Category: debate

A superb piece: Sam Harris explains why, though he has criticisms of Israel, he won’t debate Israel’s critics

June 7, 2026 • 9:00 am

I always find Sam Harris’s writings absorbing, but in today’s piece he’s really hit his stride, telling us why, despite his own criticisms of Israel, he won’t debate those people—he calls them “scholars, grifters, and moral lunatics”—who demonize Israel as not only morally worse than its enemies, but the worst country in the world.

In a way, the piece below is a bookend to the superb piece he posted on November 7, 2023: “The bright line between good and evil.”  In between then and now, Hamas has lost the war, Gaza has been largely wrecked because of Hamas’s tactics, and yet the terrorists are still in power. What has changed is that despite the efforts of Israel to limit civilian casualties in Gaza and Lebanon, antisemitism and hatred of Israel have ballooned.  To Sam, and to me, this spate of criticism of Jews and Israel, parading under the flag of “anti-Zionism”. shows that the “river-to-the-sea” gang has lost its moral compass. And the encampers and drum-bangers have dragged a lot of academics and journalists along with them.

What is missing in all the debate is what Sam has bookended: the moral compass that points clearly to which side in the conflict is on the side of morality and justice.  It might be salutary for you to read his 2023 piece  first (I posted about it here), but it’s imperative to read the piece he just put on his Substack. You can it for free by clicking on the screenshot below.

What shines in Sam’s analysis is his laserlike focus on the most important question—right versus wrong—and his refusal to be distracted from that focus.  This is truly a superb piece, and I recommend it highly. Today you should be reading Sam Harris, not me.  I’ll put a few quotes in indents below, but you really need to click above and spend a while pondering Sam’s views.

Excerpts:

Many readers and podcast listeners have been dismayed by my enduring support for Israel and now urge me to debate someone—really anyone—drawn from a growing cast of scholars, grifters, and moral lunatics who have made that beleaguered country their professional or psychiatric obsession. The Making Sense Community seems to have inherited this infatuation, leading to some heated exchanges in recent days. I’ve explained my position on Israel across several podcasts and in my public talks, but it might help to summarize it here.

First, my general attitude: I’m not interested in exploring all the ways that Israel has missed the mark—from Prime Minister Netanyahu’s corrupt alliance with the far right, to the many crimes committed by settlers in the West Bank, to the deaths of innocent noncombatants in several wars—because none of these failings, however grave, will alter my sense that (1) the ethical difference between Israel and her enemies remains vast, and (2) the global preoccupation with the Jewish state, as though it were the worst villain among nations, is contemptible, being the product of perennial lies and delusions.

Next, a simple heuristic: As I suggested in at least one Community thread already, if my intransigence on these matters mystifies you, it might help to understand that, for whatever reason, I think militant Islam is ten times worse than you think it is. When I talk about “jihadists” and their various groups—Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, the IRGC, etc.—I’m talking about people who I consider to be worse than Nazis (jihadists being, essentially, Nazis who are certain of Paradise). My views about the conflict in the Middle East will not fundamentally change unless my critics produce evidence that Israel has become as evil as her enemies.

However, you can rest assured that if the IDF morphs into a death cult that uses its own civilian population as human shields (and yet somehow remains widely popular), if ordinary Israelis begin to celebrate martyrdom above every earthly priority, producing generations of bright-eyed, suicidal fanatics, if the residents of Tel Aviv condone the taking of Palestinian infants, old women, and other noncombatants as hostages and then gather in crowds of thousands, baying for their blood—if, in other words, the Israelis begin to resemble the Palestinians, then I won’t care who wins this war. Short of this, there remains a world of difference between the two sides, and I believe that we should focus on how brutalizing it is for any free society to confront enemies that can sincerely claim to “love death” more than everyone else loves life—for this has been Israel’s predicament for the better part of a century.

The problem in the Middle East is not, and has never been, the existence of the state of Israel. The problem is jihadism, Islamism, Islamic extremism, Islamofascism, militant Islam—or whatever words you want to use to describe the belligerence and triumphal lunacy of those who take the most pernicious doctrines of Islam too seriously.

He then explains his unwillingness to engage in debate about the war. I’ve put a critical bit in bold:

I won’t debate the history of the Middle East because it is irrelevant to resolving the conflict there. Of course, many people insist that we must disentangle and reconsider every strand of this history, going back at least a century. The reason I’m convinced that this is a fool’s errand is simple: Palestinians and Israelis have discrepant accounts of the past, and no amount of study or debate will reconcile them.

What’s far more important to understand—and I think it really is the only thing worth considering—is what the current inhabitants of Israel, the Palestinian territories, and the surrounding Arab states want out of life now. (Not what they pretend to want or what a handful of royal families want, while their populations want something quite different.) What do the Jews and Muslims in the region really yearn to accomplish? What are they willing to sacrifice for? What are they willing to die for? And what are they willing to let their children die for?

When we focus on the present this way, if we’re being honest, we must concede that there are two very different realities on either side of this conflict: culturally, psychologically, ethically, spiritually—in every way that matters. Yes, Israel has its religious fanatics too. But they aren’t the same sort of fanatics we find in Hamas or Hezbollah, and they’re far less representative of the surrounding culture. Notwithstanding everything that can be said against Prime Minister Netanyahu, the Israeli far right, and the settlers in the West Bank—and there is much to condemn—I believe the following remains true:

If the Palestinians laid down their arms, there would be peace. There could be a two-state solution; there could even be a one-state solution; it wouldn’t matter. If the Palestinians simply stopped killing Jews and stopped building a culture that celebrates pointless murder and martyrdom as its highest values, there could be a diverse, tolerant, and prosperous society between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. There could have been one eighty years ago. But if the Israelis laid down their weapons, there would be a genocide. This was obviously true on October 7th, 2023. And for anyone who has been paying attention, it has been true on every other day since the founding of the state of Israel.

Those who demonize Israel and lionize terrorists, or those Palestinians who lionize terrorism—and there are many of them—must deal with this point, which seems palpably true.  But requiring Hamas to lay down its arms, as well as demanding that Palestinian society lay aside Jew hatred and then aspire to peace and prosperity, is a tough ask, and we won’t see it in our lifetimes. For even the younger generation of Palestinians have been brainwashed into Jew hatred, and they aren’t even teenagers yet.

There’s more, but Sam ends this way:

Why does antisemitism matter? Well, for the Jews, it’s obvious why it matters, but why should it matter to everyone else? It matters because when you look at what antisemites also hate, you find they hate everything that makes culturally rich, diverse, open societies possible. Real antisemites bring with them more than just their hatred of Jews: they bring censorship, political repression, conspiracy thinking, and the politics of dehumanization and scapegoating. So decrying antisemitism is not an act of special pleading. It is a defense of the moral and institutional architecture that free societies require.

Let me close with another general point to members of the Making Sense Community: Many of you have written to tell me that you’ve lost respect for me over this issue (or that you still value my work and are giving me “a pass” on Israel). I reject this framing, and you should too. No one should be a part of Community just because they agree with me. I’m not running a political party, and there is no line for me, or for anyone else, to toe. If I’ve fallen off a pedestal because I said something you don’t agree with, the pedestal was the problem, not the disagreement. Of course, if you think I am lying to you, or that I otherwise lack integrity, you should leave and never look back. But if you just think I happen to be wrong, even about something important—especially about something important—I encourage you to keep showing up with better evidence and argu

The first paragraph makes the point that antisemitism (aka “anti-Zionism”) is a hatred not just of Jews, but of the liberal, democratic societies built by the West.  The grifters and maniacs will never admit that, but look at what is happening to liberal European democracies like Belgium and the Netherlands—countries that have admitted floods of Muslims who have imported hatred of the very societies to which they’ve fled.

I have not lost respect for Sam: I admire him all the more, and have told him so.  Of course this piece, one of the best on the current Middle East situation, will itself be demonized and ignored, probably by invoking things Sam has said in the past. We will hear, “But he favors torture!” Or “He’s a neuroscientist, and not qualified to pronounce on politics.”  Or, “Sam has been too hard on religious people.”   Those are all distractions. Yes, I’ve had my differences with Sam—I think his view that there is an objective morality is misguided—but that is irrelevant.  Regardless of whether Israel’s morality is objectively better than that of the morality of its critics, it’s true that those of us who are rational want to live in a society based on liberal democracy than in a dysfunctional one based on jihadism and Jew hatred.  Jihad is more than a struggle to live a holy life by the lights of Islam: it’s also a struggle to destroy Western values.

Pinker vs. Douthat debate: Do we need God?

March 12, 2026 • 11:15 am

The Free Press and CBS News (Bari Weiss is involved in both organizations) is hosting an ongoing series of “town hall” interviews and debates, the topic being “Things that matter.” The series is sponsored by the Bank of America.

A few weeks ago the series included a episode of interest to many of us, a debate between Steven Pinker and Ross Douthat on “Do we need God.” These gentlemen should need no introduction, save to add that this debate probably arose because of Douthat’s new book, Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious, a book that he promoted widely (see some of my takes on it here). The video of that debate went online yesterday.

Here’s part of the website’s intro to the debate:

Today, nearly a third of Americans claim no religious affiliation, which would have been unimaginable a generation ago.

But the story of religion in the West is much more complicated than simple decline. In the past few years, we’ve entered what feels like a religious revival, or at least a leveling off in the decline of faith. Even as our society becomes more technologically advanced, many people are searching more intensely for meaning, purpose, and moral clarity. In other words, the question of faith hasn’t disappeared. If anything, it is even more urgent.

For years, intellectuals predicted that as religion receded, society would become calmer, more rational, and more scientific. Shed religious superstition, the theory went, and we would inherit a more enlightened public life. Instead, many societies haven’t become less fervent so much as differently fervent—driven by conspiracy, tribalism, and forms of moral conflict that often feel almost cosmic in intensity.

The premise of our Things That Matter debates, sponsored by Bank of America, is simple but essential. We want to revive the tradition that has long made the United States exceptional: our ability to argue openly across deep divides while still remaining part of the same civic community. Disagreement does not have to mean contempt. And since religion is one of the most politically charged topics in public life, it felt fitting to begin here.

Where does morality come from without God? Are our ideas of human dignity, moral obligation, and human rights ultimately grounded in a transcendent reality—or are they products of human reason alone? Are the apparent benefits of religion simply the community and rituals it nurtures, rather than the truth of its claims?

To explore these questions, we brought together two formidable public intellectuals: cognitive psychologist Steven Pinker, author of Enlightenment Now: The Case for Reason, Science, Humanism, and Progress, and New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, author of Bad Religion: How We Became a Nation of Heretics.

You can hear the 57-minute debate by clicking below (I hope). It’s moderated by lawyer and commentator Sarah Isgur, who seems to be a secular Jew. It begins with summaries by Douthat and Pinker (about 4 minutes each), and then Isgur asks questions to Pinker and Douthat, questions that were clearly given to the debaters in advance (they have notes to answer them).

My take: Pinker wiped the floor with Douthat. Of course I’m biased, but Douthat’s arguments were lame, and he didn’t even dwell on the “science-y” arguments he made when touting his book (fine-tuning, consciousness, etc.). (Steve could have rebutted those, too.) Instead, Douthat says that “God self-evidently exists” and doesn’t rebut Pinker’s arguments showing the well-known negative correlation between religiosity of countries (or American states) and their well being. Douthat also makes quasi intelligent-design arguments, one of which is that our minds were created by God to help us understand the universe. I guess he doesn’t understand evolution.

Audience questions, chosen in advance, begin about 19 minutes in (the debaters apparently knew the selected audience questions, too). They’re interspersed with more questions from the moderator.  The best of her questions is at the end (55:15): “What is something that each of you would concede tonight—a point that the other made that you found compelling—that made you perhaps question some of your own positions on this?”

I would have preferred more of a slugfest, one in which Pinker and Douthat addressed each other, as they often do in Presidential debates (there’s a bit of that). This is all polite and respectful, but that detracts from what I like to see in a debate. But that’s due to the organizers, not the participants. And, sadly, there are no before-and-after votes. In my view, humanism won hands down over religion.

CBS/Free Press launches a series of debates and town halls. Coming up: Steve Pinker to debate Ross Douthat on God

February 12, 2026 • 9:10 am

In conjunction with its new sponsor, The Free Press, CBS News is launching a series of debates and town hall presentations. One of them is a debate about God featuring Steve Pinker and Ross Douthat, which should be a barn-burner. I am informed that that debate will take place on February 26, and will be broadcast live.

Douthat, as you know, has been flogging his new pro-Christianity book Believe: Why Everyone Should be Religious, and I’ve discussed excerpts published by Douthat here. It appears to be the usual guff, arguing that stuff about the Universe that we don’t understand, like consciousness and the “fine-tuning” of the laws of physics, comprise evidence for a creator God. Assessing all gods, Douthat (a pious Catholic) finds that the Christian one appears to be the “right” god. Are you surprised?

Pinker is an atheist, and has written about nonbelief from time to time in his books, but has not written an entire book on it.  I look forward to this debate, which will be broadcast live on THURSDAY, FEBRUARY 26, so mark your calendars. Pinker will surely be ready to answer Douthat’s shopworn “evidence,” so it should be fun.

Click below to access the general announcement.

Below: the series’ rationale and its upcoming debates and interviews. No dates and times have been announced save my finding out that Pinker vs. Douthat is on February 26.

This is, of course, the result of Bari Weiss becoming Editor of CBS News, and I’m not sure how I feel about this endeavor. Note that it’s sponsored by the Bank of America.

We live in a divided country. A country where many cannot talk to those with whom they disagree. Where people can’t speak across the political divide – or even sometimes across the kitchen table.

THINGS THAT MATTER aims to change that.

Sponsored by Bank of America, THINGS THAT MATTER is a series of town halls and debates that will feature the people in politics and culture who are shaping American life. The events will be held across the country, in front of audiences who have a stake in the topics under discussion.

This launch comes on the heels of CBS News’ successful town hall with Erika Kirk, which drove double-digit ratings increases in its time slot and generated 192 million views across TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and X – making it CBS News’ most-watched interview ever on social media.

JAC: Note that the town hall with Erika Kirk was NOT a success; it was lame and uninformative. There’s a link to the video below. Back to the blurb:

The events take Americans into the most important issues that directly affect their lives – immigration, capitalism, public health, criminal justice, foreign policy, artificial intelligence and the state of politics. The debates echo the country’s 250th anniversary, showing how the power of America’s earliest principles – civil, substantive discussion, free of rancor – have immense value today.

“We believe that the vast majority of Americans crave honest conversation and civil, passionate debate,” said Bari Weiss, editor-in-chief of CBS News. “This series is for them. In a moment in which people believe that truth is whatever they are served on their social media feed, we can think of nothing more important than insisting that the only way to get to the truth is by speaking to one another.”

Bank of America has joined THINGS THAT MATTER as its title sponsor. Tracing its lineage to 1784, Bank of America is sponsoring the series in support of dialogue and debate during the country’s 250th anniversary year.

THINGS THAT MATTERwill kick off in the new year. An early look includes:

Town Halls:

  • Vice President JD Vance on the state of the country and the future of the Republican Party.

  • OpenAI CEO Sam Altman on artificial intelligence.

  • Maryland Governor Wes Moore on the state of the country and the future of the Democratic Party.

  • In case you missed it: Turning Point USA CEO Erika Kirk on political violence, faith and grief – watch it here.

Debates:

  • Gen Z and the American Dream: Isabel Brown and Harry Sisson. Should Gen Z Believe in the American Dream?

  • God and Meaning: Ross Douthat and Steven Pinker. Does America Need God?

  • The Sexual Revolution: Liz Plank and Allie Beth Stuckey. Has Feminism Failed Women?

Readers are welcome to weigh in below on the topics and format of this forum.

Melanie Phillips explains, once again, why anti-Zionism is antisemitism

January 9, 2026 • 11:30 am

Reader Norman sent me the first video below saying, “in one of your posts the other day you gave a link to an article about how anti-Zionism = antisemitism.”  Yes, I’ve frequently said that and in fact did so in the last post. And I think the equation is clearly true. For those on the left justifying anti-Zionism, the claim that it is NOT antisemitism rests on an incorrect construal of “anti-Zionism” as “criticism of the politics of Israel/Netanyahu”. Alternatively, “anti-Zionism could mean “favoring a one-state solution, a state that includes both Palestinians and Jews—and we all know what that means for the Jews.

As the moderator defines it in the video, “anti-Zionism” is “opposition to the existence of a Jewish state in the territory defined as the historic land of Israel or Palestine” and that view implicitly favors the erasure or destruction of Israel, which to any reasonable person is antisemitic (where would the Jews go?). Further seeing the “anti-Zionism” trope as being politically okay ignores the fact that nearly all Muslim states in the Middle East are explicitly religiously Muslim as part of their government (viz., the formal name of Iran is “The Islamic Republic of Iran”). In contrast, while Israel was approved as a homeland for Jews after WWII, there is no requirement for residents to adhere to the tenents of Judaism, for 20% of the population are Arab Muslims and many of the resident “Jews” are, like me, atheists who are culturally Jewish. To show the difference, try being gay in Gaza or Iran as opposed to Israel.

So, below is what Norman wanted me to see: a short speech by British author and commentator Melanie Phillips.  It’s part of a four-person intelligence² debate that took place six years ago. The proposition debated is is “Anti-Zionism is antisemitism.” Phillips’s bit, agreeing with the proposition, starts 47 seconds into the video, and I’ve begun the video at that point. Her bit ends at 10:28, so the part to listen to is about ten minutes long. The rest is some person, not part of the formal debate, banging on.

As Norman says, “this is one of the most forceful and succinct statements I have heard or read.” It is indeed. And despite its title, Mehdi Hasan does not explode here. That is in the second video below, which gives the entire two-hour debate.

Here’s the whold video, including besides Mehdi Hassan (his speech starts at 35:45) and Melanie Phillips, Einat Wulf (who agrees with Phillips; her speech starts at 24:00) and Ilan Pappé, an Israeli who favors a “one-state solution” (his speech starts at 12:25). The audience, clearly on the side of Hassan and Pappé throughout, defeated the motion.  They are wrong.

Bill Maher vs. Jon Lovett on trans rights

February 25, 2025 • 9:30 am

Jon Lovett is identified by Wikipedia as

. . . .  an American podcaster, comedian, journalist, and former speechwriter. Lovett is a co-founder of Crooked Media, along with Jon Favreau and Tommy Vietor. All three formerly worked together as White House staffers during the Obama administration. Lovett is a regular host of the Crooked Media podcasts Pod Save America and Lovett or Leave It. As a speechwriter, he worked for both President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton when she was a United States senator and a 2008 presidential candidate.

And of course you know who Bill Maher is.  In the ten-minute talk argument below, Lovett and Maher discuss issues of kids with gender dysphoria, including these questions:

a.) Can schools hide a child’s desire to transition sex roles from the parents?

b.) Are there social influences that can promote children to want to change gender roles beyond “feeling like you’re in the wrong body.”

c.) Can the government be allowed to ban “gender-affirming care”?

d) Are children dying (presumably by suicide) because they aren’t allowed to transition?

Lovett actually comes off worse here, mainly because he’s spouting Biden-era dogma about sex and making statements that are scientifically dubious. However, I have to call out Maher near the beginning when he says “Obviously sex is more complicated than just two sexes.”  Yes, sex is complicated, but there are just two sexes. This is the mistake I discussed the other day.

Maher also conflates gender dysphoria with sexual attraction. But in the main, Maher makes some good points, and above all emphasizes that these are questions to be debated, not quashed by “progressives” who slander everyone trying to discuss them as “transphob” or “bigots”.

Maher calls the social conditioning of gender-dysphoric kids “entrapment”, which he defines as “suggesting that people do something that they are not going to do,” or “Putting an idea in someone’s head that wouldn’t be there otherwise.” (In this case, the idea is that the child/adolescent is trapped in the wrong body.)

Lovett, in contrast denies the prevalence of social influence on transitioning, while Maher takes Abigail Shrier’s view that many (but not all) children who decide they are in the wrong body are pushed to transition by peers, doctors, and teachers.  As he says, premature transitioning is medically dangerous and perhaps superfluous, not to mention an issue that can hurt Democrats who support it out of virtue signaling. Maher: “To take that risk at that age, before you know shit about anything. . . ”

Lovett makes the familiar but incorrect argument that without gender-affirming care, many kids would die.  He draws an analogy with cardiology, in which heart surgeons sometimes screw up during surgery and their patients die. But that’s a bogus argument because heart surgeons operate (and patients consent) if the consequences of not having surgery are dire. The difference is that we have enough experience to know the risks and benefits of heart surgery.

But this is not the case for gender dysphoria. Withholding hormones and surgery from kids who are dysphoric does not as often touted, leead to depression and death. (“Do you want a dead son or a live daughter?, some say.)  Yet studies show that about 80% of gender-dysphoric children who are not driven to take hormones and surgery resolve as gay (no medical dangers there!) or even cis.  That is a strong argument against the kind of “gender-affirming care” that puts dysphoric kids on a one-way escalator leading first to puberty blockers and then to hormone treatment and/or surgery.

Maher also seems to know more about the recent science than does Lovett, mentioning the ten-year Olson-Kennedy study showing that puberty blockers, touted by ideologues like Lovett as essential to saving lives, do not in fact improve the well being of gender-dysphoric childrene. From the NYT:

The doctor, Johanna Olson-Kennedy, began the study in 2015 as part of a broader, multimillion-dollar federal project on transgender youth. She and colleagues recruited 95 children from across the country and gave them puberty blockers, which stave off the permanent physical changes — like breasts or a deepening voice — that could exacerbate their gender distress, known as dysphoria.

The researchers followed the children for two years to see if the treatments improved their mental health. An older Dutch study had found that puberty blockers improved well-being, results that inspired clinics around the world to regularly prescribe the medications as part of what is now called gender-affirming care.

But the American trial did not find a similar trend, Dr. Olson-Kennedy said in a wide-ranging interview. Puberty blockers did not lead to mental health improvements, she said, most likely because the children were already doing well when the study began.

“They’re in really good shape when they come in, and they’re in really good shape after two years,” said Dr. Olson-Kennedy, who runs the country’s largest youth gender clinic at the Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles.

Although we the American taxpayers funded this study through the NIH, the results have not yet been released. Why? Because they don’t support the dogma that puberty blockers save lives. Also from the NYT:

In the nine years since the study was funded by the National Institutes of Health, and as medical care for this small group of adolescents became a searing issue in American politics, Dr. Olson-Kennedy’s team has not published the data. Asked why, she said the findings might fuel the kind of political attacks that have led to bans of the youth gender treatments in more than 20 states, one of which will soon be considered by the Supreme Court.

“I do not want our work to be weaponized,” she said. “It has to be exactly on point, clear and concise. And that takes time.”

This is shameful. To suppress important data because they “might fuel political attacks” or go against “progressive” ideology is totally unethical.  Maher knows about that study, as do many of us; but apparently Lovett either does not or deliberately ignores it.

Maher also makes the point that insistence on possibly harmful medical intervention without knowing its long-term effects is a stand that can—and probably has—harmed Democrats. (Yes, some Republicans take this stand because they really don’t want trans people around, but you can take that stand for the right reasons, too.)

Maher’s point, with which I agree completely, is that you don’t go ahead with possibly harmful medical treatment until you know what the harms actually are. 

Without further ado, here is the debate, which is mildly acrimonious:

Holden Thorp, the editor of science, jettisons the journal’s ideological neutrality

January 9, 2025 • 9:00 am

This piece, by a pseudonymous researcher with a Substack, is another example of scientists decrying the journals and editors who make political statements in public. By so doing, the author points out, they simply decrease public confidence in science and scientists (down 10% in just five years, though still high). In other words, violating institutional neutrality in science is counterproductive. When Nature endorsed Biden four years ago, all it did was to erode confidence in the journal, and in U.S. scientists, while not moving any voters toward the Democrats.

Click the headline below to read the article for free:

The author speaks specifically about Holden Thorp, the editor of Science, certainly the most prestigious science journal in America. Thorp said this after the Democrats lost the election:

Holden Thorp, the Editor-in-Chief of Science, another preeminent science journal—the kind publishing in which makes or breaks careers of aspiring academics and the kind that defines funding and research strategies the world over, wrote a response, of sorts, to the voters “…who feel alienated America’s governmental, social, and economic institutions [that] include science and higher education”. His claim is simple: Trump’s message of “…xenophobia, sexism, racism, transphobia, nationalism, and disregard for truth…” resonates with them. It’s the people’s fault: the people voted wrong. Well… to borrow his own words, “Make no mistake.” Holden Thorp does not speak for me.

You can find Thorp’s op-ed here.

It’s not that the author is a Trump fan, for, like me, he despises the man:

. . . Harris’ legacy is tainted by her support for the diversity and social justice activism responsible for the damage that has been done to Western academic and social institutions in its name. She lost to Donald Trump, a conman and a charlatan of historic proportions who went as far as inciting a coup to remain in power the last time he was president, and a persona as anti-science as one could imagine after Lysenko’s death, second possibly only to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. In many ways, 2024 was the year the Democrats handed the election to Trump

About the Pew surveys, with links in the article:

What these surveys and studies show is that people continue to trust scientists more, than they do politicians. It follows from this that the more scientists act like politicians, the less the public will trust us. Yet, in recent decades, scientific institutions and individual scientists have been acting more and more like the politicians by engaging in activism and social engineering.

I do not know who the author is, but he/she rejects being spoken for by Thorp simply because of Thorp’s dismissal of Americans as a “basket of deplorables” and declaring that his journal adheres to “progressive” politics:

Surveys and studies on public trust in science suggest that what people question is not the science, but “… the extent to which scientists’ values align with their own”, and how this alignment—or misalignment—affects the integrity of their findings. What are the values that people expect scientists to align with? According to Holden Thorps of academia, those values are xenophobia, sexism, racism, transphobia, nationalism, and disregard for truth. This disparaging message is nothing new. In fact, this has been the message communicated by individual academics and academic institutions to people on the outside for at least two decades, the message that can be found everywhere, from land acknowledgements to course syllabi. Academics are telling people that they stole “indigenous land”, that they are oppressors, colonizers, racists, misogynists, -phobes of all sorts, fascists, racists, nationalists. It is furthermore alleged that it is up to the enlightened academic elite to show the unwashed masses the path to salvation that lies through admitting one’s sins, accepting one’s guilt, and correcting the way one thinks, speaks, and behaves. Notably, the sins in question, as well as the alleged enlightenment of the accusers, are both imaginary.

It is not only that Holden Thorp and those like him have for decades been dripping disdain for the very people who pay their salaries, travel allowances, and research costs from their taxes; It is not only that his brand of academics have for decades been demonizing those regular voters he is talking about—bus drivers and fast food employees, teachers and policemen, servicemen and businessmen—as some sort of Nazi-adjacent monsters, accusing them of all sorts of imaginary sins. It is that those same people, while being demonized for their desire to live and enjoy normal, safe, and productive lives under the conditions afforded by the freedom and safety of Western civilization, the civilization built on the blood of the brave defenders of its values—those same people have at the same time witnessed the full-throttled support academia threw behind the black lives matter riots and Islamic terrorists—those real, living and breathing Nazis who behead children, rape women, burn entire families alive, and shoot their pet dogs; Hamas supporters were allowed to roam free on academic campuses, attacking people, vandalizing buildings, leaving a mess for the janitors to clean up, and, in general, destroying things built over generations by the very people the academics demonize.

In other words, those voters Holden Thorp is so disdainful of were witnessing the hypocrisy of the academic community, the members of which compromised the truth for political gain—exactly the sin Thorp is accusing his political rivals (Trump supporters) of. Against this backdrop, the surprising part is that trust in science and scientists remains as high as it does.

The article gives several more examples of the institutional capture and lack of institutional neutrality of science editors and journals, including the sad tale of Laura Helmuth and Scientific American (I note that the new, Helmuth-less journal seems to have retracted its wokeness). But the article ends on a note of hope. I have added the links from the original article.

As I was finishing this piece, there were several positive developments. As I have already mentioned, Laura Helmuth resigned from Scientific American, offering the journal a chance to reclaim its former scientific rigor. Marcia McNutt, the president of the United States National Academy of Sciences, wrote a powerful editorial Science is neither red nor blue, published in Science. The University of Michigan, formerly one of the hubs of diversity, equity, and inclusion ideology squandering some US$15M/year, resolved to no longer solicit diversity statements in faculty hiring, promotion, and tenure. A UofM physics professor offered a relatively mild testimony of the damage done by the DEI initiatives and the black lives matter grift, a testimony that was unthinkable only a few years ago. More generally, in the wake of October 7th, multiple institutions adopted political neutrality. These are important first steps in reversing and repairing the damage that was done to scholarship, research, innovation, and teaching over the decades of woke/DEI insanity.

As they say, “One can hope. . . .”

The next link gives FIRE’s list of schools that have adopted institutional neutrality à la the University of Chicago’s Kalven Principles. There are now 29 of them: a good start, but still a drop in the bucket given that there are about 6,000 colleges in the U.S.

A while back Luana debated Holden Thorp about the ideological takeover of science. Here’s a video of that debate, and I don’t think Thorp came out on top

More on the KerFFRFle about “what is a woman?”

January 2, 2025 • 11:45 am

The fallout from the FFRF fracas, which I call the “KerFFRFle”, continues. There is plenty of negative commentary about me, some of it indeed hateful (one jerk commented that he was glad, when Steve, Richard, and I resigned from the FFRF’s honorary board, that the “trash took itself out”), but you can find that for yourself. Indeed, much of this pushback is characterized by name-calling and “old white men” tropes rather than scientific or even philosophical argumentation, and doesn’t deserve response. At any rate, this post gives examples of reputable people (and not all of them are “old white men” who feel that I (as well as Steve and Richard) made useful points that deserve to be debated.  However, Turley’s piece below links to one harsh critique of what I wrote.

First, a piece from Ronald Lindsay, the editor of the Center for Inquiry‘s (CFI’s) magazine Free Inquiry and former president of the CFI.  The CFI remains one organization that studiously avoids ideological capture, and I’d recommend that readers consider joining it. I’m one of the CFI’s Committee for Skeptical Inquiry’s Fellows, and I highly doubt that I’ll ever have to resign! They’ve also reprinted my “Biology is Not Bigotry” piece, ensuring that it won’t disappear from the Internet. Besides being archived in two places, about four other sites have kindly reprinted it.

Click on all headlines to go to the pieces. I’ll give brief excerpt of each piece:

An excerpt:

FFRF’s removal of Coyne’s post was unwarranted and Barker and Gaylor’s curious apology shows they are no longer proponents of freethought, however much their organization may advocate for church-state separation. Being a freethinker implies a willingness to consider arguments that challenge one’s beliefs and to conform one’s beliefs to the evidence. Barker and Gaylor’s abrupt removal of Coyne’s post shows that for them the claim that sex is non-binary can never be challenged; it must be accepted as dogma.

And exactly which “values and principles” did Coyne’s essay violate? Coyne made no disparaging remarks about transgender individuals. To the contrary, as indicated, Coyne was at pains to point out he supports civil rights for transgender individuals, and presumably Barker and Gaylor do not take issue with that stance. No, what Barker and Gaylor apparently vehemently oppose—to the extent of censoring an essay and issuing an apology—is a science-based argument that sex is binary and cannot be changed at will. Furthermore, the harm they identify as caused by the essay is the “distress” felt by those reading it.

I hope I would not have to remind readers that one of the arguments used for centuries by religious institutions and advocates to justify censoring of religious criticism, including science-based criticism, is that it causes “distress” and violates cherished values. To have Barker and Gaylor echo religious censors goes beyond ironic; it is a travesty.

Next up, Robert Goodday.  He actually wrote four related posts on the issue on his “Carolina Curmudgeon” Substack site, and added this note:

My own thoughts about the FFRF events, in 4 easy-to-read substack postings 🙂

Click the titles to go to his posts.

An excerpt:

Since then, events have occurred that have resulted in several of the leading members of the FFRF advisory board resigning from the organization. The problems really started when Jerry Coyne, an honorary FFRF board member, wrote an article critiquing Grant’s essay. Coyne had been told by the co-presidents of FFRF that his critique would be published online by the organization — and it was — but only for a very brief period of time. In a rather shameful act of disrespect and betrayal of their principles, after FFRF received one or more complaints about Coyne’s essay (complaints that apparently claimed that Coyne’s critique was causing unnamed trans individuals distress), FFRF removed Coyne’s article – without even have the courtesy to inform Coyne of what they were planning to do and without even replying when Coyne wrote to ask why his article had been taken down.

In my next posting, I’ll focus on an email interaction I had two years ago with Annie Laurie Gaylor, one of the two co-presidents (along with Dan Barker) of FFRF. My third posting will critically analyze the original “What is a woman” essay. The fourth will comment on FFRF’s statement that the co-presidents posted to explain and justify removing Coyne’s article.

An excerpt:

Two years ago, Kat Grant, the individual who wrote the “What is a woman?” essay for FFRF, participated in a podcast interview that focused on a discussion of trans ideology. At that time, in response to what was said during that podcast, I wrote to the presidents of FFRF raising questions regarding some of the conclusions that I heard being espoused on that podcast. I was pleased to receive a reply that same day from Annie Laurie Gaylor, one of the organization’s co-presidents. However — I was not impressed with the shallowness of the content of her reply, and so, not being the kind of person who shies away from continuing that kind of discussion, I wrote back to Gaylor to highlight questions I had raised that she had not addressed. Not surprisingly, I never received any acknowledgement of that second email. A copy of these emails is posted below.

You can read the emails at the link.

An excerpt:

Overall, I would give Kat Grant’s essay a “D” grade (but only because I’m feeling in a generous mood – having just finished consuming a large Starbucks coffee, so my mood is under the influence of a considerable amount of caffeine – and the essay does not contain spelling errors). The reason I could not bring myself to give the essay a higher grade is because it: (i) includes factual errors, (ii) involves sloppy reasoning, (iii) repeatedly engages in begging the question, (iv) includes discussions that are simply not relevant to the issue that is purportedly the focus of the essay, and (v) never actually does answer the question posed by the essay’s title.

. . . I’m actually going to start my critique by discussing the final sentence of the essay – which is the only sentence that involves any effort on Grant’s part to provide an answer to the question posed by the essay’s title. Of course, what I had anticipated would be Grant’s definition of a “woman” is the definition that lies at the heart of trans ideology; according to that view, a woman is anyone who feels or even just says that they are a woman (see, for example, psychiatrist Jack Turban’s discussion of male and female gender identity in a recent article in the NY Times). This is, in fact, the only definition of “woman” that COULD be compatible with trans ideology — because it is the only definition compatible with the oft-chanted trans ideology refrain that “trans women are women”.

The problem with this definition, though, is patently obvious; it involves perfectly circular reason, such that it provides exactly zero clarity about what it is that trans women who claim to be women are claiming that they are. Indeed, the trans ideology definition of “woman” may represent the platonic ideal of what circular reasoning entails.

An excerpt. The part in italics is from the FFRF’s statement on why they removed my piece:

FFRF and its new legislative arm, FFRF Action Fund, will do everything we can to defeat President-elect Trump’s draconian vow that the official policy of the U.S. government will be that “there are only two genders, male and female.” We are already gearing up to fight his promise to end the “transgender lunacy” on day one of his administration.

Wow. I had never realized that when I donated to FFRF, I was indirectly donating to another, much larger, organization: Human Rights Campaign. It’s not that I’m opposed to much of what HRC supports (although I certainly don’t support ALL of their efforts), but I had always thought that the mission of FFRF was different from that of HRC. I always thought that FFRF was an organization focused like a laser on the separation of church and state. If I wanted to donate to an organization (HRC) focused specifically on lesbian and gay and trans activism, I would have. If FFRF has so much money that it doesn’t need that $50K for its own specific efforts that focus directly on ITS specific mission – then I guess I’m a fool for having donated money to them so consistently over the years. My bad.

The larger point – and what I think is the most important issue that has been raised by this whole rather sordid set of events involving the FFRF – is that I think the FFRF should STAY IN ITS LANE. We need an organization to focus specifically on separation of church and state issues, and FFRF should have let other organizations focus on other issues – however worthwhile the efforts of those other organizations may be. When I first wrote to FFRF 20 months ago, this was exactly the issue I tried to raise with FFRF co-president Annie Laurie Gaylor. Sadly, it is apparent that FFRF is now becoming just another progressive ideology organization — and like other far left progressive organizations, FFRF is now worshipping at the altar of trans ideology.

This is from Sarah Haider’s Substack. It makes me a bit sad because although I’ve always admired Sarah’s writing and work (she was a cofounder of Ex-Muslims of North America), she is, while remaining a nonbeliever, leaving the atheist “community:

An excerpt:

This past week, a drama has been unfolding at the Freedom From Religion Foundation (FFRF). It seems that they published a piece by an intern (Kat Grant) on the definition of “woman” in their newsletter, Freethought Today. You can read the piece here if you like, but I’ll spoil it for you: Grant thinks a woman is whoever claims to be one. Thankfully, they invited the distinguished biologist Jerry Coyne for a rebuttal defending the biological definition, but then hastily took it down, calling it “an error of judgement” that does not reflect their values. Understandably outraged, Coyne resigned from the FFRF honorary board, as did Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker.

While they are saying goodbye to FFRF, I think it might be a good time for me to say goodbye to organized atheism altogether.

This is not, to be clear, a goodbye to atheism. Despite the reports of famous re-conversions of former-atheists like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, I cannot find God in my heart (or even a “God-shaped hole”). The switch has flipped; the myth has fully unraveled and been replaced by an understanding of the world that sits firm in my mind (far more comfortably than faith ever did). On this point, I don’t believe there is a way back for me. (I nearly wish I could manage some wiggle room here, if only so that I can understand what it is that my newly-religious friends are feeling and accepting. But no such luck.)

Still, I have become friendlier to the idea of religion as a social good as of the past few years, and now (more controversially), I even feel that there are intellectual benefits to faith too–or at least, to some forms of it. Much of this is informed by my experiences working within the atheist activism space, and by my resulting intellectual drift.

I would urge you to support Sarah’s work by considering a donation here.

Finally, from Jonathan Turley‘s website (he’s a legal scholar, writer, and professor at George Washington University Law School):

An excerpt:

The resignations from the FFRF raised some of the same points made by “old guard” figures who have left the ACLU over its own abandonment of neutrality and  effort “to adhere to ‘progressive’ political or ideological positions.”

There is a worthy debate over transgender issues in science. Dr. Coyne was attempting to contribute to that debate. Yet, many prefer to work to silence others rather than respond to opposing views. Indeed, I was hoping that Kat Grant would come out to support Dr. Coyne in his effort to offer such a critique of her work.

Liberals have come out in support of the censorship, dismissing Coyne as someone who simply “rehashes the right-wing talking point” and “promot[es] this kind of hate.” (This commentator noted that his views were published on BlueSky, a site that has become a safe space for liberals who do not want to be triggered by opposing views).

The intolerance for opposing views is so great that the FFRF is willing to engage in atheist orthodoxy, which not long ago would have been viewed as a contradiction in terms. It is a disgraceful position for a group that once defended those banned or canceled for their views. It is a moment that reminds one of what Robert Oppenheimer said about physicists, but it is particularly poignant for these atheists who have joined a mob to silence: they “have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.”