People Swallow These Stories Hook, Line, and Sinker

If there is one constant in life, it is this: according to the media, every time a Republican does something, millions of people will die. 

Like Atlas holding up the world, the spendthrift ways and DEI policies of the Democratic Party are the only thing that stands between vast numbers of oppressed people dying horrible, torturous deaths and nirvana itself. Every policy, every budget cut, even every utterance by a Republican, leads to mass death, and that is quadruply so when it comes to Donald Trump. 

It is an iron law, and the main task of the Pravda Media is to seek out and highlight victims of the dastardly Republicans. 

The old hotness–from two or three days ago–was the 100,000 people a month Donald Trump and Elon Musk personally murdered with their USAID cuts. David Brooks, Mr. Straight-Down-the-Middle NYT columnist and PBS bloviator, compared the two to Pol Pot, which seems reasonable. I suppose Hitler was overused, so it’s good to see these people branching out. 

The Washington Post featured federal workers whose trauma from being laid off has sent them into a mental health tailspin, proving how evil the Trump people are. After all, no Americans have been laid off or put out of work by Democrat policies and told to “learn to code.” 

And now we are being warned that Trump’s demanding Harvard follow Civil Rights laws is going to kill many more people. We are to simultaneously believe that Harvard is a brave defender of all that is good and holy by refusing to follow black-letter law, and that Trump is going to kill millions by demanding they do so. 

https://t.co/qxmNuHKFMp

— Joseph Allen (@j_g_allen) June 3, 2025

Let us stipulate that Harvard researchers are doing some extraordinary work. There is no doubt that, buried among all the research about the gender confusion of tapeworms and the DEI implications of black holes, there is a great deal of real science being done there, and that at least some of it will benefit millions of people. I want that research to continue. 

But the claims being made that Trump’s battle with Harvard over its plainly illegal policies–the Supreme Court itself ruled that Harvard has systematically discriminated on the basis of race, and Harvard’s own investigators laid out in excruciating detail how the university has created a hostile environment for its own students and faculty–are patently absurd. 

Five years and $35 million into her research, Fortune is now in the process of closing 21 labs and “figuring out where to put the monkeys” from her study — while mourning a potential cure for the world’s deadliest infectious disease.

“I didn’t have time to process and grieve the loss,” Fortune said. “Our project was awesome. It was part of the largest investment the National Institutes of Health had ever made in TB. It was honestly the most satisfying science I’ve ever been a part of because it was really working.”

But now, “all the data and knowledge” her team has gathered “is gone”.

“It’s as if those studies never happened,” she said.

There is so much wrong with this description, and it only takes about 5 seconds of real thought to grasp that. What is remarkable to me is that so few people take those five seconds to realize how they are being manipulated. 

First of all is the obvious: if this research really was on the brink of curing Tuberculosis, why did Harvard allow it to evaporate? The amount of money required to keep it going is pocket change for the university, and even less significant to its many billionaire donors. It’s not like the federal government was sending them checks each day, so that the moment the funds are frozen, they have to close the doors. It would be trivial to keep the project going until new money was raised from Bill Gates or the Pritzkers or God knows who else. 

And then there is that $60 billion endowment. To keep this research going until the dispute with the Trump administration is resolved or new money raised–we are not talking billions, but millions of dollars–would be trivial. 

In other words, Harvard decided the research wasn’t really that important. Certainly less important than generating a story that people will die because a researcher was just two years away from curing Tuberculosis. 

And how do we know that this research really was that close to curing Tuberculosis? Remember when Joe Biden was pouring money into cancer research so fast that it would be cured by the end of his term? Yeah, well, I am waiting. I want a cure for cancer as much as the next guy, but Joe Biden or a researcher looking for money telling me they have the answer is…unconvincing. 

As for the research evaporating into thin air? Uh, yeah, right. That is not how it works. You don’t get so close to the end of research without having collected data, documented findings, and built up a lot of knowledge. Sure, there can be time-sensitive experiments, but to call this catastrophizing is kind. Either that, or this is horrible science and should never have been funded. 

In other words, this portrayal of the story is clearly propaganda. No doubt the study had merit, but not so much that Harvard or any of their donors cared to save it. No pharmaceutical companies were interested. Bill Gates shrugged it off. The Pritzkers were more focused on vaginoplasties…and so on. 

I saw the headline, read the first few lines of the story, and my bovine excrement detector pegged. I might wish that the research weren’t interrupted by Harvard’s intransigence, but the likelihood that TB was on the verge of being cured and that years of research evaporated is about the same as the likelihood that fusion power is just 10 years away, as it always is. 

So why does it work? Aren’t most people who read The Times of London smart enough to roll their eyes? 

Simple: most people have outsourced their critical faculties to others. 

Before you take this as a put-down of most people, it actually is rational to do so in many cases. It’s not like we can all know everything about everything, so we naturally outsource much of our thinking to others, assuming that the “experts” in some subject or another are better equipped to develop opinions on these matters than we are. 

It’s the division of labor, on an intellectual level. We expend some effort deciding who to believe, and then let those people do the thinking for us. 

Harvard, NPR, PBS, The New York Times, The Atlantic, The New Yorker… these are the institutions to which the thinking has been outsourced for many in the demi-intellectual class. And the outsourcing is total. When Harvard or The Atlantic speaks, the only appropriate response is Pavlovian. It’s stimulus/response. 

When you and I see obvious BS, many people see a compelling story that moves them. Their rational faculties have been short-circuited completely. These institutions easily become the Bernie Madoffs of the intellectual world, able to spin the most absurd stories and be believed because, well, they know what they are talking about, right? Look at the results!

We talk about people living in a bubble–and they do–but the problem goes deeper than the filtering of information. If it were just a filter or bubble, then the bubble could burst, as it should have many times in the past few years. After the Steele Dossier, Hunter Biden laptop, “sharp as a tack” hoaxes were exposed, a person exercising rationality would revise their circle of trust, right?

But millions haven’t, and most of those millions are pretty smart. 

The problem is that they have outsourced thinking to others, or at least thinking on big, complicated topics. They have chosen authorities and will not abandon them. They still look to Fauci, Scientific American, the FDA, and the CDC, and all the other authorities. David Brooks and Jonathan Capehart impress them as moderate, deep thinkers. They are on PBS!

Demi-intellectuals will cling to their priors like the last holdouts of Japanese soldiers who took years and decades to come in from the jungle.