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https://www.thefp.com/p/the-real-science-on-masks-they-make?utm_nce on Masks: They Make No Difference
Face coverings do nothing to reduce the spread of Covid, according to a new, gold standard scientific review.
JOHN TIERNEY
FEB 27
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Cashiers wear protective masks in a grocery store in New York City on April 2, 2020. (Stephanie Keith via Getty Images)
We now have the most authoritative estimate of the value provided by wearing masks during the pandemic: approximately zero. The most rigorous and extensive review of the scientific literature concludes that neither surgical masks nor N95 masks have been shown to make a difference in reducing the spread of Covid-19 and other respiratory illnesses.

This verdict ought to be the death knell for mask mandates, but that would require the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the rest of the public health establishment to forsake “the science”—and unfortunately, these leaders and their acolytes in the media seem as determined as ever to ignore actual science.

Before the pandemic, clinical trials repeatedly showed little or no benefit from wearing masks in preventing the spread of respiratory illnesses like flu and colds. That was why, in their pre-2020 plans for dealing with a viral pandemic, the World Health Organization, the CDC, and other national public health agencies did not recommend masking the public. But once Covid-19 arrived, magical thinking prevailed. Officials ignored the previous findings and plans, instead touting crude and easily debunked studies purporting to show that masks worked.

The gold standard for medical evidence is the randomized clinical trial, and the gold standard for analyzing this evidence is Cochrane (formerly the Cochrane Collaboration), the world’s largest and most respected organization for evaluating health interventions. Funded in part by the National Institutes of Health and other nations’ health agencies, it’s an international network of reviewers, based in London, that has partnerships with the WHO and Wikipedia. Medical journals have hailed it for being “the best single resource for methodologic research” and for being “recognized worldwide as the highest standard in evidence-based healthcare.”

It has published a new Cochrane review of the literature on masks, including trials during the Covid-19 pandemic in hospitals and in community settings. The trials compared outcomes of wearing surgical masks versus wearing no masks, and also wearing surgical masks versus N95 masks. The review, conducted by a dozen researchers from six countries, concludes that wearing any kind of face covering “probably makes little or no difference” in reducing the spread of respiratory illness.

It may seem intuitive that masks must do something. But even if they do trap droplets from coughs or sneezes (the reason that surgeons wear masks), they still allow tiny viruses to spread by aerosol even when worn correctly—and it’s unrealistic to expect most people to do so. While a mask may keep out some pathogens, its inner surface can also trap concentrations of pathogens that are then breathed back into the lungs.

Whatever theoretical benefits there might be, in clinical trials the benefits have turned out to be either illusory or offset by negative factors. Oxford’s Tom Jefferson, the lead author of the Cochrane review, summed up the real science on masks: “There is just no evidence that they make any difference. Full stop.”

This lack of evidence would be enough to keep any new drug or medical treatment from being approved—much less one whose purported benefits had not even been weighed against the harmful side effects. As the Cochrane reviewers disapprovingly note, few of the clinical trials of masks even bothered to collect data on the harmful effects on subjects. Most public health officials and journalists have ignored the downsides, too, and social media platforms have censored evidence of those harms. But there’s no doubt, from dozens of peer-reviewed studies, that masks cause social, psychological, and medical problems, including a constellation of maladies called “Mask-Induced Exhaustion Syndrome.”

Yet public health officials, in violation of the first-do-no-harm principle, continue recommending or mandating masks without good evidence of their effectiveness or any pretense of cost-benefit analysis. Masks are still required in many hospitals and other institutions. Despite all the data showing that Covid-19 poses virtually no risk to healthy children, the CDC continues to recommend masking all students in communities where infection rates are rising. While the WHO advises against masks for children under five, and the European Union advises against them for students under 12, the CDC cruelly recommends masking everyone from age two on up.

The CDC’s director, Rochelle Walensky, remains determined to ignore the best research on masks, as she made clear in a congressional hearing earlier this month. “Our masking guidance doesn’t really change with time,” she said, when asked how the new review from Cochrane would affect the agency’s policies. “This is an important study,” she conceded, “but the Cochrane review only includes randomized clinical trials, and, as you can imagine, many of the randomized clinical trials. . . were for other respiratory viruses.”


Children wear masks while playing in Central Park on May 24, 2020. (Ira L. Black via Getty Images)
It was a statement remarkable for its chutzpah as well as its scientific incoherence. One of the worst mistakes of the CDC and other lavishly funded federal agencies was the failure to conduct randomized clinical trials to determine whether their policies were effective. The Cochrane review had to rely on pandemic mask trials conducted in other countries—and now Walensky has the gall to complain that other countries didn’t do enough of the research that U.S. agencies shirked. She’s right that some of the trials involved other viruses, but why dismiss them as irrelevant to the coronavirus? And while one can always wish for more studies to include in a meta-analysis, that’s no excuse to ignore the best available evidence in favor of the shoddy science peddled by her agency to defend its policies.

Early in the pandemic, the CDC justified its newfound enthusiasm for masks in a press release hailing “the latest science” from a case study of a hair salon in Missouri. “[W]earing a mask prevented the spread of infection from two hair stylists to their customers,” the CDC proclaimed, a preposterously sweeping conclusion to draw from a small observational study that lacked a control group and had other obvious limitations (most of the salon’s customers were never even tested for Covid).

On national television, Walensky touted another study, of schools in Arizona, as proof that masks dramatically reduced the spread of Covid, but the study’s methodology was so clearly flawed—and the results so out of line with rigorous studies—that other Covid researchers dismissed it as “ridiculous” and “so unreliable that it probably should not have been entered into the public discourse.”

Instead of sponsoring—or at least heeding—clinical trials, the CDC kept searching for confirmation from less reliable research. It repeatedly cherry-picked observational data, crediting masks for a short-term reduction in Covid rates in some localities while ignoring contrary data from more systematic analyses, such as a study that tracked infection rates nationwide over the entire first year of the pandemic—and found that neither mask mandates nor mask usage correlated with infection rates.

Can anything persuade the maskaholics in the public health establishment and the public to give up their obsession? Some researchers, echoing Walensky, concede that the Cochrane review is the gold standard but argue that the clinical trials so far haven’t been extensive enough to rule out the possibility that masks might do some good. But that vague possibility is no reason to force masks on people: a public health intervention is supposed to be based on solid evidence, not wishful thinking.

In his book Unmasked: The Global Failure of COVID Mask Mandates, data analyst Ian Miller devotes an entire chapter to graphs exposing the CDC’s statistical malfeasance. He also prepared a graph for a previous City Journal article that is worth showing again, because it’s a visual confirmation—from nationwide data, not clinical trials—of the conclusions in the Cochrane review. The graph tracks the results of the natural experiment that occurred across the United States in the first two years of the pandemic, when mask mandates were imposed and lifted at various times in 39 states.

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-secrets-in-our-skies?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=260347&post_id=104901744&isFreemail=true&utm_medium=email
The Secrets in Our Skies
We shot down four objects floating over U.S. airspace, but gave up looking for three. What were they exactly—and what is the government not telling us?
ADAM POPESCU
FEB 25

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The first spy balloon, which entered U.S. airspace on January 28, was shot down over the Atlantic on February 4. (Chad Fish via AP)
The secrets of the mysterious crafts floating across America are now buried forever under the sea ice of northern Alaska, the wilds of the Yukon, and the choppy, gray-white waters of Lake Huron.

Amazingly, it was too cold, and the weather conditions too harsh, for the United States military—which had no trouble blasting the balloons out of the sky—to keep looking for their debris. Late last Friday, the U.S. Northern Command, part of the Department of Defense, called off the search.

So we’re left not knowing—for sure—where they came from, or what they were looking for, or what they found. We can’t even confirm whether they were all Chinese or all balloons.

The only clue to the objects that descended on us from out of the blue is two words uttered by the president of the United States: private companies.

Last week, President Biden told the world the balloons are probably “tied to private companies, recreation or research institutions studying weather or conducting other scientific research.”

“[N]othing right now suggests they were related to China’s spy balloon program or that they were surveillance vehicles from any other country.”

Which suggests it could be any old company from Peoria or Stockholm or wherever doing something anodyne like researching wind patterns or sending fried chicken into the stratosphere.

What the president didn’t say is that the balloons were likely dispatched by a Chinese company that’s not at all a company in the way Americans imagine them, but really, an extension of the Chinese military intelligence regime.

First things first—what are the odds China is behind all this?

High.

Consider that there is a lot of stuff up there from countries around the world, including the United States—mostly balloons that collect topographic data, gauge weather patterns, and enhance our communications.

In 2022, that stuff included 366 unidentified aerial phenomena, or UAPs, floating above the United States. Most of them were perfectly innocuous, but 171 could not be explained.

Still, the United States Air Force chose not to fire a missile (pricetag per missile: $400,000 to $450,000) at any of those. (Or, at least, there were no reports of that having happened.)

Not this time.

That’s because right before the three recent mysterious UAPs turned up, there was another UAP—and pretty much everyone now agrees that that one was a Chinese spy balloon. On February 4, an F-22 blew it up off the coast of Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

“We detected a Chinese balloon, and then we opened the scope and found more,” said Ryan Graves, a former F/A-18 Super Hornet Navy pilot who recorded more than 100 encounters with UAPs while patrolling the Eastern Seaboard of the United States a decade ago. “It’s certainly tied together.”


A U.S. Air Force pilot looks down at the first flying object, a Chinese surveillance balloon, before it was downed earlier this month. (US Department of Defense via Getty Images)
Is there any chance the three mystery crafts were not spying on America?

I asked Miles Yu, the China-born director of the Hudson Institute’s China Center, whether he thought there is a world in which the mysterious flying objects were not working for Chinese intelligence.

“Impossible,” Yu told me. “The Chinese government can and does exert significant influence over any private enterprise, far beyond what the U.S. could do.”

Retired U.S. Admiral James Stavridis, a former NATO Supreme Allied Commander, added: “In China, there is a very close nexus between commercial companies at every level and the People’s Liberation Army.”

Graves, the former Navy pilot, noted that the United States has already gathered a lot of information about the balloons—and our decision to take them out suggests that whatever we know isn’t good.

“We have gun-camera footage, radar, other information about what this was,” Graves said. “That’s true even if we don’t find objects on the ground.”

Mira Ricardel, a principal at The Chertoff Group who was deputy national security advisor under John Bolton, said, referring to China: “It’s not like they have companies over there that say, ‘Hey, we’re going to fly objects over the U.S. like SpaceX.’ This is not a democracy.”

Ideally, said Mary Kissel, a senior adviser under former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, the balloon saga would wake up the country. “Beijing is not our friend,” Kissel said. “This is not the action of a friend. France would not fly a spy balloon at 60,000 feet above us.”

So what, exactly, were the balloons looking for?

Ricardel suspects the point of launching the balloons was “to see what the U.S. response will be.”

The Chinese are especially adept at sending balloons into “near space,” Yu said. “If you fly a balloon at 60,000 feet, it’s much easier to take lateral images of ground installations rather than use a satellite hundreds of miles off the ground,” he said.

Balloons are cheap, fast, easy to use, and can be equipped with infrared cameras “to see what’s happening beneath the clouds,” said Anastasia Quanbeck, a spokesperson for Aerostar, an aerospace company based in Sioux Falls that operates stratospheric balloons worldwide.

They can also stay airborne—around 80,000 feet—for years at a time, all the while broadcasting data back home in real time. Like TikTok hoovering up our data, but from a very high altitude.


Only the first object was recovered. The other three crafts—and their secrets—will likely be buried forever below ice. (Chad Fish via AP)
So why didn’t the president just tell us the whole, unvarnished truth?

A few possible reasons.

One is avoidance. In Washington, Yu argued, “the guiding philosophy is to avoid a direct conflict with China.”

That’s an odd approach, he said, given that China “uses confrontation to extract cooperation”—meaning it creates problems to force the United States to ease up on other fronts. Sure, we’ll call off the balloons, as long as you stop yapping about intellectual property rights or Uyghurs or Taiwan.

Ron Garan, a former NASA astronaut who spent six months in space and another three years leading a high-altitude balloon company, believes the flying objects were “rogue balloons.”

The balloons’ operator, in China, probably lost control of them, and then their self-destruct mechanism failed, Garan said. He was amazed by Beijing’s response to the whole saga. First, the Chinese expressed regret; then, after we blew up balloon No. 1, they became angry; then, they went off about all the spy balloons the U.S. has sent to China—all of which exacerbated our already tense relations. “China couldn’t possibly think they could get away with it,” Garan said.

Former Navy pilot Ryan Graves said that the federal government’s silence on this story reflects a broader reticence to communicate plainly and candidly about national security, American airspace, or UAPs.

Graves said that he had become something of a pariah in his old Navy circles for speaking publicly about UAPs. “No one likes sticking their neck out there,” he said. “My former commanding officer—I was in touch with him via a friend I ran into. He was on FaceTime and said, ‘Look who’s here.’ I was wearing my alumni hat, and the officer said, ‘Take that fucking hat off.’ In his opinion, I was an embarrassment to the squadron.”

What does China likely make of our response to its flying objects?

The most important data the crafts provided was America’s reaction to it—further confirmation, in the eyes of the Chinese, of our national decline.

“China sees this as a way to erode our unity, and that gives them an advantage,” Elliot Ackerman, an author and former Marine, told me.

Mary Kissel said the balloons had cast a spotlight on a gaping hole in our national discourse. “There are a lot of gray areas of warfare that we really, as a nation, have not confronted,” Kissel said. “There’s a lot of stuff floating in the air above us at 60,000 feet all the time and we have not come up with a coherent policy to deal with it.”

Instead, there was the predictable partisan sniping—Republicans accusing the president of being weak, Democrats insisting the president acted prudently.

Worse than that, there was hysteria. We glimpsed a few balloons traipsing across the skyline, and suddenly we imagined hundreds, thousands of balloons with cameras crisscrossing the American heartland, gazing into our nuclear silos and our bedrooms, and there was talk of UFOs—sorry, UAPs—descending upon us from outer space. We imagined this was the opening act of Red Dawn or worse yet, Independence Day. We wondered what the White House wasn’t telling us.

“When you sprinkle a few kernels of doubt on what the government is telling you, that in and of itself is a win,” Ackerman said, alluding to the Chinese and the spy balloons we will never find. “It’s got everybody’s imaginations going, like the beginning of a spy novel.”

This is the first piece by Adam Popescu, who recently joined The Free Press as a Senior Reporter.

Read our story about how China got our kids addicted to ‘digital fentanyl’ here. And if you’re looking for more thoughtful coverage on world events, become a Free Press subscriber today:

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-booming-market-for-backdoor-ozempic?
The Booming Market for Backdoor Ozempic
It’s not just celebrities. Women around the country are going to great lengths to procure ‘liquid gold’ in our bottomless appetite to be thin.
By Olivia Reingold
February 16, 2023
It’s noon on a Wednesday, when most people would be eating lunch. But not Kate Barone, an Atlanta-based salon owner who is 5 feet 1 with blonde hair down to her waist. She recently got down to 90 pounds from a high of around 120 on semaglutide, the active ingredient in the blockbuster diabetes drug Ozempic.

She said she’s off the injections for now while she undergoes fertility treatment to freeze her eggs. But she can’t wait to get back on the drug, which, she says, still has the lingering effect of suppressing her appetite.

“I feel like I’m a drug addict—I want to, like, relapse,” she told me, laughing.

Barone, 37, represents a new kind of Ozempic user, who gets the drug off-label from a medical spa that also provides Botox, fillers, and hair loss treatments—taking the drug far away from its medical roots and deep into the cosmetic sphere.

Ozempic, taken once a week as a shot in the arm, stomach, or thigh, was first approved by the FDA in 2017 to lower blood sugar in people with type 2 diabetes. But the drug came with an incredible side effect: rapid weight loss. In 2021, the FDA greenlit a higher dose semaglutide product, Wegovy—made by the same Danish manufacturer, Novo Nordisk—as an obesity treatment.

Meanwhile, over the past year, the world has watched as some of our most famous celebrities started to shrink. Khloé Kardashian, who once called herself the “fat sister,” now has abs. Rebel Wilson and Mindy Kaling, who for years have admitted to struggles with their weight, are suddenly the smallest they’ve ever been. While all credited their new shape to exercise and foods like grilled salmon, unfounded rumors on social media alleged that the real cause was Ozempic. TikTokers even claimed, with no proof, that semaglutide helped Kim Kardashian shed 16 pounds to fit into Marilyn Monroe’s “Happy Birthday” dress for the Met Gala (although she told Vogue it was a “sauna suit” and “strict” eating regime).
READ MORE https://www.thefp.com/p/the-booming-market-for-backdoor-ozempic?

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-real-world-impact-of-our-reporting?
The Real-World Impact of Our Reporting
Whistleblowers, investigations and congressional hearings. Plus, a new audio series featuring J.K. Rowling.
BARI WEISS
FEB 15
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James Baker, Vijaya Gadde, Yoel Roth, and Anika Collier Navaroli are sworn during the Protecting Speech from Government Interference and Social Media hearing. (Matt McClain via Getty Images)
Dear Readers,

Bari here. Before I head into our story meeting, I want to pop into your inbox to thank all of you, once again, for subscribing to The Free Press and to give a quick summary of the impact our reporting has had over the past few days.

On Wednesday of last week, the House Oversight Committee summoned four former Twitter executives to answer questions about our Twitter Files reporting. As hearings continue, the public may finally get the answers it deserves about the way Twitter censored key information about subjects like Covid; about its covert cooperation with various government agencies, including the FBI; and broader questions about the power of this platform over public American life.

After politicians in Washington cited our reporting, we convened the reporters who broke open the Twitter Files story at the subscriber-only FP Forum we hosted. If you missed it, watch here:


The very next day, we published Jamie Reed’s alarming firsthand account of her experience working as a case manager at The Washington University Transgender Center at St. Louis Children’s Hospital. Reed is the first whistleblower from inside an American pediatric gender clinic to speak out publicly. And the details she describes are, as she put it, “morally and medically appalling.”

Within hours of publication, the story generated a major reaction among law enforcement and policy makers.

Senator Josh Hawley’s office announced an investigation.

So did Missouri Attorney General Andrew Bailey, who says the Transgender Center was taking state taxpayer money unlawfully to fund their operations.

And Washington University responded to the piece in a statement: “We are alarmed by the allegations reported in the article published by The Free Press.”

Subscribers got to meet Jamie at a live FP Forum event last Thursday, where she spoke to our Emily Yoffe and shared more about her experience at the clinic, her decision to speak out, and her advice for parents and kids around the country. Watch that conversation here:


And just yesterday we announced one of our most ambitious projects to date: The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, a new audio documentary that examines some of the most contentious conflicts of our time through the life and career of the world’s most successful author. The show is hosted by our Megan Phelps-Roper and premieres next Tuesday, February 21.

Watch the trailer here (and share it, too):

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The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling, a new podcast hosted by @meganphelps coming February 21st. Learn more at thefp.com/witchtrials
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And—I know it’s a lot! We’re doing a lot!—tonight Nellie is hosting an FP Forum with Jennifer Sey, one year after she wrote in our pages that she was leaving a top job at Levi Strauss & Co. in order to speak her mind.

Jennifer Sey, Elon Musk, Jamie Reed, and J.K. Rowling could have gone to any outlet in the world. Instead, they came to The Free Press, a publication that didn’t exist a year ago, a publication that exists now because of you—our subscribers. You are what’s enabling us to drive the political and cultural conversation in the U.S. and beyond.

https://www.thefp.com/p/why-65-percent-of-fourth-graders?
Why 65 Percent of Fourth Graders Can’t Really Read
Emily Hanford reveals how America’s teachers adopted a flawed system for teaching reading to kids—and, as a result, completely failed them.
THE FREE PRESS
FEB 11
Kids learn to read the old-fashioned way at Hobart Elementary School in 1999. (David Butow via Getty Images)
Many parents saw America’s public education system crumble during the weight of the pandemic. Stringent policies—including school closures that went on far too long, and ineffective Zoom school for kindergarteners—had devastating effects that we are only just beginning to understand.

But, as with so many problems during the pandemic, COVID didn’t necessarily cause these structural breakdowns as much as it exposed just how broken the system was to begin with.

How broken? Consider the shocking fact that 65 percent of American fourth-grade kids can barely read.

American Public Media’s Emily Hanford uncovers this sad truth with her podcast, Sold a Story. She investigates the influential education authors who have promoted a bunk idea and a flawed method for teaching reading to American kids. She exposes how educators across the country came to believe in a system that didn’t work, and are now reckoning with the consequences: Children harmed. Tons of money wasted. An education system upended.

Guest host Katie Herzog talks to Emily about her groundbreaking reporting to ask how it all went wrong—and what we can do to make things right.



Why 65% of Fourth Graders Can't Really Read

The Free Press

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Embracing God to Own the Libs
Andrew Tate and the rise of the political convert.
SHADI HAMID
FEB 8
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Andrew Tate holds up a Quran outside a court in Romania, where he is being detained as part of a human trafficking and rape investigation. (Photo via Twitter)
In 2022, Andrew Tate was the most googled person in the United States. He had managed to build a massive following online—especially among young men and on the far-right—with a potent mix of cultural criticism, self-help bravado, and the sort of unvarnished misogyny that is rare even among misogynists. Then, in December, he was arrested in Romania on sex-trafficking charges. Until the platform banned him, TikTok videos of Tate had been viewed more than 11 billion times.

But I had been interested in Tate for another reason: his religious identity.

In October, the British-American ex-kickboxer had converted to Islam. Known for his libertine lifestyle—including running a sex-cam business—he seemed an odd fit for the moral strictures of Islam. And he was.

Muslim reaction to Tate’s very public announcement of his conversion on the social media site Gettr was split: Some saw it as an opportunity to share the good word. Others were horrified, fearing Tate would re-popularize stereotypes about Islam subjugating women.

That difference of opinion mostly reflected differing politics. Like other minority communities, American Muslims, and especially young American Muslim men, had become increasingly divided between the “woke” and the “anti-woke.” The anti-woke, or “based,” were into Jordan Peterson. They were also into Andrew Tate, whose story, whose brand, had come to embody a defiant, wholesale rejection of the norms, habits, and beliefs of the progressive mainstream.

After Tate’s arrest, I braced myself for media coverage about his newfound faith. But it was like no one in the legacy press was even aware he had converted.

The Economist ran a profile of Tate that tried to answer the question on the minds of millions: Who is this guy? I was surprised (and relieved) to find that the profile made no mention of Tate’s religion. Ditto The Washington Post and The Guardian. With the exception of Muslim Twitter, I could barely find any mention of it at all.

As far as I was concerned, this was progress. So what if Tate was Muslim? People of all faiths do bad things and have bad ideas, and Muslims were no exception. Finally, we were normal.

But it was intriguing.

Tate’s conversion to Islam is the most striking example yet of a growing phenomenon—the rise of what the theologian Massimo Faggioli calls “political conversions.” Consider that, when Tate explained why he chose Islam, he didn’t mention theology, salvation, the Quran, the Prophet Muhammad—or anything to do with spirituality or faith.

“Islam very closely reflects my personal beliefs,” he said in an interview with the Muslim polemicist Mohammed Hijab. “In my personal life, I’ve learned that if you don’t have standards, and if you’re not a strong person who’s prepared to defend his ideas, you’ll get crushed.”

As Tate sees it, where Christianity in the West is weak, undemanding, and devoid of firm rules, Islam is exacting, masculine, and vigorous. It refuses to be mocked, and it refuses to accommodate itself to progressive norms—particularly when it comes to gender and the family. Where Christianity has, in effect, accepted defeat, Islam, Tate said in the same interview, “feels like the last religion on Earth,” the only faith that stands a chance of mounting an effective resistance to moral decay and decline. (Whether Tate himself is moral, or wishes to be, is secondary.)


Andrew Tate on a private jet. (Via Twitter)
It is difficult to say just how widespread “political conversions” are, but recent survey data shows they are spreading. According to a 2020 Pew poll, evangelicals, for example, were one of the few religious groups to gain members over the last four years.

But there was a catch. Many of these self-identified evangelicals don’t go to church. They identify as evangelicals because of what it means politically. As the political scientist Ryan Burge notes, “Instead of theological affinity for Jesus Christ, millions of Americans are being drawn to the evangelical label because of its association with the G.O.P.”

I do not mean to suggest that many political converts aren’t believers—including Andrew Tate. In a somewhat amusing defense of Tate’s conversion (which compared Islam to a toaster), the YouTube personality Smile 2 Jannah cited a saying of the Prophet Muhammad urging Muslims not to doubt the sincerity of seemingly dubious conversions.

And what Andrew Tate is doing—emphasizing the politics of faith over spirituality—isn’t entirely novel. Religion is never just about religion, after all. As the Christian theologian William Cavanaugh argues in his 2009 book The Myth of Religious Violence, the decoupling of politics and faith is an “invention of the modern West.”

Yet, Tate’s conversion does tell us something important about what is happening in America right now.

As the culture continues to secularize, to become more detached from any underlying moral vision, right-wing intellectuals have responded by gravitating toward more demanding forms of Christianity, particularly Eastern Orthodoxy and Catholic integralism. Among the more prominent converts has been the conservative author Sohrab Ahmari, who grew up in a secular home in Iran, immigrated to the United States, and eventually embraced Catholicism, which Ahmari credits with imposing a “tremendous order and metaphysical direction” to his life. Like Islam, these religious orientations are perceived to be tougher, more masculine, more grounded in rules rather than sentiments. They order freedom by constraining it. They not only entail exacting rites and rituals; they are explicitly about not making concessions to secular modernity.

Some of these Christian culture warriors have come to view Islam as a resource and Muslims as allies in the long struggle against progressive cultural dominance. The conservative author Rod Dreher—who converted to Eastern Orthodoxy in 2006, before it was cool—described his admiration in a post titled “Islam: ‘The Last Badass Religion.’”

“That’s something I respect about Muslims in general,” Dreher wrote, “they take their faith a lot more seriously than we Christians do. The only forms of Christianity that are going to survive the dissolution now upon us are going to be those that are serious about the faith, and incorporate it into disciplined ways of living.”

Ahmari put it this way: “I view Islam with greater respect as a Catholic than I ever did as a secular [person] or as an atheist.”

This tells us something about the all-consuming political divide in America today, which is less about politics than culture—which is to say, religion. After all, religion—or its absence—shapes our habits, norms, and attitudes. Secularization doesn’t make religion irrelevant; instead, it creates new ways of being “religious.”

All of which explains how evangelical voters flocked en masse to Donald Trump, and why some Muslims, despite everything, insist on seeing Andrew Tate as a flawed but necessary vessel. They don’t care what he believes so much as what he signifies. In the end, it didn’t matter what was in his heart—and how was one to know what was there, anyway? What mattered was his politics, since politics has become its own kind of faith.

Is this the first you’re hearing of political conversion? Or is this a phenomenon you’ve followed? Tell us in the comments.

And if you believe in the work we do at The Free Press, become a subscriber today:

https://www.thefp.com/p/he-just-doesnt-want-to-murder-you?
He Just Doesn’t Want to Murder You
Scores of Facebook groups called ‘Are We Dating The Same Guy’ promise sisterhood and security. But they’re a lot more like the crowd-sourced Stasi.
SUZY WEISS
JAN 30
Janet Leigh in the 1960 classic Psycho (Photo via Alamy)
The screenshot, taken from dating app Hinge, shows software engineer Evan,* with thick black hair and a big, toothy smile. His profile says he is 5 feet 8 inches and graduating from Berkeley. Underneath reads a caption:

“Evan, 26 ”

The way the screenshot is positioned, it looks like Evan is gazing at the red flags next to his name.

Evan’s profile had been posted anonymously on the Facebook group “Are We Dating The Same Guy? | New York City NYC”—which started in March 2022 as a place where women compare notes on men. It currently has more than 82,000 members.

In the past year, scores of similar Facebook groups have sprung up across the U.S. in cities including Charlotte, Philadelphia, Tampa, St. Louis, Boston, Chicago, Seattle, and Austin, and in far-flung locales such as Kosovo, Melbourne, and Thailand. Some have more than 30,000 members, others less than a hundred. Almost anybody can join as long as you agree to a few rules. One requirement is usually a variation of this: Do you swear that you will not screenshot or share anything found in this group with anyone outside of this group? This is vitally important to the integrity of our group and safety of our members.

There are rules against “bullying, gaslighting, shaming, victim blaming, or aggressive behavior,” too. But regardless of the Fight Club–style bylaws, the groups are pretty much a free-for-all.

The anonymous woman who posted about Evan regaled her group with stories about their four-month relationship before he dumped her.

“He struggles with empathy,” she wrote. “He also never tells you what he needs and expects you to guess what he needs.”

“He sounds like a classic love bomber to me,” opined one commenter, whose profile photo shows her posing on an Adirondack chair with a corgi.

“Borderline personality disorder,” another commenter snarked.

“This push and pull is part of the hunt if he is a covert narcissist,” said a third. “They are skilled predators and usually have had this same relationship over and over again.”

Another: “Textbook narc.”

Dozens of similar comments followed, speculating about Evan and his various pathologies.

“Are We Dating The Same Guy” is ostensibly a place where women can detect if a dude they’re seeing is also seeing someone else. Members claim their intentions are benign—righteous, even. Take this New York commenter who said, “This group is a place for women to protect and empower other women while warning each other of men who might be liars, cheaters, abusers, or exhibit any type of toxic or dangerous behavior.”

The women, sometimes posting anonymously, share identifying information about the men: screenshots from text messages and dating apps, photos, or just descriptions (“Anyone have any intel on a Korean guy named Eun whose [sic] been on hinge?”). They ask the group if there’s anything they should know: fetishes, faux pas, unbecoming track records.

And, oh, there always are.

Whenever a new photo and description goes up, women in the group are immediately alerted to the red meat, and—with him—the red flags.

Red flags, according to the New York group, include wearing rings, working in the NYPD or FDNY, being a comedian, being 5 feet 7 inches or shorter, being Parisian, not removing pictures of an ex from Instagram, removing pictures of an ex from Instagram, not liking holidays, working as a corporate lawyer, suggesting coffee or drinks instead of a sit-down dinner for a first date, and being named Jason.

One guy was accused of having “like, bad dark energy.” And the indictments turn darker still.


Christian Bale as serial killer Patrick Bateman in American Psycho (Photo via Alamy)
A man named Brad garnered 160 not-so-nice comments. He’d met up with Susan, who brought this story to the group, for drinks after matching on Tinder. A few months later, he had offered to fly her to a city he said he was going to for work, and, anyway, Susan got irked and ghosted him. Other women quickly agreed that yes, Brad was probably a human trafficker or “some other sort of controlling sick person” or even “a serial killer.” (On posts like these, some commenters offer background check services that other group members pay monthly fees for.)

Now, it’s possible that “Are We Dating The Same Guy?” saved Susan from a dark fate. Bad things can happen. And the brutal quadruple murders in Idaho on November 13, 2022, are one horrific example where social media may have played a role. Police arrested 28-year-old criminology student Bryan Kohlberger for the crime, and he is accused of following his three female victims on Instagram. TikTok videos from women claiming to have gone on Tinder dates with the suspect went viral in the wake of the killing spree.

But here are the facts. There were 24,576 homicides in 2020 compared to 200,955 accidental deaths, according to the CDC. You’re about twice as likely to die from an unintentional fall, for example, than be murdered. Also: The lion’s share of murder victims, about 80 percent, are men. Meanwhile, the FBI estimates that less than one percent of murders committed in any given year are carried out by serial killers.

While every single murder is horrific and the desire to prevent them is understandable, it’s a fiction to think an anonymous whisper campaign on Facebook is the antidote to such crimes.

The women—or, to use the parlance of the group, “ladies”—say they’re all about supporting each other. “This group has always been a space where we can warn each other and protect each other from bad guys,” wrote the New York group’s creator in a November post. But the exercise is closer to a crowdsourced surveillance state than an earnest attempt to identify the next Ted Bundy.

Where did all of this come from? How did we get from he’s just not that into you to he’s probably going to kill you?...

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https://www.thefp.com/p/ken-burns-on-his-most-important-film?
Ken Burns on His Most Important Film
The documentarian takes on the U.S. and the Holocaust, and weighs in on what that dark period tells us about the chasm between our ideals and our reality.
THE FREE PRESS
JAN 29
Documentary filmmaker Ken Burns. (Jay Godwin via Alamy)
Ken Burns is the most famous documentary filmmaker in America. He has made 35 films over the past five decades on subjects like the Civil War, Vietnam, Jefferson, Franklin, the Roosevelts, the Statue of Liberty, baseball, jazz, Muhammad Ali, and many more.

He said of his most recent film, The U.S. and the Holocaust: “I will never work on a film more important than this one.”

No matter how many movies you’ve seen or books you’ve read about the Holocaust, Burns’ new film, which focuses on the U.S.’s response to the worst genocide in human history—what we did, and didn’t do—is bound to both surprise and horrify you.

In honor of Holocaust Remembrance Day, I spoke to Burns about why a filmmaker of American history takes on the Holocaust and what this dark period tells us about the chasm between our ideals and our reality. Below are some excerpts from our discussion, edited for length and clarity.

I went into this conversation to talk about FDR, the antisemitism inside the State Department, eugenics, immigration quotas, Charles Lindbergh, Father Coughlin, and more. What I didn’t expect was the intense exchange we had about the responsibilities of writing history, about the uses and misuses of the Holocaust as a political metaphor, and about the way Burns’ own worldview colors his work and how mine colors the way I see a film like this one.

—BW

On telling the story of the Holocaust as a human one:

BW: I want to start with one of the first scenes of the six-hour documentary, which is about the Frank family. Many have read the diary of Anne Frank, but you decide to tell this story in a new light by focusing on her father, Otto Frank, and the way that he desperately tried to get the Franks into the United States. He couldn’t, despite having all of the connections one would need to make it from Europe into America. This theme—America’s policy toward Jewish refugees during the war—underscores the entire film. Why did you decide to open with this story of Otto Frank desperately trying to escape, instead of the story that we know, of an innocent little girl hiding in an attic?

KB: Let’s remember that the diary of an innocent girl, who is often the point of entry for many Americans and certainly schoolkids to the story of the Holocaust, isn’t about the Holocaust. It’s about everything leading up to the moment of her arrest and the overshadowing fear of hiding in the secret annex. As a country, we think we’re disconnected from that, but we are not. We are culpable. Otto Frank had connections in the United States. He had crossed every t and dotted every i and he still couldn’t get in. What I wanted to do is leave our audience with the sense from the very beginning that she could be here and still be alive.

We’re required to particularize this story in a way that we don’t usually do. We say six million and it means nothing. It’s opaque. It’s dense. By particularizing it, you begin to realize that it’s not a number; it’s a set of individuals. And that the lost potentiality of those individuals is the greatest crime.

Which symphonies weren’t written? What children weren’t tended with love? What gardens weren’t raised? There’s a lot of missing human beings as a result of the madness that we call, in retrospect, the Holocaust.

On American ignorance during the Holocaust:

BW: The convenient narrative that a lot of Americans, including some American Jews, tell themselves about why the U.S. did so little to save European Jewry is that they just didn’t know. What your film does is make the case that, in fact, they did know. For example, you show Kristallnacht—the night of broken glass—on the front pages of scores of American newspapers in 1938. In one really memorable, chilling moment, you play a tape of Edward R. Murrow, in December 1942, saying “there are millions of human beings, most of them Jews, being gathered up with ruthless efficiency and murdered.” That was broadcast to millions of Americans around the country. In short: You tell a story that flies in the face of the accepted narrative about American ignorance. Did you grow up with the notion that Americans just didn’t know? And how much of what you found surprised you?

KB: The latter question is the easiest to answer, and it’s everything. And that’s true of every film. We don’t make films about subjects that we know about and then tell you what to know. Last time I checked, that’s called homework. We’d rather share with you a process of discovery. So there’s not a moment in this where it wasn’t overwhelming. I grew up, ostensibly, Episcopalian. My father was a cultural anthropologist, and he made me watch Judgment at Nuremberg at a young age. I knew America had a complicated past. We seem to think we know, each generation, who the real Americans are and who aren’t, which has gotten us into an awful lot of trouble and continues to get us into trouble.

On the influence of American media during the Holocaust:

BW: I grew up understanding that the American press bore tremendous responsibility for burying the story of the Holocaust. Only 26 of the 24,000 front-page New York Times stories during the entirety of the war were about the Holocaust. The Times’ first story on the Nazi extermination campaign, which described it as the greatest mass slaughter in history, appeared on page five, tacked onto the bottom of a column. Since your film makes the case that everybody knew what was going on in Europe, how do you understand the role that the American press played during this period?

KB: We can look at American media and say everybody knew. But we can also see that if it’s a tiny little thing on page six, as Deborah Lipstadt points out, maybe the editors don’t really believe it. What you have is all the vestiges, all the traces, all of the smells that are retained from a country that is suffused in antisemitism. And that’s going to infect the ranks of your newspaper. It’s going to infect the college that you may want to go to. It’s going to affect the conversations in the schoolyard between your kids and the neighbors’ kids. It’s going to be there in the bloodstream. And if you’re reading Henry Ford’s newspaper, then you know in your bones how bad and evil Jews are.

On the role of a documentarian:

BW: It is very clear in the film that you are trying to connect the tragedy of that period of history to America today. The film ends with a montage that includes images of “go home” graffiti on mosques, tapes of Trump yelling to build the wall, news clips of the Tree of Life massacre in Pittsburgh, the Charlottesville rally in 2017 where white supremacists shouted “Jews will not replace us,” and then finally, the January 6th attack on the Capitol. Talk to me about the choice to end the film in this way.

KB: We just assumed we would end with LBJ at the Statue of Liberty in 1965 dedicating the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, the work of Emanuel Celler, a Jewish congressman from Brooklyn, but we couldn’t do that ending because of what was happening in our country. It’s not a throughline. Out of six and a half hours, there’s a three-minute montage that takes us from that time—George Lincoln Rockwell and the American Nazi Party—to the Camp Auschwitz t-shirt that one of the January 6th insurrectionists was wearing. And that’s the last image of the film.

When we finish a film and we sign it, it’s no longer our film. It’s your film. And that’s what’s so interesting about our conversation today. I’m talking to somebody who has fully appropriated, appropriately, the film that we signed our name to. Because once that story is out, how it lands, how it’s heard, how it’s retold, how it’s excerpted, is your business. And that’s what makes this kind of exchange so thrilling, because you realize that it’s this ineffable “something” that is being transferred in the story that permits us to have the kind of conversation that we’ve had today.

On history repeating itself:

BW: There’s this moment in the film where one senator in the 1930s says, “This country belongs to the people of this country. While hundreds of thousands are hungry, millions of children underfed, and hordes of young boys and girls seeking jobs without the ability to get them, I’m not willing to let down the bars.” We don’t even need to name names, but it sounds a lot like several Republicans today.

KB: And there’s another senator who said in 1940 or 1941: “I want to build a wall high enough that no one can get in.”

BW: Right, and it has a really emotional effect. The hair on my neck stood up. I wonder: What pitfalls do you see in drawing comparisons between then and now?

KB: History has never repeated itself. There’s not been a single event that’s happened again. To be able to perceive larger patterns, that’s our work in life. Why am I here? What is my purpose here? What is the meaning of life? These are the essential questions, but we’re distracted by all of these grievances. Human nature is always the same. Greed and generosity, puritanism and prurience, virtue and vice, they’re always there. And they’re not just between you and another person. They’re within you and within me. So when Daniel Mendelsohn says in the film, “Don’t kid yourself, it could go that way. It doesn’t have to, but it could,” then he’s saying to you, “Stop the next one.”

On the use and misuse of history:

BW: I see Mendelsohn saying, “Don’t kid yourself, it could go that way,” and then I see a clip of Trump yelling to build the wall. I get a very distinctive political message from that.

KB: Yeah, it’s not political. The authoritarian playbook is being practiced in lots of different places. You know, if you’re an employee of the state of Florida and you just don’t agree with your governor and you’re fired, that’s out of the authoritarian playbook. People who are not authoritarians say, “Oh, you disagree with me? Let’s have a discussion. Let’s see whether there’s common ground.” But Florida’s not doing that. It’s saying, “Disney, we’ve given you favorable treatment for so long. But you think that the LGBTQ community has equal rights? Well, we don’t. We’re going to take away those special privileges you have.” I was just trying to call out this authoritarianism.

BW: Thinking about the uses and misuses of history, when I see people on the right saying that Fauci is like Dr. Mengele, or calling COVID vaccines “Nazi shots,” or when I see Marjorie Taylor Greene likening mask mandates to the yellow star, I am absolutely disgusted. I wonder if we should be hesitant from any political perspective to use Holocaust motifs and symbolism in trying to understand contemporary American life.

KB: After much reflection and soul searching and arguments and disagreements, we decided we had to skate on that thin ice. I don’t think we could have gotten away with any other ending but the one we had, but you’re right, it opens up a can of worms. Does it imply that you can use the Holocaust as something in your back pocket to get out of jail? I don’t want that to happen. These were the kinds of conversations that we struggled over.

BW: Yes, exactly. That’s why I think it’s so interesting.

KB: There was a reason to end the film the way we did: Maybe one person would go, “You know what? There’s too much of this stuff today. That’s a lot like what happened then. I don’t want this to happen. I believe in American institutions.”

The most interesting conversations in American life happen behind closed doors. On Honestly, we’re prying them open. Support our podcast by subscribing:

https://www.thefp.com/p/the-story-behind-the-twitter-files
The Story Behind the Twitter Files
Join Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberger, David Zweig, and Nellie Bowles live this Wednesday at 5pm PST.
THE FREE PRESS
JAN 29
Back in December, The Free Press was invited by Elon Musk to Twitter HQ, where we were given access to the company’s vast archive of internal communications.
In the weeks that followed, we broke stories—about the platform’s Trump’s ban, its secret blacklists, and its interference in the Covid debate—that revealed how a handful of unelected individuals at this private company put its thumb on the scale to manipulate the public discourse.

Those in the mainstream press, who didn’t ignore the Twitter Files altogether, had questions about exactly how this information got into our hands. Did Musk direct us in any way? Were we fed cherry-picked information? Why couldn’t we just release the entire data set to the public at once?

Now, for the first time, our reporters who were on the ground—Bari Weiss, Michael Shellenberger, David Zweig, and Nellie Bowles—will answer these questions and more.

Our next FP Forum, exclusively for subscribers of The Free Press, will take place next Wednesday, February 1st, at 5pm PST.

Join Bari, Michael, David, and Nellie as they take you behind the scenes of this story and discuss the process of reporting it out. Subscribers can share questions for our guests in the comments section and find the event link below. If you’d like to attend Wednesday’s FP forum and future events, please consider becoming a subscriber today.

See you then! ...

https://www.thefp.com/p/dubai-paid-beyonce-24m-she-gave-them?
Dubai Paid Beyonce $24M. She Gave Them Her Integrity
Our celebrities call democracy tyranny, then don’t recognize real tyranny when it hands them a check.
TANYA GOLD
JAN 28
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GUEST POST
SAVE
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Beyoncé headlines the Grand Reveal of Dubai’s newest luxury hotel, Atlantis The Royal in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. (Photo by Kevin Mazur via Getty Images)
I went to Dubai once. It is where tyranny meets hyper-capitalism, and it is as awful as it sounds.

I was helping a journalist friend research an article. I spent my days admiring an undersea bedroom in a lagoon and a ski slope inside a mall. At night I would meet trafficked maids, or a woman imprisoned for adultery. I asked an ancient British tourist why he came here for his holidays. He said,
“The staff will hold your dick if you ask them.” That is what Westerners like about Dubai: the indentured servitude. And the weather.

Last week, at the grand opening of Atlantis The Royal, Dubai’s newest luxury hotel, Beyoncé gave her first live performance in five years. This gig featured a 48-person all-female orchestra—how feminist—a Lebanese dance troupe, and her daughter. She was reportedly paid $24 million for the occasion.

Her latest album, Renaissance, is, among other things, an homage to black queer culture. She performed no songs from it; how could she in a country where homosexuality is punishable by death? So she sang her back catalog for the equivalent of ten Bugatti Chirons. Oil-rich tyrannies have generous marketing budgets; they’re selling tyranny itself.


A general view of fireworks during the Grand Reveal Weekend for Atlantis The Royal. (Neville Hopwood via Getty Images)
What Beyoncé does or doesn’t do for money wouldn’t matter but for the trend of celebrity activism, which insinuates that morality travels with a star like her wardrobe. Beyoncé acolytes say that just by arriving in Dubai she made the city gayer, a kind of subtle protest. Perhaps so subtle that even Dubai’s ruler Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid—accused of abducting two of his daughters for noncompliance with his wishes, one from England, and another from a ship as she tried to flee Dubai—wouldn’t notice. Did his enforcers reconsider their stance on gayness as they sang along to “Drunk in Love”? Or are they are laughing themselves stupid at the PR coup of persuading an until-now gay ally to perform at the opening of a hotel in a country that hates gays?

Dubai, along with Saudi Arabia, wants to reinvent itself as a tourist destination for when the oil runs out. There is nothing understated there—the Burj Khalifa, which is the tallest building in the world; the Palm Jumeirah, a man-made archipelago in the shape of a palm tree. Everything is vast and highly colored, a distraction. It has to be: To enjoy yourself in Dubai, you must close your eyes to suffering. Almost 90 percent of Dubai’s residents are migrant workers, and many of them live in conditions amounting to indentured slavery.


Chef Nobu Matsuhisa, Rebel Wilson and Tom Roelens attend the grand opening of Nobu By The Beach. (Francois Nel via Getty Images)
Beyoncé isn’t Dubai’s only brand ambassador. Aussie actress Rebel Wilson, who is gay, was photographed at the opening of Nobu by the Beach in Dubai that same weekend. (She participated in a sake ceremony.) Members of the Kardashian-Jenner dynasty were photographed at after-parties, presumably celebrating the common values they share with Dubai: love of attention and excess.

The luxury hotel opening is just the latest act in a grotesque fairground, where brands and celebrities who practice goodthink at home sell themselves to the highest bidder elsewhere, while attempting—and failing—to maintain the moral high ground.

Perhaps nowhere is this clearer and more absurd than in the world of sports. FIFA was condemned for giving this year’s World Cup to Qatar—a tyranny in which migrant workers are barely better than slaves. (Many died building the World Cup stadiums.) Gianni Infantino, the president of FIFA, addressed critics in Qatar last summer. “Today I feel African,” he said, like a deranged person. “Today, I feel gay. Today, I feel disabled. Today, I feel a migrant worker.”

But he isn’t any of those things. He’s a straight, Italian-Swiss football administrator dogged by accusations of corruption.

Infantino, who could teach a class in hubris, is even less honest than the British boxer Anthony Joshua, who, when criticized for appearing in Saudi Arabia last year, simply said: “I don’t know what sports-washing is.”

Well, here’s an example for Mr. Joshua. Find Lionel Messi, football’s genius-idiot, now reinvented as a tourism ambassador for Saudi Arabia, having an “ultimate Saudi experience”—staring at something through binoculars, riding a dune buggy—in photographs at visitsaudi.com. Or Cristiano Ronaldo photographed with the Crown Prince of Dubai, looking at the Palm Jumeirah.

Presumably, Messi’s ultimate experience does not include the common abuse of women, or the murder of Saudi critics. There is no reference to the journalist Jamal Khashoggi, dismembered with a bone saw in the Saudi consulate in Istanbul in 2018 on the order of its ruler Mohammed bin Salman, or the execution of children. The country apparently has hopes of hosting the World Cup in 2030. It will probably get it.

This collusion between Western celebrities and Middle Eastern despots is enabled by idiotic elements on the left: People who don’t seem to know what fascism, Stalinism, or Nazism is, since they insist upon confusing it with things they don’t much like. They hate their own rotting democracies so much, they cannot accept that other places are worse. Call a democracy tyranny and you won’t recognize tyranny when it hands you a check.

This logic says that, given our own ills, what do we have to teach Saudi Arabia? And if we have nothing to teach Saudi Arabia or Qatar or the UAE, why shouldn’t we go on holiday there and enjoy the luxury that indentured slavery creates? Who are we to judge, we ask, between mimosas and dermabrasion facials.

Tyranny’s defenders—that is, its contracted employees—will say that feasting in authoritarian states brings incremental reform and teaches us to be less racist toward an over-overlooked and vulnerable minority: authoritarian rulers. I think the opposite. It normalizes tyranny, using what we love best to seduce us: leisure.

Tanya Gold is an award-winning freelance journalist. She lives in England.

https://www.thefp.com/p/will-jordan-peterson-lose-his-license
Will Jordan Peterson Lose His License for Wrongthink?
The Canadian psychologist is right to resist re-education.
NEERAJA DESHPANDE
JAN 8

Have you seen the “men will literally do X instead of going to therapy” meme? It’s funny: Men will literally join 10 improv teams instead of going to therapy. Men will literally teach you how to open a can of beans for 6 hours instead of going to therapy. You get the drift.

Canada’s most famous public intellectual, Jordan Peterson, brought that meme to real life this week when he announced he’d rather never work again than be forced onto the couch. 

I don’t blame him.

The College of Psychologists of Ontario has told Peterson that if he doesn’t go to therapy—sorry, a board-mandated “Coaching Program” with a board-issued therapist—it may revoke his license to practice psychology. 

What warranted this ultimatum? A few tweets and a podcast.

According to Peterson, about “a dozen people” from around the world complained to the college about comments he had made on Twitter and on Joe Rogan’s podcast, claiming that those statements had caused “harm.”

In March, the college began investigating these complaints. Then, in November, the college informed Peterson: “The comments at issue appear to undermine the public trust in the profession as a whole, and raise questions about your ability to carry out your responsibilities as a psychologist.” 

Among those comments: Calling an advisor to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau a “prik.” Snarking at environmentalists for promoting energy policies that hurt children in developing countries. Using female pronouns in reference to the transgender actor Elliot Page. Declaring a plus-sized model on the cover of Sports Illustrated “not beautiful.” (This Wall Street Journal editorial has a good rundown.)

With perhaps one exception—a comment Peterson made calling a former, unnamed client “vindictive”—the public statements that triggered this whole affair are political snipes that have nothing to do with his capacity as a psychologist. Nevertheless, the College is demanding that Peterson not only go through a re-education program, but also that he sign off on the following statement: “I may have lacked professionalism in public statements and during a January 25, 2022 podcast appearance.”

Now, no one who has followed Peterson—presumably including the higher-ups at the College of Psychologists of Ontario—seriously believes he would agree to such a request. He has confirmed as much on Twitter. (This is a guy who burst onto the scene in 2016 after refusing to use gender-neutral pronouns.) And Peterson is famous enough at this point to be inoculated against the financial consequences of refusing to submit, which the college must know. 

The college’s statement, then, is not a message to Peterson, but a message to other would-be dissenters: Comply with our politics, or risk losing your livelihood. 

In this, the College of Psychologists of Ontario joins a growing list of institutions of higher learning: The University of Sussex forced Kathleen Stock into exile for challenging the concept of gender identity. Evergreen State College ran out Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, after refusing to protect them from violent student protesters. Portland State did the same to assistant professor of philosophy Peter Boghossian after he dared to question politicized scholarship. MIT canceled a lecture that University of Chicago geophysicist Dorian Abbot was set to give, citing an op-ed he’d written opposing affirmative action. UC Irvine fired Aaron Kheriaty, a professor of psychiatry and its director of medical ethics, for refusing the Covid vaccine on ethical grounds. Princeton fired Joshua Katz—supposedly over a decades-old offense he had already been punished for—right after he wrote an essay criticizing anti-racism policies. 

I could go on and on. The pattern remains the same: Institutions whose mission is to facilitate open discourse have become shells of their former selves, living off their rapidly decaying legacies to conform to the whims of the mob.   

But there is something about the Peterson story that is more chilling. It was not enough for the College to declare his comments offensive. It had to go one step further and imply that there was something about him that was unwell. By referring Peterson to a therapist for daring to speak his mind, the College of Psychologists of Ontario has pathologized dissent. It has made political disagreement into an illness.

There is a long history here—one Peterson is surely aware of, seeing that he wrote the foreword to the new Vintage Classics edition of The Gulag Archipelago by the Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. For most of its existence, the Soviet Union, among other authoritarian regimes, used mental illness as grounds for marginalizing countless voices: those who believed in free expression, or liked abstract art, or read the wrong novels, or, worse yet, shared those novels with their friends. There was a certain logic to this: If you were crazy enough not to toe the party line in a country dictated by the party, then likely you were actually crazy. (A reprehensible logic, yes, but not totally nuts.) A similar rationale applies today: Jordan Peterson must need help if he thinks tweeting this blasphemy won’t cost him dearly. 

Whether or not Peterson is ultimately penalized for his refusal to comply, the damage has already been done. The public has seen behind the curtain. Within the governing body of a profession that searches out our innermost thoughts, the punishment of wrongthink apparently now takes precedence over the free exchange of ideas.

Neeraja Deshpande is a researcher at The Free Press.