Quietly Correcting...
How We Deal with Changes in Belief
If you wanted to be skeptical of abolishing the police, for a few years that was considered completely, completely an inappropriate opinion to have in a mainstream American liberal institution.
-Nellie Bowles (former New York Times writer)
How Antifa was dealt with in the mainstream press was basically two ways: Pretend it’s not real, which was sort of the main way it was handled (“it’s just a tiny movement, it doesn’t have any role”), or you pretend it’s just very good. You had mainstream reporters at the time saying the soldiers who fought in World War II were Antifa, that we are an Antifa kind of country, and this kind of attempt to make this group of activists into like American civic heroes. And the third thing that was always very important in the press was that, if Antifa was ever discussed, to say that it’s totally separate from BLM and that it’s a very different movement, and that to imply that they’re in any way entwined is like really, really crazy… And the reality was, there was only one protest each night. It was a united group. It was one movement. It was completely entwined for a time. There’d be a supposed BLM protest one night and no one would be there. And all of those leaders were actually at the sort of autonomous action event that was more aggressive and more violent. And Antifa sees violence as a righteous part of the revolution they want. And so they’re openly pro-violence, pro-using guns, pro-using sort of physical intimidation, pro-lighting things on fire. So that was obviously why BLM wanted to distance themselves from it, but they were very useful because actually lighting the fires and using a little bit of a frisson of threat was very useful in escalating the intensity of the moment, the intensity of the revolution. And eventually what you saw, and what I write about in the book is Antifa kind of getting sidelined a little bit as more and more corporate money comes into BLM. But at the start, in that first hot year, it was an entwined movement. Now the memory-holing and the denial is fascinating because I think we’re going to see it on a ton of these things that we’ve just been talking about. I think we’re gonna definitely see it on pediatric gender medicine, which I write about in the book. But the people denying that they were ever for hormones for kids under 18 is going to be just like the norm. And the memory-holing, you’re already seeing it.
Now, the open disavowal of some identitarian positions to which Democrats seemed deeply committed until a couple of weeks ago has seemed to validate that prediction. Since Trump’s victory, elected officials like Gilberto Hinojosa, the outgoing chair of the Texas Democratic Party, and Rep. Seth Moulton, a moderate Democrat from Massachusetts, have sensibly urged Democrats to ditch their most unpopular positions on cultural questions. “Democrats spend way too much time trying not to offend anyone rather than being brutally honest about the challenges many Americans face,” Moulton acknowledged last week. “I have two little girls, I don’t want them getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete, but as a Democrat I’m supposed to be afraid to say that.”
Many Democrats I have spoken to in the last few days are hopeful that the vibe shift on the left will prove real. According to New York Times opinion columnist Maureen Dowd, “Some Democrats are finally waking up and realizing that woke is broke.” Longtime Democratic strategist James Carville seems to share the same opinion. Democrats, he told Dowd, are fleeing identitarian positions “like the devil runs away from holy water.”
Pew Research polls show that, as of November 2024, public concern about COVID has reached an all-time low, with more U.S. adults having received a flu shot in the last six months than the updated COVID vaccine. Even more noteworthy is the shift in how we now perceive the response to COVID-19, with fewer and fewer Democrats (and hardly any Republicans) believing the responsive COVID policies (like masking and social distancing) were a ‘good idea’. Importantly, we’ve also begun to acknowledge that COVID originated in a Wuhan laboratory, rather than a ‘wet market’. While this revelation may seem trivial, it lends itself to a broader, more important discussion about the dangers of free speech suppression. Until this year, the Wuhan lab leak theory was deemed a racist, fringe ‘conspiracy theory’, with social media platforms even censoring accounts that dared broadcast the idea. That the Lab Leak theory (and several other previously prohibited ‘conspiracy theories’) has now been proven true has prompted other uncomfortable but necessary conversations, on topics such as childhood vaccinations, water fluoridation, and autism.
What a fascinating year it was! Cultural change continues to accelerate, getting worryingly close to spinning out of control (although what would that even look like?). A huge number of the smartest and most engaged people I know are now effectively on an entirely different end of the political spectrum than they were 5 years ago. In 2023 I wrote:
If your worldview hasn’t significantly shifted in the past 5 years you probably need to update your knowledge and affiliations
Whether or not they recognize it most people and institutions seem to have taken this to heart. On issue after issue the discourse and media narrative and agency positions have shifted, subtly or dramatically. Even the Overton window has shifted, as the formerly dominant cultural institutions have ceded control to competitors. Just imagine what the coverage of the Daniel Penny verdict (and the trial itself!) would have been like in 2020 if you need an illustration of this.
Yet… almost no one has admitted error. People ignore their earlier positions-and persist in proclaiming things, with absolute certainty, that half a decade ago they would have labelled as bigoted or idiotic. Listening to experts and commentators and politicians you hear the same self-assured confidence that their assumptions and their institutions and their ideology (although the ideology is never mentioned) are valid and useful guides to reality and should be trusted. When the conclusions and the recommendations have deviated so sharply from what they were 4-5 years ago this strains credulity. After all, in 2020 those same people were using that same tone. Yet both positions cannot easily be reconciled. What happened?
There are three issues around which this inflection has been especially sharp, in my view. For each the conversation has shifted dramatically and in no case is any account given for the change, or acknowledgement of the previous position:
COVID policy - the vast raft of measures taken as a response to COVID-19 and especially the expert consensus on the mRNA treatments which quickly became available and were immensely profitable for pharmaceutical companies (and their de facto appendages: cable news networks)
Police reform - a chorus stretching back to the death of Michael Brown (during which we saw a preview of what was to come with media spin, false testimony, speculation, ignorance, and unrest) but which reached a crescendo in 2020. The ideas that racism was tied to police violence, that defunding the police would be an effective measure, and even the continuing policies of bail reform and non-prosecution fall under this category
Youth gender ‘medicine’ - surgical & pharmaceutical interventions done to minors with gender dysphoria. This issue was an ominous online whisper (which literally every legacy media outlet refused to report on for years), and then suddenly it was a shout. Thousands of uncertain and unhappy teens were medicated and cut according to an activist institutional consensus which has inexorably begun to shift. For those of us you saw the shape of the problem 5 years ago this shift has been agonizingly slow.
The narrative around WPATH (the World Professional Association of Transgender Health) has begun to slip and the valences are begin to reverse… but most commentators would rather forget their earlier proclamations, which were made with moral certainty and a kind of disdain for anyone who would disagree. There’s a lesson here: be respectful of folks who hold different ideas, for soon those folks could be you.
Assumptions
Looking back on the world of 2020 a picture has begun to take form: a successful and technocratic society with powerful institutions whose values and competencies had faded, but which were no longer being restrained by the media or the public. The legacy media generally worked to protect these institutions, not correct them. The public was mostly unaware of what was happening and operated from a position of general trust and widespread ignorance, accepting a few widely-publicized facts and anchoring their worldview upon them.
This trust would mostly dissipate within the coming years. Professionals and iconoclasts and disagreeable people and those with integrity spoke out but were effectively silenced (as far as the mainstream was concerned) for a long time. Those engaged dissenters were often stigmatized, silenced, punished, and derided. No one has ever apologized for those reactions, to my knowledge.
What accounts for our blundering mistakes as a society? Some of it was routine institutional error and bad incentives and even corruption. I tend to think a lion’s share of the blame lies with ideology, taught in colleges and workplaces by people whose stated goal was indoctrination. Bad ideas were advanced by academics and ideologues and there weren’t enough experienced folks with power around to correct them. When those few who were willing tried, they were silenced.
Discourse
The truly infuriating thing about this period is the tone of the discourse. Imagine: a person who claims that anyone who doesn’t believe that Kamala Harris will win the presidency is an idiot and a bad person. This person has enough institutional support and consensus to gather like-minded people and form a chorus: Kamala will win… any other prediction is racist and in bad faith. They use tech companies and universities and the media to silence the doubters and the critics, personally attacking the most vocal and thereby cowing the rest into uneasy silence.
Then the election happens and our hypothetical person is shown to be wrong and needlessly vicious. That is what has happened with each of my policy examples: again and again and again. Indeed, many people in our dominant institutions deeply wish that they had had this kind of power during the election. If they had they would have used it in precisely this way.
Anyone trying to smear or silence or marginalize someone based only on their policy ideas should be castigated in the strongest terms possible. This kind of negative behavior is far too useful for certain interests to disappear altogether, of course, but the era of the cancel mob does seem to be receding. Unfortunately I don’t think that this is due to any increase in collective wisdom or compassion. Rather, the ideas which the cancellers were defending have proven to be so unworkable and unpopular that the mobs have quietly dispersed, leaving only the most committed and unbalanced… and a small group cannot form a mob. These kinds of impulses still lie smoldering in the culture, though. Indeed, they’re foundational in human nature. Only general instruction in ethics and epistemology have any hope of limiting them.
Hopefully during our next iteration of social media-inflamed ideological hysteria people are a little more circumspect. If they’re not, you should remind them. Who are you to proclaim what’s right and valid? You told us that teenage girls should be allowed to be pushed into drastic testosterone treatments by the thousands in 2019. Remember?
Amendment
The shift has been slow… and then fast. That’s how these things often are. The murmurings of change were barely visible in 2023 and in 2024 they’ve burst into full display. It is a constructive and necessary exercise to constantly remind folks of what they were saying in 2020 versus what they’re saying now. Not only will in puncture their contempt for disagreements and their misplaced confidence, but it might stimulate a little epistemological humility and remind everyone to think carefully and to treat each other with courtesy. We could always use more of the things.
Here are those three issues and how they’ve changed… in a mere four years:
1.) Covid policy
What did the panic do to science? It hasn’t hurt politics, which lumbers on wreaking havoc and causing mass disappointment, much as before. Science took a hit, though, because of the irresistible urge to leverage the historical prestige of science for political ends.
In 2020 the virus was treated as an existential crisis which necessitated the closure of schools, businesses, and churches (but not stores or special parties). Masking and distancing were zealously enforced public health measures which were understood to be completely beyond question (always a red flag). It wasn’t any particular policy which was striking-it was the tone: paranoid, moralistic, hysterical. I can’t recall many people explicitly arguing that schools should remain closed for 18 months to protect kids, for example (although teachers’ unions did their best). Rather there was a general feeling of hysteria and a very real mob mentality. EVERY measure that the government (and its newly empowered handmaiden, the public health administration) proposed was enthusiastically endorsed. Ironically, asking for scientific data would get you labelled anti-science. This intoxicating brew of public fear and acclaim was too much for our leaders… and bad policies resulted. That’s completely aside from the mRNA treatments debacle.
‘Vaccines’ (I’ve been reliably told that’s a misnomer but it’s in general use and I’m not a medical researcher) were treated as godsends and some very strong claims were made about them repeatedly:
If you’d been vaccinated you were safe from infection and from becoming contagious
Vaccines were more effective than natural immunity
Vaccines were important and beneficial, on balance, for every possible demographic and population group and should be administered as widely as possible. There was very little risk of vaccine injury or complication.
Why go through the whole list? Every one of these claims proved to be wrong, and the people making them were proven to be (by their own words, in some cases) liars.
If you only read the New York Times and watch CNN these might be shocking statements to you (perhaps not). Nevertheless, they are all accurate, to my knowledge. Remember the ‘lab leak’ theory? How ridiculed and suppressed that narrative was… until it suddenly became ‘probably true’? These changes are much like that, only far, far more mortally consequential.
Note: this remains the one issue on which cable news will not report or amend their conclusions or conduct any analysis. Whether it’s the lab leak theory or school closures or (especially) mRNA treatments. They remain largely silent, with growing nervousness.
2.) Police reform
If you’d said that Derek Chauvin might not have killed George Floyd, or that police (and black communities, and society) have much bigger problems than racism, or that BLM was an acquisitive and malignant operator in the world of policy reform, you’d have literally become a pariah-instantly.
All of those things are now openly discussed and plenty of liberals are willing to state them. Where, in contrast, are the reformers trying to address systemic racism in the police departments are arguing for law enforcement funds to be cut? Where is the outrage when murderous black suspects are (predictably) killed by police? It was there in 2020 and now it’s not.
This is a particularly interesting item because many of the policies which were implemented in the wake of BLM are still with us. They’ve certainly indirectly led to the deaths of far more black citizens than have been killed by police in the past few decades-but never mind. As a country we only care about the deaths of black people (as a rule) when it’s useful for special interests to gain power or money.
This was an incredibly emotional topic in 2020. I had many conversations with inflamed, passionate people (mostly young women). Now when I try to raise the subject with them, they never want to talk about it. Has their movement succeeded? Is systemic racism gone? Or do they understand that their feelings misled them and created a sense of crisis, allowing manipulative activists to dishonestly frame social problems, and try to drive a wedge between citizens and law enforcement in order to advance their own radical vision?
They succeeded, for a little while… but only with folks whose background and lifestyle allowed them to believe that police weren’t important. Just because you rarely see police doesn’t mean they’re not crucial. They tend to stay in poor areas, protecting the citizens there from violence and predation. Removing them will increase those things, but not for the wealthy. More people understand that today and it still astounds me that they didn’t then.
3.) Youth gender ‘medicine’
The release of the Cass Report, the very distinct shift in tone and coverage in the New York Times, the Atlantic, the Washington Post, the belated recognition of Helen Joyce AND Hannah Barnes and many others, the public about face of Congressman Seth Moulton… the rebound on this issue has been dramatic. You’ll rarely hear anyone acknowledge their change of stance, of course. When we consider that many of them were calling the very positions that they now hold dangerously transphobic perhaps that’s to be expected, though.
This issue rests on 4 important questions:
How carefully are these kids screened to eliminate other issues and pathologies (so that they’re not being treated with drugs that help trans people when their deeper issue is autism or sexual trauma or schizophrenia)?
What is the effectiveness of surgery and pharmaceutical treatment in preventing suicidality?
What is the likely desistance rate of the kids now being treated, OR how many of the kids now presenting with gender dysphoria are likely to change their mind?
How risky are these treatments? Obviously surgery is irreversible and hormones are profoundly disordering… but are there risks to puberty blockers?
The answers, which everyone seems to slowly be acknowledging, seem to be:
How carefully are these kids screened? Not carefully at all. In many cases they’re ALL basically being affirmed.
What is the effectiveness of surgery and pharmaceutical treatment in preventing suicidality? All data indicates it is not very effective in the long term.
What is the likely desistance rate of the kids now being treated? It’s hard to know but we can say that no one has any idea. The numbers of patients has surged and the patient profile has changed radically (more female, more anxious, more autistic… ). It’s probably safe to say: many of these kids aren’t trans.
How risky are these treatments? Risky. Cancers, bone weakness, lowered IQ-the data is still developing but the days of newspapers claiming that puberty blockers are low risk and ‘reversible’ seem to be drawing to a close. The New York Times published a voluminous article in 2022 basically announcing its institutional change but made little mention of its earlier flawed reporting and issued (as far as I know) no retractions.
Writing about the premier trans activist medical group, JL writes:
WPATH’s worldwide membership has dropped dramatically by 60% during the past year. “The future for gender affirming healthcare at a global level now looks rather uncertain.
This was almost unimaginable three years ago. Will any of those withdrawing organizations address the issue? Probably not. Will any people?
Epilogue
I could write all day about the institutional hypocrisy displayed around these issues. Institutions are institutions though. They use hierarchies and specialization to diffuse responsibility and they wield their power to protect their own interests first, even while they proclaim their concern for health or safety or children. That is simply the way of the world and anyone who doesn’t believe that the folks at the CDC would tell lies to protect their own funding or careers, or that medical researchers would conceal data to bolster their ideology and polish their image, should simply examine those organizations and individuals for themselves. I am supremely confident that you will find that institutions are self-serving and experts (who seem to absorb the glib irresponsibility of the institutions) are generally cowardly. It’s unfortunate, but true.
A prominent doctor and trans rights advocate admitted she deliberately withheld publication of a $10 million taxpayer-funded study on the effect of puberty blockers on American children — after finding no evidence that they improve patients’ mental health.
Dr. Johanna Olson-Kennedy told the New York Times that she believes the study would be “weaponized” by critics of transgender care for kids, and that the research could one day be used in court to argue “we shouldn’t use blockers.”
However, these are large groups of people OR they are individuals who have essentially traded their human decency for credentials. Most people are just people… and yet they’ve mostly quietly corrected too.
I think it’s now an interesting exercise to ask people: how have your beliefs shifted in the past few years? This attitude of constant and myopic self-confidence in a worldview which continues to fail itself is probably psychologically comforting but it results in absurdities.
People do not like to admit when they’re wrong. Much of their discomfort comes from our nature as status-hungry social animals. Admitting to others that you were wrong involves a kind of implicit apology and might cause some loss of credibility or face. Admitting to yourself that you were wrong threatens the edifice of interrelated beliefs, which often rest on shockingly flimsy (emotional, associative, presumptuous, prejudiced) foundations. This kind of cognitive dissonance can be intensely uncomfortable for many people. Instead of experiencing it it’s easy to edit and rewrite the story you tell yourself about your beliefs and their origins. Even when confronted with emails or tweets it’s often possible to wiggle and maneuver through the machinery of semantics and logical ambiguity to recreate your past claims in a different and less difficult form. This process often largely seems to be unconscious.
The cognitive dissonance is much worse (and the need for intellectual dishonesty accordingly greater) if you’re in the grips of an ideology. Ideologies have self-protective mechanisms.
They label and demean those who disagree with you. How many people on this planet have a negative impression of Joe Rogan despite never having listened to his podcast? This is an associational stigma-this person or idea is invalid because he/it is related to something bad and therefore I can safely dismiss everything related to him/it. By now this blanket of error literally covers most of the citizens and commenters in America for many people. If people who believe different things are bad people whose ideas can be dismissed prior to investigation then who’s left to convince you that you’re wrong?
They moralize issues. Trans health care for minors was (in still is, in too many institutions) portrayed as a necessary means to save the lives of some of our society’s most unhappy children. Only a bad person would be against that! Unfortunately, that framing begs the question (do these procedures save lives? That’s what we disagree about!) and ignores all nuance and counterfactuals. It’s important to understand that moralizing the issue shuts down any discussion of it and therefore protects the ideology, not people. Anyone who believes in the scientific method would be happy to have these questions dealt with publicly, as much as possible. That’s how science (and good policy-making) works. But if you start with a cherished belief and work to protect it from any opposition or criticism you will fear and resist questions or dissents.
No one disagrees that these are important issues and that people’s lives might be at stake. Both sides believe this, though. It’s not that one side cares about human life and one does not. Both sides care about human life and disagree about the best way to promote and protect it. Anyone who still believes that institutions are reliable enough to be trusted to make policy about these hideously complex and ever-changing questions by dictate, behind closed doors, is actually not acting in the interests of human life. They’re acting in the interests of the institutions… and usually an ideology as well.
They catastrophize. Why was it so important that every black suspect killed by police within a (roughly) year-long window be tied to racism? Even when suspects resisted, lunged for weapons, or were killed by officers of the same race racism was invariably mentioned. Why should suicide be the first subject raised in response to discussions about gender dysphoria? By making every issue about life and death (and implying that the other side wants the latter) you flatten complex issues and shut down thought.
Ideologies do not admit error, even if people do. They are unwieldly tools with which to understand the world and they should be assiduously avoided. Anyone who tells you that some value (safety, kindness, social justice, equity) is above ‘truth’ is not your friend.
Institutions have lost their pompous sheen of credibility. They will continue to act with their usual certainty I imagine because they are, in a sense, machines. A computer will never stop giving you results while it’s running but once its OS is understood to have been corrupted those results will be understood with the appropriate skepticism. I personally believe that institutions would gain more credibility if they admitted their errors and manipulations and ulterior motives (even just some of them) but there seems to be a hard brake in place against that sort of thing happening. If you’d asked me ten years ago, I would’ve said that institutions will do anything within the rules (and often outside of them) to preserve themselves. Now I say that they’ll do anything which doesn’t contradict the ideology of their members or hurt the careers and statuses of their managers.
New institutions are beginning to emerge to challenge the failing dinosaurs. Where the market has influence (colleges, media companies, corporate valuations, board rooms) the changes are already being felt. The political priority should be to weaken the grip of government agencies (even non-profits, which now often function as arms of state power, funded entirely by public money) and de facto monopolies. The prospect of shake-ups at the CDC and the HHS and the FBI are so encouraging not only because those institutions need reform but because they have become too extensive, too rigid, too secretive, too bureaucratic. Everything that the FBI does could be done by 20 other law enforcement agencies in America and in many cases they should be. (I would much rather deal with a special investigations unit of the State of Florida than my regional FBI Field Office).
The experts have begun falling with their institutions and the fall continues. This seems just: people who misled the public or substituted incorrect theories or unpopular values for scientific skepticism have no claim on the trust of the public. People who overwhelmingly chose to stay quiet about emerging doubts or issues to preserve their careers and reputations or social status are cowards. They feared ridicule or professional difficulty or administrative sanction-they should have feared the cry of their own consciences and the outrage of a misled public. A major undertaking for new media should be to identify prominent supporters of vaccine mandates and ‘gender medicine’ and bail reform and hold them to account for their earlier positions. This isn’t punitive-it’s an organic and necessary corrective mechanism for society. Those folks answered the pressures of their organizations and social circles and now they should answer the pressure of the public-the entity they should have been acting on behalf of from the beginning:
…if you benefit from a college degree or a professional certification or a management position and you encounter ideas or proposals which you believe to be harmful and insane do not let fear of the mob or concern for your personal wealth or status dissuade you from participating in the discussion. That’s not politeness, or acceptance, or inclusion-it’s cowardice.
But what about the rest of us? Millions upon millions of people have quietly veered onto a different track without ever acknowledging the change. In many cases I wonder if they themselves realize it. This is a delicate area because there are few things less appealing than an “I told you so!” That will only provoke defensiveness. Yet the conversations are useful and often necessary.
My thoughts on this are that the era of glib and arrogant certainty is at an end. It probably never should have been the dominant mode but it certainly was for a while. The world is a fast-changing and complicated place and as our familiarity with social media and digital information flows deepens people will begin to realize the value of intellectual humility and of owning your mistakes. EVERYONE changes their mind. Everyone makes mistakes. Everyone has regrets. True error lies in refusing to admit your missteps, and in maintaining an attitude of arrogance or closed-mindedness.
Of course, there are also many people who have not changed their minds and continue to persist in beliefs that have proven to be wrong and harmful. There are people who also continue to lie. But that’s an entirely different matter…
One note to add: there are no children or anyone else who "is actually trans" since "trans" is not something one can be (a boy who is actually not a boy is a logical impossibility). To the extent "gender dysphoria" exists, it is a symptom of a mental illness, not a condition itself.
Nice article! If only it were read by those who most need to hear it...