But So What? You might be tempted to think this is all irrelevant rambling into the void. But if you think that, you’re mistaken. The thing is, Real Raw News is popular. Really popular. It got more than 2 million page visits in January. It’s a lot more popular than this blog and even outdraws some established publications like The Nation. “Okay, views are views, but does anyone really believe this?” you may ask, perhaps derisively. Well, it falls to me to say that yes, yes they do. The typical RRN article gets hundreds upon hundreds of comments. And sure, a lot of them are “My mother is being paid $2,000/day working from home” spam, but most of them are not. Hundreds upon hundreds of comments are from readers grateful to Baxter for sharing the “truth.” Even more unsettling are comments from people who spot a problem with the occasional story, but still trust Baxter overall. Baxter has a donation page on Christian crowdfunding site GiveSendGo. It has raised more than $210,000 and donations continue to pour in on a daily basis. Sure, some donation messages clearly indicate people who are in on the joke…but many more do not. But I don’t just need to guess based on comments and donation messages. In this realm, I can appeal to personal experience. I work in the broader world of American right-of-center politics, and we encounter Real Raw News believers constantly. We get emails from people who confidently insist the public-facing news of the day is fake, and the truth about the events at Gitmo will soon be revealed. At public Q&A events, we’ve fielded questions from genuinely nervous and worried people, who complain about their friends losing hope and being blackpilled by the news, and want to know why there hasn’t been more effort to share what’s “really” going on. A friend of mine who served in the Trump administration has described attending parties where, when he mentioned looking for a post-admin job, he received knowing looks and wink-wink-nudge-nudge remarks from people signaling they knew what was “really” going on. Somehow and someway, a lot of people believe or half-believe or badly want to believe this stuff. And where a lot of people do anything, there are takeaways to be found! In my three-plus years of reading all news that is both real and raw, here is what I’ve found. Conspiracies Evolve Like Comic Book Lore In his review of the Alexander Romance, Scott remarked that figures like Alexander the Great or Hercules were, essentially, the pre-modern versions of Batman: Stories about them are a genre, with countless different variations and stylistic choices that evolve over time, with just a few set principles guiding all of them. The Real Raw Newsiverse, and other modern conspiracy theories, also function like comic book lore. Just like Batman, and just like Hercules, “Donald Trump” has become a genre. Fake news stories about him and his Deep State enemies have a few core premises (adrenochrome, pedophile cabals, there is a Plan and we should Trust It) but endless room for variation past that point. Fans of comic books, soap operas, or The Simpsons might be familiar with something TVTropes calls “comic book time.” Certain facets of a fictional reality are locked in place, and with the passage of time everything else is gradually retconned to maintain the status quo. In season 2 of the Simpsons, Homer and Marge started dating in 1974, in Season 3 Marge becomes pregnant with Bart in 1980 (after a date watching The Empire Strikes Back), and in season 4 it’s revealed that Homer missed the Moon Landing to listen to “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy.” Tragically, though, The Simpsons kept going past season 10, and if Homer was 18 in 1974 that would make him eligible for a full Social Security benefit today. So in 2008, the continuity changed so that Homer was in a Nineties grunge band just before marrying Marge8. The Simpsons writers have avoided rejiggering the canon since, but if they do, they’ll have to confront the fact that 30-something Homer and Marge are now millennials, and in a decade they’ll be members of Gen Z. You may live to see a Simpsons flashback episode about Homer and Marge living as hipsters in Brooklyn during the 2010s (truly, we live in cursed times.) But the same phenomenon exists in the world of conspiracies. Instead of a consistent, elaborate canon, what we have is a few story beats with a lot of customization and the occasional retcon. When Baxter first began posting his stories, a core part of the narrative was that Donald Trump still secretly had all the powers of the presidency and was still in command of the entire U.S. military command. Early articles promised that Trump’s apparent loss of office was only a temporary ruse, necessary to expose the worst elements of the Deep State, but that Trump’s triumphal return to power would take place by July 4, 2021. The national media might have put on a song and dance suggesting otherwise, but behind the scenes, loyal military forces were the real ones in control. This control even extended to the military helpfully house-sitting the White House and not letting Biden use it. Despite his illegitimate victory, Biden met an unwelcome surprise when he arrived at the White House on January 20. Instead of getting a ceremonial greeting, he and Kamala Harris were stopped by National Guard and U.S. Marines at the barbwire fence encircling the White House. The Marines informed them that the military had assumed control of the Executive Branch and instructed them to vacate the area. When Harris belligerently said, “Move aside, we’re president now,” the Marines locked the gate. […] To avoid shame and maintain an illusion of power, Biden’s people concocted a ruse, supported by his media allies, to deceive the American public into believing he had won a fair election and had moved into the White House on schedule. Inside Actor/Producer Tyler Perry’s 300-acre Atlanta estate sits a three-story stucco replica of the commander-in-chief’s residence, which he originally built as a set piece for a television show. […] Although the replicant White House is built to 80% scale, on television and in images it’s indistinguishable from 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. Biden and Harris have been using the facsimile to feign leadership and impose despotic rule on the nation. Of course, July 4 came and went, with Trump’s return nowhere to be seen, so the canon simply updated: In the new narrative, the military had been conducting a year-long election fraud audit on Trump’s behalf, the results were nearly ready for public release, and Trump’s return would simply be “swift.” But no swift return has transpired, and so as the 2024 election has approached, the lore has evolved in the direction of Trump authentically running in this election and simply reclaiming power by winning it. As time has passed, more subtle changes have had to pile up. Early on, RRN reported that Joe Biden was a brain dead semi-corpse being held at Walter Reed, and any public appearances by “Biden” were one of several actors. But after four years of Let’s Go Brandon, Biden himself has become a more popular villain, and so quietly references to his brain-dead status have disappeared. In the early days of RRN, the military was firmly behind Trump and any implication that Biden held the powers of commander-in-chief was a media-fueled sham. But as time has passed, Trump being the “real” commander-in-chief over a loyal military has evolved into a reality where there are two American militaries, a “White Hat” faction loyal to Trump and “Black Hats” loyal to Biden. Early stories implied the White Hats were more numerous, but recent stories have implied the opposite, with the White Hats an elite force that often wins battles decisively while badly outnumbered. A secret purge has gradually become a secret civil war, specifically one with frequent war crimes: White Hat forces in Maui have eradicated or repelled all but a handful of the felonious FEMA agents who began terrorizing the tropical paradise in the aftermath of the inexplicable blaze that razed Lahaina and surrounding towns in early August, a source in General Eric M. Smith’s office told Real Raw News. Since mid-August, United States Marines have fought with FEMA patrols in Lahaina, Kaanapali, Wailuku, Maalaea, and Pukalani, and the skirmishes resulted in the deaths of approximately 475 federal goons and, alas, 34 valiant Marines. The Marines died upholding the Constitution of the United States; the feds died trying to defend the criminal Biden regime. […] “The Marines died valorously,” our source said. “We ain’t taking FEMA prisoners from the rank and file, only the key players. General Smith made it clear it’s weapons-free. Those bastards know damn well they’re following unlawful orders, and they’ll pay the price.” I think the ever-evolving nature of conspiracies is actually pretty important to psychologically grasping their appeal. I have a friend who is a big believer in 9/11 Trutherism. He once compelled me to watch the documentary “The New Pearl Harbor,” an exhausting 5-hour film promoting 9/11 conspiracies. If one actually watches, one quickly discovers that a lot of 9/11 conspiracy theories are mutually exclusive, or at least don’t mesh well together: One conspiracy argues that fighter jets were intentionally diverted the wrong direction to keep them from shooting down the hijacked jets approaching New York, while another conspiracy suggests that United 93 was shot down, and it was all covered up. In some versions, the planes didn’t hit the Twin Towers at all. Sometimes Bush did it, and sometimes Israel did it, and so on. Similarly, in my career I’ve worked adjacent to people who, like RRN, were very hostile to Covid-19 shots. That hostility made them sequentially endorse wildly different assertions about how the vaccines worked. Sometimes, the vaccines contain heavy metals. Sometimes, they contain hydra DNA to turn recipients into partially non-human chimeras. Sometimes, the vaccines are a depopulation agent. Sometimes, they’re a mind-control agent, or a killswitch that can be activated by self-assembling nanomachinery. One viral documentary in 2022 claimed that Covid was caused by snake venom in the water supply, and that Covid vaccines were an additional dose of snake venom to keep people sick (all this, of course, because the snake is Satan’s animal). What stands out isn’t the silliness of these particular theories, but that I saw them sequentially endorsed by the same people. Some of these people are smart enough to notice inconsistencies, at least when they’re pointed out, so why don’t they bother them? To some extent, I think it’s for the same reason people don’t care that every Batman story doesn’t perfectly line up. Consistency isn’t the point! What actually matters is enjoying individual stories and the wider genre they fit into. Covid vaccine haters don’t think too hard about any specific story. Instead, they’re driven by a core impulse of “distrust the new vaccine that people I distrust are promoting,” and every conceivably story or tale that feeds that genre of thought is, for them, worthwhile. Similarly, Real Raw News fans don’t think too hard about any specific story. Instead, I think their core impulse is, ironically, profound disappointment in how the Trump administration failed to deliver. Trump shook up the American political landscape more than anyone in living memory, and promised sweeping changes to every level of American government, yet his actual administration proved rather disorderly, changed far less than was promised, and then lost power after one term. For many, this simply prompted a revision in how they saw Trump. But for others, the preferred response is to embrace a fantasy reality where Trump is a superhero. I actually think the reverse side of this explains things like the durability of Russiagate: If you’re a normal American liberal, everything Trump says is offensive and piggish, but to justify their level of disdain for them, many needed to elevate his evil to the level of treason, even if that never really made any sense. It can't just be that Trump is an egotistical jerk or a narcissist or whatever. He's got to be a traitor who's going to end American democracy. People Crave Extreme, Over-the-Top, and Underhanded Solutions. At the height of the French Revolution’s Reign of Terror, the Committee of Public Safety pushed through the Law of 22 Prairial. The law simplified the procedures of the country’s Revolutionary Tribunal by: Defining a whole heap of activities as criminal treason, including “creating scarcity,” disparaging the National Convention, “inspiring discouragement,” and spreading fake news.
Inline links: 2, Arrested, tried, executed, Arrested, tried, executed, secret underground tunnel, for some reason, 3, tried, executed, George W. Bush, Hunter Biden, Anthony Fauci, Gavin Newsom, Mark Milley, Victoria Nuland, Tom Hanks, Brian Stelter, 4, variations, entry, 5, committed suicide, 6, real person, Supposedly, arrested immediately, months, Sometimes, warped pledge, kind of problems, conviction, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!5uuY!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fcc5e8197-f02d-4221-9186-4bcc4f165c72_759x723.png, arrest, thrown out of an airplane, 7, more than 2 million page visits, this blog, The Nation., https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!EJFm!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F66137a9b-260a-4cfa-adf3-c02c069dabd9_712x351.png, donation page, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!AVfs!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F16499732-4a26-43a0-8cd2-9dc38d5c6ac5_971x306.png, review, “comic book time.”, in 1974, listen to “Yummy, Yummy, Yummy.”, in a Nineties grunge band, 8, take place by July 4, 2021, house-sitting the White House, “swift.”, civil war, snake venom in the water supply, Law of 22 Prairial
Making the sentence for all crimes identical: Mandatory death penalty9. As far as perfidious methods to deliberately destroy due process and engineer mass executions go, the Law of 22 Prairial is pretty much unmatched in human history. And yet: In the roughly two months of the law’s existence, about one-fifth of defendants were still acquitted! No such good fortune exists in Gitmo. The White Hats’ secret tribunal is a tribunal of blood. In three years of activity, as far as I know exactly one person has escaped conviction: Former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, freed after a direct intervention from Trump. A tiny handful of others have received decades-long prison sentences, but even they tend to meet bad ends. Bill Clinton received a life sentence, only to mysteriously die in prison, perhaps murdered by his daughter Chelsea, who wasn’t really his daughter, but nevertheless soon wound up executed herself. Not only does the rate of death sentences at Gitmo seem to exceed 90 percent, Baxter makes very little effort to portray the proceedings as fair or just. Upon arrest, instead of being read their rights, detainees are informed that they have no rights, and are instead “enemy combatants.” Yet despite being classified as “enemy combatants,” defendants are almost without exception charged with treason. The U.S. Constitution defines treason narrowly as levying war against the United States, or giving aid and comfort to its enemies, and requires at least two witnesses to the same specific act, but in Gitmo the label is invoked with a liberality that would make Robespierre blush. “Traitors” have been arrested and convicted for telling troops not to attend Trump rallies and for ruling against Donald Trump in court. Defense attorneys are denied access to evidence pre-trial, and many defendants get no lawyers at all. Trials work a lot like Phoenix Wright, in that at any point the three-officer panel10 can simply declare they’ve seen enough evidence and pronounce a conviction with death sentence immediately. In the case of former Tom Hanks co-star, this has happened within five minutes. Appeals are non-existent. The actual executions sometimes involve tormenting the condemned with fake escape attempts or pardons: The driver told Whitmer he needed to make a pitstop to grab her “exoneration paperwork.” Then Whitmer saw the clearing and the gallows and Vice Adm. Crandall. And the hangman and a Navy chaplain standing atop the gallows. “You lied to me,” Whitmer bellowed. “Minor error, not a lie,” the driver replied. […] The admiral instructed the hangman to flip the switch, and a second later, Whitmer was swinging from the rope, a guttural gurgling sound escaping her lips. She was officially pronounced dead several minutes later. “Another Covid queen out of the way,” Adm. Crandall said. During the treason trial of Hillary Clinton crucial evidence is provided by former campaign manager John Podesta, who accepts a plea deal for life in prison in return for testifying about Clinton’s child-trafficking activities. But after Clinton had safely been hanged, the military tribunal simply decided to revoke Podesta’s plea deal because, well, they felt like it. “Even though he’s not prosecuting Podesta’s case, Vice Adm. John G. Hannink made the decision to renege on the deal. He’s the one who offered it. The severity of Podesta’s crimes matched Clinton’s—a lot of stuff they did in tandem, together. When you think about it, there’s really no reason why he should get special treatment. He’s a sodomist [sic.]11. Before breaking the deal, he called Trump,” our source said. But Trump, our source noted, recused himself from the decision-making process, as he didn’t want his personal feelings of the defendant to interfere with military justice. […] “If the court wants him to hang, let him hang,” Trump reportedly said. As it happens, John Podesta was actually executed by firing squad. But hey, at least he got a trial. Sometimes, particularly evil members of the Deep State are simply beaten to death in their cells, or thrown overboard. The figure of Vladimir Putin is also a vessel for fans’ darker desires. Trump and his American allies, being properly heroic, at least take down their foes gradually. Putin’s Russians, on the other hand, live up to movie stereotypes. The Army … pulled the condemned from their cells 25 at a time, binding the criminals to logs staked in the ground and blindfolding them. They had received no trials, last meals, Last Rites, or final words. A firing squad taught them the consequences of vaccine adherence. The Army didn’t bother removing the corpses before lining up the next 25; they simply let the dead bodies flop to the ground and forced the next group to witness the ineluctable fate awaiting them, the outcome of their insouciance12. What to make of all this? Honestly, I’m not entirely sure, and the takeaway might simply be “Michael Baxter needs to mix it up to keep the site interesting.” It might also speak to the bewildering complexity of modern life and the desire for something simpler and more cinematic. As people sometimes complain, Nothing Ever Happens. But on RRN, the Happening is relentless and constant. The normal legal system is aggravatingly glacial, taking years to resolve cases and often imposing meager sentences when a case finally concludes. Most of one’s political enemies, even if they lose an election, simply lateral to a high-paying private sector job or at worst fade into obscurity. But in a real, raw legal system, evil is sniffed out with much greater alacrity; the bad people are so obvious and their crimes so glaring that they can be taken out extrajudicially with no worry about a miscarriage of justice. The apparently-complex conspiracy cinematic universes is actually appealing because it makes the world far, far simpler. The bad people are all maximally bad, deserving of hastily-dispensed maximum justice. Some of this is worrisome, too: If thousands of relatively ordinary people are willing to believe in ad-hoc military tribunals executing people with minimal due process for crimes like “ruling against Donald Trump in court,” that could be a sign that modern constitutional society is a more superficial veneer than one would hope. The World’s Laziest Conspiracy One of the most striking things about both Real Raw News and the Qanon movement it spun off from is that in some ways they are un-conspiracies. Your more traditional conspiracy, about the Rothschilds or the World Economic Forum or the Lizard People, tells you that normal political engagement is pointless, as all that really matters is confronting and defeating the hidden forces manipulating or controlling events. But RRN is a conspiracy theory that calls for total inaction. RRN believers don’t need to raise money or write letters to the editor or join political activism groups or even vote. The only thing expected of an adherent is to “trust the plan.” They aren’t even waiting for a promised future deliverance. Deliverance is, in fact, happening right now – merely off-screen. It’s actually funny to me that the (official) press freaks out so much about Qanon, and its potential to inspire violence. Qanon and RRN tell the public that whatever has them down and depressed shouldn’t, because it’s all fake, and there are unseen heroes protecting them in the shadows. Don’t worry, just have faith and know things will work out. Real Raw News is the opiate of the digital masses. Real Raw News is the exact sort of conspiracy theory that the Deep State, if it exists, should want to exist and be popular. It’s the sort of conspiracy that the Deep State, if it exists, might deliberately invent. Do I think that’s what happened here? Not at all – Real Raw News is way too much work for a government employee. Trump Will Never Die But what about five years from now? What if there were some technological change that would make it far, far easier to produce evidence of a sweeping conspiracy theory? That’s right, this review is actually about AI13. The rise of realistic artificial intelligence has created a lot of fretting about deepfakes, and it’s also created a lot of fretting about porn. Will young men really bother with the pain and difficulty and awkwardness of dating in real life, when they can just create a custom AI girlfriend to their exact specifications, then simulate sex with her using virtual reality? Will women bother with seeking out a boyfriend if they can use an LLM to give them perfect 24/7 empathy and emotional validation? Questions of sex and relationships are converging on Robert Nozick’s experience machine – will people still seek the real thing if artificial substitutes are increasingly realistic as alternatives? But for some reason, nobody is asking this about the news. Oh, sure, people have fretted that a deepfake video might smear a person’s reputation or swing an election. But as the AI revolution continues, a lot more becomes possible. Remember in 2022, when a homeless guy broke into Nancy Pelosi’s home and attacked her husband with a hammer? For a while, conspiracies flourished that Paul Pelosi was actually having some kind of erotic tryst with his attacker, and that police body camera footage might confirm this. The footage came out and, of course, offered no evidence of this. But now imagine a world where, on Twitter, an anonymous source claims that they have the real body camera footage, and it does show that Paul Pelosi was having a lovers’ quarrel with his attacker. The other, mundane footage is a deepfake, released by police to cover things up, or invented from scratch by the press or the Democratic Party or both working together. In this world, how many people end up believing fabricated proof of Paul Pelosi’s gay lover? And before you dismiss this as all totally ridiculous, remember that lots of people believed this story with no evidence at all. Many thousands of people have deluded themselves into thinking that Real Raw News is true simply because they badly want it to be true. It indulges their personal political beliefs, affirms the just-world fallacy, and lets them feel as though they possess “secret” knowledge of the world, simply by reading a blog nobody else takes seriously. But in a sense, all of us have a little of the Real Raw News believer in us. We’re prone to confirmation bias – we like reading stories and studies that confirm our pre-held beliefs, and we’re more likely to avoid or ignore those that don’t. Sometimes, we get too excited and fall for stories that are misleading, or out of context, or dishonestly presented. Sometimes, we have radically different interpretations of the same event caught on camera. Even if we know the world isn’t fair, we relish stories that let us pretend otherwise. So…how are those biases going to work when anyone can quickly create hyper-realistic looking “proof” for any story? Already, AI-fabricated images and videos are enough to bamboozle your mom on Facebook. Soon, they might be realistic enough to fool everybody without special training, and eventually they might be so realistic they can fool just about anyone. Right now, Real Raw News is a simplistic WordPress site that uses stock photos for its imagery. But with us approaching a future where intelligence itself is too cheap to meter, we may not be far from a world where every story, however preposterous, can have a convincing 4k video of it happening. Donald Trump can be president forever, with all the evidence one could ever want. Every day of Hillary Clinton’s military tribunal will have a full day of court footage, plus a condensed highlight reel for the people who want to skip boring legal procedure. Every Marine/FEMA battle in Maui will have authentic-looking combat footage. Every Gitmo execution will be proven through “leaked” bootleg recordings of gallows and firing squads. Imagine you are an ordinary, mildly engaged American citizen. You live far from the halls of power, you work an ordinary job, and whatever your feelings on political issues, you rarely see elections translate in a clear way to your own daily life. You might be interested in Washington, but Washington really isn’t that interested in you. Online, the world throws a million potential narratives at you. In some of them, the world is a confusing mess of moral gray areas. In others, the people you care about are winning. But in some narratives, you’re the hero, the people you like do good things, and the bad guys get what they deserve. The superficial evidence for all of these narratives is about equally convincing, at a glance. Look outside, and it’s hard to see the impact of any of the stories. Your entire understanding of reality is mediated through what sites you choose to read and what videos you choose to watch. As a politically marginal person, it won’t matter what you as an individual choose to believe. So, what happens if you choose to believe the story you find most enjoyable? And what if millions of others choose the same? 1 “Wait a minute, this is about a fake news website? Why is it in this contest?” Excellent question! To that, I offer several answers: A collection of fake news blog posts may as well be considered a long-running series of short stories, and I hope that we’d be allowed to review the collected short stories of an author even if they were never technically compiled into a book.
Inline links: 9, Jeff Sessions, received a life sentence, die in prison, executed herself, telling troops not to attend Trump rallies, ruling against Donald Trump in court, 10, within five minutes., tormenting, 11, firing squad, thrown overboard, 12, Nothing Ever Happens, 13, experience machine, 1
ACX Endorses Harris, Oliver, Or Stein
October 30, 2024 · Original source
The other tailwind is intra-party cohesion. Donald Trump spent the past eight years purging the Republican Party of people willing to stand up to him. The current head of the RNC is Donald Trump’s daughter-in-law. Meanwhile, the Democrats are delightfully unorganized, such that there are constant rumors that Joe Biden is trying to sink Kamala Harris, that Nancy Pelosi made some kind of horrendous blackmail threat to Joe Biden, and that possibly all of these people are part of a shadow war between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. I don’t believe any of it, but it’s pretty funny and less worrying from an ability-to-consolidate-power standpoint than what’s happening with the GOP.
I mostly stand by the reasoning in my 2016 post, Slate Star Codex Endorses Clinton, Johnson, Or Stein. But you can read a better and more recent argument against Trump’s economic policy here, and against his foreign policy here. You can read an argument that Trump is a dangerous authoritarian here.
Inline links: Slate Star Codex Endorses Clinton, Johnson, Or Stein, here, here, here
In Search Of AI Psychosis
August 26, 2025 · Original source
I’m not making fun of Kelsey or her daughter here. Something about this rings true to me. When I was eight years old, I wouldn’t have cared much what my parents thought either. But if the computer believed it, that would be a different story! II. In Search Of . . . Social Media Psychosis? In case you’ve been hiding under a rock for the past ten years: QAnon is a right-wing conspiracy theory. The most common version claims that liberal elites, especially Hillary Clinton, molest young children to extract an immortality serum from their blood. Donald Trump figured this out and is trying to stop them, but for some reason he can’t play his hand openly, so he has to pursue a roundabout strategy involving winning the Presidency and dismantling the liberal order from above. Everything that has happened in politics over the past ten years has been part of the shadow war between Trump and the immortal pedophile conspiracy. This is pretty crazy. But is it psychotic? And since it spread through sites like 4chan and Facebook, should we invent a new diagnostic entity, “social media psychosis”, to cover it? These are tough questions, but in the end we didn’t do this. I think this was partly because there was a pre-existing category, “conspiracy theory”, that seemed like a better fit. We concluded that “sometimes social media facilitates the spread of conspiracy theories”, but stepped back from saying “social media can induce psychosis”. And by “in the end we didn’t do this”, I mean “we absolutely did it, but forgot about it later.” I think now there might be several dozen subreddit moderators who could accurately describe their job as “witch webmaster who runs an online service giving advice to new witches”. And partly it was because there are so many crazy beliefs in the world - spirits, crystal healing, moon landing denial, esoteric Hitlerism, whichever religions you don’t believe in - that psychiatrists have instituted a blanket exemption for any widely held idea. If you think you’re being attacked by demons, you’re delusional, unless you’re from some culture where lots of people get attacked by demons, in which case it’s a religion and you’re fine. This is partly political self-protection - no psychiatrist wants to be the guy who commits an Afro-Caribbean person for believing in voodoo. But it also seems to track something useful about reality. Nietzsche wrote “Madness is something rare in individuals — but in groups, parties, peoples, and ages, it is the rule.” Most people don’t have world-models - they believe what their friends believe, or what has good epistemic vibes. In a large group, weird ideas can ricochet from person to person and get established even in healthy brains. In an Afro-Caribbean culture where all your friends get attacked by demons at voodoo church every Sunday, a belief in demon attacks can co-exist with otherwise being a totally functional individual. So is QAnon a religion? Awkward question, but it’s non-psychotic by definition. Still, it’s interesting, isn’t it? If social media makes a thousand people believe the same crazy thing, it’s not psychotic. If LLMs make a thousand people each believe a different crazy thing, that is psychotic. Is this a meaningful difference, or an accounting convention? Also, what if a thousand people believe something, but it’s you and your 999 ChatGPT instances? III. A Hidden Army Of Crackpots I have a family member who believes that the theory of evolution, as usually understood, cannot possibly work. He has developed an alternative theory called “noctogenesis” which patches Darwinism using ideas from the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, and he works on-and-off on various related books and papers. I have told him I suspect he might be a crackpot; he stands by his claims. It’s fine; when I got into the technological singularity and AI safety, lots of people suspected I was a crackpot, and I stood by my claims too. You’ve got to stand by your family members even when they’re slightly crackpottish. This family member is happily married, retired after running a successful business, and generally a normal likeable person. He has no signs of mental illness, and doesn’t talk about quantum evolution unless someone else brings it up first. There must be millions of people like him. Used car dealers with proofs of P = NP, dentists who think they’ve discovered something important about Mary Magdalene, math professors obsessed with destroying the moon. I’m working on evaluating ACX Grants, and these people are out in force. A few propose literal perpetual motion machines. Others have vaguer plans, like some kind of social media app (it’s always a social media app) that will cause world peace. Many of them have decent jobs and seem like upstanding members of society. Their secrets are known only to themselves, their family members, and their would-be grantmaker. …and, increasingly, their chatbots. After years of hiatus (or at least not talking to me about his work) my family member is back on the quantum evolution beat, and LLMs appear to be involved. If I knew him less well, I would think the LLM had caused the quantum evolution theory - but no, it just made it much easier to research and write about. Is this psychosis? The answer has to be no, but it’s once again hard to draw the line. A very small number of crackpots will be vindicated by history. A larger number will be erroneous but sympathetic - the official account of the Kennedy assassination is pretty weird, and reasonable minds can disagree. From there, we get to ones that are maybe not so sympathetic: flat earth, QAnon, the thing where the Queen was an alien lizard. If only one person thought the Queen was an alien lizard, and they never managed to convince anyone else, would that be sufficient evidence for a delusional disorder? I’m not sure. (psychiatry has a diagnosis, schizotypal personality, which sort of involves being a normal person with a few odd ideas, but it’s not a great match for many of these people, and interesting mainly as a genetic curiosity - it travels in the same families as schizophrenia itself) Maybe this is another place where we are forced to admit a spectrum model of psychiatric disorders - there is an unbroken continuum from mildly sad to suicidally depressed, from social drinking to raging alcoholism, and from eccentric to floridly psychotic. People who are eccentric can remain so their whole lives, with the level of expression depending on their social connections and the ease of pursuing their rabbit holes. LLMs, by making it easier to pursue odd theories and serving as a surrogate social connection who always agrees with you, can bring latent crackpottery into the open. IV. Cause And Effect Bipolar disorder has an interesting relationship with sleep. Most manic people sleep very little, or not at all - maybe an hour or two a night. But also, poor sleep can cause bipolar episodes in people prone to them. In a typical case, a bipolar who’s been well-controlled for years will get assigned a big report at work and get poor sleep for a few nights until they finish. At first, this will be just as bad as it sounds, and they’ll be working through a fog of tiredness. Then the tiredness will lift. They’ll feel normal, then better-than-normal, until finally they can’t sleep even if they want to. Then they’ll email the report to their boss and it will be written entirely in Assyrian cuneiform. I increasingly think this isn’t just an incidental feature of bipolar, but part of the reason it exists as a diagnostic category at all. Most people have a compensatory reaction to insomnia - missing one night of sleep makes you more tired the next. A small number of people have the reverse, a spiralling reaction where missing one night of sleep makes you less tired the next. Solve for the equilibrium and you reach a stable attractor point where you never sleep at all. But this does other bad things to your brain - hence the cuneiform. I’m not claiming that bipolar is “just” sleep loss. As Borsboom et al will tell you, psychiatric disorders can be viewed as complex networks of symptoms, each reinforcing the others. In a few pure cases, you can get a ratchet going with sleep alone, and the sleeplessness will spark everything else. More likely, there will be lots of interactions between poor sleep and everything else, and the “everything else” can sink or hypercharge an impending manic episode. Still, I find this a fruitful way to think about bipolar. Sleeplessness is both the cause and the effect. Can delusions also be like this? That is, suppose there’s some personality trait where having one delusion makes you even more delusional. Maybe the delusion makes you excited (who wouldn’t be excited to learn they’re the Messiah?), and you’re more delusional when you’re in an excited state and not thinking clearly. Or maybe it’s a three-symptom cycle - the delusion causes excitement, which makes you unable to sleep, which scrambles your thinking, which makes you more delusional (which makes you even less able to sleep, etc). The point is: delusions are certainly an effect of bipolar disorder. And in the dynamical system model of psychiatric disorders, we should expect that effects are often also causes; that’s how the vicious cycle gets going. This is the best I can do at modeling true LLM psychosis. Someone with a trait where delusions lead inevitably to more delusions starts using an LLM. The LLM accentuates whatever usual tendency towards crackpottery they have and makes them believe something a little crazier than whatever they believed before. Then that crazy belief feeds upon itself and causes other things like excitement and sleep loss, which (if the person is predisposed) precipitates a true psychotic episode. V. Folie A Deux Ex Machina If one person believes a crazy thing, it’s a delusion; if a thousand people believe it, it’s a religion. What if exactly two people believe it? In psychiatry, this is called folie a deux. It fits awkwardly into our nosology and is rarely seen. Still, it happens enough to generate a few case studies. In a typical case, one person has psychosis for some normal reason, like schizophrenia or bipolar, and the second person is a shut-in who lives with them and rarely talks to anyone else. The psychotic person gets some normal psychotic delusion - they’re God, the Feds are after them, etc - and sort of psychically steamrolls over the second person until they believe it too. Usually removing the second person from the first is sufficient for a cure. This slightly challenges the view of psychosis as a biological disorder - but only slightly. Again, think of most people as lacking world-models, but being moored to reality by some vague sense of social consensus. If your social life is limited to one person, and that person themselves becomes unmoored, then sometimes you will follow along. I would expect second-sufferers to believe delusions in a sort of cognitively normal way, the same way people believe true facts, honest mistakes, and conspiracy theories. I would expect them to be less likely (though not zero likely) to have other psychotic features like sleep disturbances, hallucinations, disorganized speech, or a tendency to autonomously generate delusional ideas aside from the one they absorbed from the index case. An introverted person using an LLM has some similarities to folie a deux. If they use the chatbot very often, it might be a large majority of their social interactions. Here the primary vs. secondary distinction breaks down - the most likely scenario is that the human first suggested the crazy idea, the machine reflected it back slightly stronger, and it kept ricocheting back and forth, gaining confidence with each iteration, until both were totally convinced. Compare this to normal social interactions, where if someone expresses a crazy idea that isn’t common in their culture, other people will shoot them down or at the very least nod politely and stop the conversation. So my working theory of LLM psychosis is: Some patients were already psychotic, and LLMs just help them be psychotic more effectively.
Inline links: https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!HDQb!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fece0561a-a62c-4eb6-8e23-7c0db5cb8a0b_749x479.png, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!mYKR!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F03938197-ae2c-4dde-88d4-c22f66e34c09_767x681.png, the transactional interpretation of quantum mechanics, math professors obsessed with destroying the moon, ACX Grants, a spectrum model of psychiatric disorders, As Borsboom et al will tell you, the dynamical system model of psychiatric disorders, folie a deux
The Dilbert Afterlife
January 16, 2026 · Original source
There are two ways to make historically good predictions. The first way is to be some kind of brilliant superforecaster. Adams wasn’t this. Every big prediction he made after this one failed. Wikipedia notes that he dominated a Politico feature called “The Absolute Worst Political Prediction of 20XX”, with the authors even remarking that he “has managed to appear on this annual roundup of the worst predictions in politics more than any other person on the planet”. His most famous howler was that if Biden won in 2020, Republicans “would be hunted” and his Republican readers would “most likely be dead within a year”. But other highlights include “a major presidential candidate will die of COVID”, “the Supreme Court will overturn the 2024 election”, and “Hillary Clinton will start a race war”.
Inline links: The Absolute Worst Political Prediction of 20XX
As he had done so many other times during his life, he resolved the conflict in the dumbest, cringiest, and most public way possible: a June 2016 blog post announcing that he was endorsing Hillary Clinton, for his own safety, because he suspected he would be targeted for assassination if he didn’t:
So I’ve decided to endorse Hillary Clinton for President, for my personal safety. Trump supporters don’t have any bad feelings about patriotic Americans such as myself, so I’ll be safe from that crowd. But Clinton supporters have convinced me – and here I am being 100% serious – that my safety is at risk if I am seen as supportive of Trump. So I’m taking the safe way out and endorsing Hillary Clinton for president.
Highlights From The Comments On Scott Adams
January 21, 2026 · Original source
I haven’t watched his videos, but they have names like You Could Be MUCH More Persuasive, The Persuasion Playbook (“Learn practical techniques to harness the power of persuasion”), and Persuasion Techniques That Will Improve Your Business And Life. Adams absolutely did not limit his interest in Trump’s persuasion to the media, and praised Trump (for example) using persuasion techniques to take down other Republican candidates. You can find his discussion of how Adams “publicly predicted Ben Carson’s demise” after Trump acted out a mocking version of Carson’s description of getting stabbed in the belt buckle (according to Adams, a masterful example of “visual persuasion”). Leo continues: A good example would be spinning a whole tale about him as an ‘ivermectin true believer’, when he was open about his skepticism. if you knew his history with medically-assisted suicide, you’d know he didn’t plan on fighting the cancer and only did IVM because his fans begged him. I half-apologize for this one. I didn’t try to “spin a whole tale” about Adams as “an ivermectin true believer”. What I said was: » “In 2024, diagnosed with terminal cancer, Adams decided to treat it via ivermectin, according to a protocol recommended by fellow right-wing contrarian Dr. William Makis. This doesn’t seem to me like a story about a cynic milking right-wingers for the grift. It sounds like a true believer.” I stand by that paragraph. I don’t think someone who was milking right-wingers as a cynical grift would have gone so far as to trust their recommendations on what to take for his cancer. I think Adams became a sincere right-winger, and so was willing to listen to right-wing medical advice. But I agree that it was written sloppily and sort of suggests he was an ivermectin true believer. He wasn’t, and I apologize for that. I later realized I didn’t need to read tea leaves about this - he says, very explicitly, in one of his books, that yes, after getting attacked by too many left-wing trolls, he decided to commit to fully joining the right wing: » “If you want to see the world more clearly, avoid joining a tribe. But if you are going to war, leave your clear thinking behind and join a tribe. Trumped joined the Republican tribe to win the presidency. Now I was joining the Trump tribe. For a war against Hillbullies [ie pro-Hillary Clinton bullies]. I was all in.” After I made some of these arguments to Leo, he said: I do think that people who listened to thousands of hours of him speaking off-the-cuff might have a better understanding than someone attempting to gain the same by reading a few of his old blog posts. This is a fair criticism. I tried listening to a couple of his shows, and they had a different, friendlier tone than his books / interviews / tweets. Arguably Adams thought of formal written communication as a place to do manipulation, and verbal communication as a cozier spot where he could relate to people normally and explain all the manipulation he was doing. @Ashwin V writes: If you knew anything about Scott, you would know that he never considered anyone a "lesser human" as you've so confidently asserted. He was streaming and trying to pass on his wisdom on his death bed. This was a response to my claim that Adams “longed to be a manipulator of lesser humans”. Several people including Ashwin objected that Adams didn’t see anyone as lesser, nor think of manipulation as demeaning. For example, nutter_just: “Your error is in thinking you must be a lesser human to be manipulable. My impression was Scott believed everyone was like this even himself which is why he believed self affirmations worked. It’s you manipulating your dumb self.” Again, I’ll half-apologize. I regret my exact framing (“lesser humans”), which I think was unnecessarily inflammatory since it implies he was sort of thinking in those terms. But I think he was doing a bad thing which requires that on some philosophical level he has to be treating other people as his lessers in an unacceptable way, even if he wasn’t consciously thinking that they were. I think trying to manipulate people is inherently demeaning to the dignity of humankind. Nor is it exonerating to say “I also manipulate myself” (even if this is true). For analogy, suppose that Adams was a literal telepathic mind controller. If he used his powers on himself (mind controlling himself to work harder), that sounds like a good lifehack. But if he used his powers to turn everyone else into his zombie slaves, he would be offending the dignity of humankind, and “I also use my powers on myself!” would be no excuse. There are a thousand edge cases, complications, things that are sort of manipulation but not quite, and ways that some of those things might be permissible for the greater good. But none of them change the fact that in the simplest and most typical of cases, like the telepathic mind controller with his zombie slaves, manipulation is wrong. One might object that there are simple, typical cases on the other side too. When a job candidate shaves, dresses nicely, and gives a firm handshake, this is in some sense “manipulating” the interviewer, since it’s an attempt to influence his decision through some channel other than facts. I can’t draw a perfect bright line here between the good and the bad cases, but I would apply tests like “is this an attempt to more effectively convey true information?” (eg when I shave, it conveys that I’m capable of remembering to shave and care a lot about the interview), “is this something where failing to do the thing would also convey even more information?” (eg if I didn’t shave, it would falsely suggest I really didn’t want the job), and “is this something where the target has basically given implied consent to this level of manipulation” (eg the interviewer wants and even hopes that people will dress nicely for the interview). I think some of Adams’ manipulations seem closer to the bad cases than the good ones. He wrote about the moment he decided to use his persuasion powers to convince America to elect Trump. One day when he was doing his dispassionate observer act, he heard about Hillary’s estate tax plan and realized it would cost his estate lots of money. He had no particular principled stance against it (“You can argue whether an estate tax is fair or unfair, but fairness is an argument for idiots and children”) but concluded that: This was personal. This was also the day I decided to move from observer to persuader. Until then I was happy to simply observe and predict. But once Clinton announced her plans to use government force to rob me on my deathbed, it was war. Persuasion war.” Accepting for the sake of argument that Adams’ persuasive powers are as impressive as he thinks, he manipulated thousands of people who might have stood to benefit from an estate tax, or who sincerely believed in fairness-based arguments for an estate tax, to vote against their own interests/beliefs, in order to enrich him personally1. I think this requires some sort of standpoint where you consider their agency and interests less important than your own, and that’s why I described him as wanting to manipulate “lesser humans”. This coexists with him often being very nice, with many people saying his podcast helped them become better people, etc. @janiesaysyay writes: This essay is a great demonstration of the kind of leftist, myopic thinking Scott [Adams] was fighting. This is how [Alexander] describes [Coffee With Scott Adams], one of the most influential online shows: » "I had been vaguely aware that he had some community around him, but on the event of his death, I tried watching an episode or two of his show. I couldn’t entirely follow..." “Some community"?! CWSA was one of the first long running, online, interactive, alternative news shows. Scott was a trailblazer host with his reasonable, thoughtful take on current events, often describing the "2 screens” views of both the left and right political opinions on current events. Scott [Adams]' question and answer discussions with his audience brought varied insights, and gave Americans a nuanced view of news. At the end of his life, Scott was highly influential in American thought, culture and politics. CWSA made it acceptable to be an American, someone who was proud of the country, unashamed of their race; proud of the culture, and proud of the heritage which built the country. This made me wonder whether I was underestimating the reach of Adams’ podcast, so I tried to find statistics. CWSA ranks 50th on Apple’s top 100 news/politics podcasts2. It’s very close to the rankings of Jen Psaki (Biden’s ex-press-secretary) and Al Franken (ex-Senator), but also to very many people I have never heard of. I’m not sure how to interpret this. Comparing YouTube subscribers of Adams and various other podcasts I’ve heard of, all numbers in thousands: Joe Rogan: 21,000
Inline links: You Could Be MUCH More Persuasive, The Persuasion Playbook, Persuasion Techniques That Will Improve Your Business And Life, writes, nutter_just, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!r4fL!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F7d643c5f-b24c-4f01-baad-963686d680da_560x174.jpeg, 1, writes, 2, https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!wOcC!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F141d78d7-8756-4ed6-bc53-081bac795a0a_728x250.png
“systems are better than goals” The main idea, that by changing my thoughts I can change my reality, is simple but went a long way for me. It opened up my imagination to what’s possible and made my thinking more positive. Cinna the Poet writes: To share a different perspective on Adams, my uncle was an avid follower. He went from being a principled libertarian whose ideas I respected very much to (I’m sad to say) an alt right bigot. Under the influence of Adams, he had no interest anymore in objective truth or the actual scientific method. Reality was all a matter of spin and “persuasion.” The phrase “post truth” gets thrown around too much, but Adams fit that description perfectly. Alex Poterack writes: I just need to note you’re not the only one who read every Dilbert book before graduating elementary school. I’m the other one. Dozens of people chimed in, here and on social media, to say they did this too. Alyssa Briggs writes: This is a great article, but you left out that he handed out king-sized candy bars on Halloween. He will be very missed by the local kiddos. … 6: Summary/Updates … This was a tough post to write, and I think many people will continue to find it unfair. For example, I claimed that Adams said he joined Team Trump because he didn’t want to pay Hillary’s proposed estate tax - and that he said he didn’t care whether the estate tax was unfair or not, he just personally hated the idea of losing money. But an Adams backer could justly point out that a few sentences later, he does talk about how it’s unfair to make him pay an estate tax when he worked hard his whole life. And then a few paragraphs later, he gives a different, more sympathetic story about how he thought Hillary supporters were bullies and it was important to stand up to them (although he then says maybe Trump supporters were exactly equal bullies, but he selfishly was more against the bullies who were bullying him - but then elsewhere he says no, the Hillary supporters’ bullying was worse.) Adams keeps trying to eat his cake and have it too. He gives one prosocial altruistic explanation (so that if someone accuses him of being selfish, he can show they’re wrong), and then one amoral selfish explanation (so that if someone argues with him about whether it’s really altruistic to oppose estate taxes for millionaires, he can say “Ha, you can’t get me, I already admitted I’m a cold hard realist who doesn’t worry about that kind of fuzzy stuff.”) This is much like how he first said Donald Trump was amazing (but didn’t endorse him), then said he was endorsing Hillary Clinton (but only for his own safety), then endorsed libertarian Gary Johnson (???), then when it looked like Trump would win again walked it back and said obviously he had really been for Trump the whole time. If someone else had won, he would have spun a story where his endorsement of them had been real. He admits all of this! So someone who is charitably inclined to Adams can tell a story where he’s a great predictor, has always done everything for good patriotic altruistic reasons, and only teaches persuasion so that people can better understand themselves and their world. Someone who is uncharitably inclined can tell a different story where his predictions are mostly wrong, he does everything for selfish reasons, and uses persuasion to manipulate others and enrich himself. I usually try to err on the side of charity. But Adams is wearing a metaphorical “I AM GOING TO USE YOUR CHARITABLE INSTINCTS TO MANIPULATE YOU” t-shirt. So I’m happy to suspend charity in this case and judge him on some kind of average of his conflicting statements, or even to default to the less-advantageous one to make sure he can’t get away with it. So here are the updates I made based on your comments: Adams wasn’t an ivermectin true believer, and although my piece very narrowly avoided saying that he was, I should have been clearer about this and avoided implying it.
Inline links: writes, writes, writes