Standard disclaimer: All show transcripts—yes, including this one—have been AI-generated and skimmed by at least two busy and fallible humans. They offer an overview of the show but you’ll find occasional typos and glitches and therefore should not be assumed to be accurate or verbatim. Readers who wish to quote anything here for any reason are encouraged to check it against the original audio at the time stamps provided. Thanks.

KEYWORDS: Trump Election, Misinformation, Political Agendas, Boogeymen, RFK, Jr., Fluoride, Global Warming, Skepticism, Critical Thinking, Climate Change, Project 2025

0:00:00
Ben Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

(MUSIC)

Celestia Ward: Welcome back to Squaring the Strange. I am your co-host, Celestia Ward, and with me is…

BR: Ben Radford here.

0:00:33
CW: And you’re normally not getting an episode this early from us. It’s a little before two weeks out, our normal schedule. This is episode 240. We are giving it a number and we are recording this on November 6th, a day after, I guess, not even a full day. The election was called at about two thirty in the morning Pacific time today.

BR: This is a fresh topic.

CW: Very fresh and bleeding fresh. Yeah. In terms of it looks like we are going to have President Trump for the next four years. And we are not a politics show; if you want to talk about the foreign policy and the, you know, relationship of Trump to allies and NATO and everything else, there’s plenty of political podcasts you can look to for that. But as skeptics in Death Valley and I was over at CSICon and it was a throughline in everybody’s mind whether or not Trump would get reelected and the polls were close and everybody realized that was a danger. And I didn’t find a single person in the skeptical convention that was pro-Trump. Most everybody who is pro-science, anti-BS tends to not want to vote for him.

0:02:04
BR: I can, I can, generally that’s true. I can think of a couple examples. I won’t, I won’t call them out on the show, but yeah, I think, and again, this is obviously generalization. I mean, there are many generalizations about skeptics, including they’re overwhelmingly old and white and male, which, and there again, some truth to that despite the efforts. But yeah, I think part of my issue is that I try and be content agnostic in terms of pointing out logical fallacies and things. And I’m sure you’ve seen this in my posts on Facebook and elsewhere. If you’re posting something that’s wrong, I don’t care whether you’re on my side or not, it’s wrong. But perhaps to my detriment, I’m like, “Look man, we need to focus on the facts and I agree with your overall point, but you should use good data to make that.” So as a result of that, I tend to sort of piss people off.

0:03:00
CW: Well, you’re an equal opportunity pedant. Yeah. The point I was kind of trying to make was just that in the skeptical realm, it seems like it’s pretty heavily left-leaning. And, you know, there’s a common trope of like, oh, science and facts tend to side with, you know, side with the left more than the right. And, you know, you could point to a few studies that talk about that in terms of misinformation and who’s voting according to what and which myths people hold in their mind. I mean, the covid pandemic was a good example of that. Plenty more Republicans died than did Democrats simply because, yeah, so acceptance of science.

BR: Yeah, demonstrably so. I mean, and again, this is not this is not a partisan attack. It’s you can look it up. It’s it is it is well known that let me look. We talked about this on the show before, right, where both the left and the right endorse conspiracy theories, but the right tends to endorse more conspiracy theories and they tend to be more clustered. So if you doubt global warming, you’re more likely to doubt scientific consensus on X. X being whatever you don’t like. Again, we don’t want to go, you know, the show isn’t about those sort of generalizations, but that is one of the trends we often see. And so it doesn’t surprise me that among skeptics, the more progressives would be over-represented.

CW: Yeah, anyway, all that is to say that’s why we’re covering it on our Skeptical Podcast. And speaking of clustered conspiracy theories, let’s look first at how we got to this point, how we ended up reelecting Trump. I heard a very sad commentary on the radio on the way here. I forget who was saying it, but the gist of this pundit’s comment was that the Harris campaign was constrained by their honesty and reality, whereas Trump, over and over again at rally after rally, went off into directions that were not constrained by reality. And the media gave him so, so, so much airtime. And even with fact checking, which not everything was fact checked. I mean, there was just no point in fact checking everything. A lot of it just flowed through like a river. And even though people were constantly saying, well, that’s wrong, that’s wrong, that’s wrong, it didn’t seem to make much of a dent.

BR: Yeah, I think I generally agree with that. I think that the biggest issue in that case was the coverage, the heavy media coverage. So as you pointed out, even when the media, the news media is saying, he talked for 42 minutes and he said these things were wrong. The fact that they’re talking about Trump is itself, it’s like the Streisand effect, right? So it’s, we’re talking about Trump because we’re talking about Trump. And even if it’s in the context of debunking, you know, in the past, I’m going to say 18 months or two years or so, you know, I’ve spent a fair amount of time looking into research in terms of what did Trump supporters say? And that’s one thing that I actually saw a lot of the progressives weren’t doing. There was a lot of assumptions being made about who supports Trump and why. And I tried to correct them whenever I could in social media, but of course, you know, I’m just, there’s Ben being an ass again. But I think that that was, I think that was one of the keys here as to why many liberals and progressives and Democrats were so surprised was I think they had misread in some cases very badly Trump’s appeal and why.

CW: Yeah And we should probably mention Steve Bannon to early on his his strategy came out where he said flood the zone With bullshit, I’m sure you remember this.

BR: Yeah, and he did. And again, you know, this is the odd part is that I sometimes see people sharing memes about like the Trump administration, they’re being covert. No, they’re being very open. This is, they’re not, I almost said they’re not smart enough to do that, but all I can tell you is that Trump, that’s what’s so fascinating about this, the situation. And I don’t mean that in any positive way, but just, you know, approaching analytically is there’s been little or no effort to hide Trump’s incompetence, rambling, typically what they do, of course, is his defenders, they just frame it as, oh, that was taken out of context, or, you know, he didn’t really mean it or whatever else.

0:07:28
CW: Yeah, just part of the wheeze.

BR: Yeah, exactly. And so, and I think that’s part of it is it, I suspect that if you interviewed people coming out of Trump rallies at the height of his popularity, which unfortunately, which is not that long ago, many of them would would probably admit, you know, at least privately that, well, yeah, he didn’t really make it didn’t really make a lot of sense. But that’s not why they love him. It’s it’s you know, his appeal lies elsewhere. It’s not because they’re they’re wanting factual information from it.

0:07:54
CW: Yeah, it’s a wrestling match instead of an intellectual debate. And the unfortunate thing is, as far as the flood the zone tactic goes, I encountered quite a few people who, when they were presented facts from quote unquote from the other side, like the multiple stories of women who were either died or suffered irreparable harm because they were denied reproductive care when they really needed it, when they were going septic. I heard, I saw women on Facebook going, oh, no, that’s just, that’s made up. That’s not, no such person ever existed. And how do you fight that? I mean, when they are primed to see everything as potentially made up and much of what’s coming from their hero is made up, they see everything like that.

BR: Yeah, and of course, there’s this curious disparity in their skepticism, right? They’re skeptical of the fact checkers, right? I mean, in the meme saying, you know, fact checking is censorship. It really isn’t, guys. I promise you, they are two different things.

CW: Yeah. And so, yeah, he Trump did not over the course of the campaign that I could notice anyway, he did not really spell out a clear policy in any sort of consistent way. His his rhetoric boiled down to tariffs are great. Drill, baby, drill, and migrants are the source of all crime. Any other topic was brought up, foreign policy, whatever, his pat answer was, well, it never would have happened if I was president. But he wouldn’t go into details about what about him, about his staff, his policies would have prevented whatever it was from happening. So, well, it was very frustrating.

BR: In his defense, he had a concept of a plan. So that’s better than nothing, I guess. You know, I mean, he but yeah, I mean, this is always the problem when you’re dealing with serial liars. And I, it’s clearly he is. I think even many, many of his supporters would admit he’s a serial liar, is they dodge and they weave and they give non-answers to questions. And of course, often the Republican rebuttal is, well, yeah, but you know, Biden did that too and Harris does that too, which number one is a false equivalency fallacy and number two isn’t necessarily true. I mean just because Kamala Harris and Walz and basically any prominent politician occasionally gives evasive answers during an interview does not mean that they’re equivalent, it just doesn’t.

CW: Yeah I mean by the numbers I mean and the New York Times I think they stopped counting after 30,000 whopper lies they caught him on.

BR: Yeah, I guess what really bothered me about this election was that it wasn’t, and this sort of touches on what you said before, is that in many cases it was based on misinformation. And look, if you want to support Trump for legitimate reasons because you have a clear idea of his proposals and policy and you’ve thought it through and you say that’s this makes sense and you’ve talked to economists, you know, if there’s some legitimate reason why you think that’s your policy, then that’s one thing. The problem is that there’s been so much misinformation and disinformation and much of it has been believed, according to polls and surveys, by Trump voters.

0:11:35
CW: Yeah, like, oh, I want to vote for him because he got insulin down to $35. No, no, he absolutely did not. Right. Or he just said he did after the fact. Yeah. Yeah.

0:11:45
BR: That’s what’s so frustrating is like, you know, is the decisions, particularly important decisions like political voting should be made on, you know, truth. I know that sounds radical, but, but just, you know, just, you know, if you have to lie about your positions, then there’s a problem there. So I’m just repeating myself, but that’s that was the issue for me was that there was this disparity in the misinformation, disinformation, the flat out lies, the rumors, the smears. And you can say that that that’s just politics, but it has been amped up. And again, there’s lots of research on this between, you know, the Russian troll farms and Elon Musk on X. There’s just been this explosion of political misinformation, disinformation over the past 18 months, a couple of years. And eventually, yes, some of it has an effect.

CW: Yeah, and now we get to see we get to live this in real time and find out if this is going to be politics as usual from now on, or if this was a blip, a Trump-shaped blip, I would have hoped it would have been just one term of that, but we’re going to find out. Now the other, since we like to parse out exactly what type of lies or misinformation or bullshit we’re dealing with, one of the things he really skillfully wielded was panics and fear-mongering. And so I wanted to just go through a quick list here. The first one, the first whopper of a lie that he managed to use to his benefit was he convinced everybody that the vice president was a powerful job, more powerful in terms of policymaking than it was in just presiding over things. He called the Biden administration the Harris administration at every turn he could. And he really linked Kamala Harris to everything that Biden did. And she I don’t think she fought back enough on that. You know, I could I could see why you don’t want to make it look like the current administration you’re serving in was terrible. That weakens you. But at the same time that Trump was saying, oh, Harris did this, Harris was in charge of that. Harris is the reason why, you know, the inflated all these things that Harris did while she was vice president, when he caught flack for picking J.D. Vance, he immediately stated that, oh, the vice president job is you barely do anything, it’s very insignificant. So, yeah, again, don’t believe what I’m saying. Believe what I’m saying now.

BR: Well, it’s the same thing with, you know, I mean, the Trump campaign has spent months and years sowing conspiracy theories about election fraud. Yeah, I mean, that’s been one of his big, big notes that he’s hit on repeatedly. All of a sudden he wins.

CW: The big lie, literally.

BR: And it’s like, well, hold on, you won. So do we need to investigate this? You were telling us for months and months and months there’s going to be election fraud and you won. So you must be illegitimate, right?

CW: Yeah. If all these illegal immigrants are voting, maybe we should find all the Russians who voted for him. Hmm.

BR: I don’t know.

CW: Well, yes. Speaking of immigrants, the other lie is the immigrants are taking your job, whether it’s a black job, a Latino job, they’re taking your jobs. And that’s an old one. It goes way back to many, many presidents. I guess he’s not he’s not alone there in pushing that agenda. But I can’t recall hearing a president say that migrants were also eating your cats and dogs. That was new.

BR: Yeah, new-ish.

CW: New this century. I know it was used against immigrant populations ages ago, like when the Chinese were immigrating for the railroad and everything else, but I, he never, he never backed down on that. Did you notice he never took that back?

BR: Yeah, I did see that. And of course, you know, it follows up with a lot of his his conspiracy theories. I mean, same thing with the Obama birtherism. You know, he he said for many years that, of course, Obama was was literally unqualified to be president because he wasn’t born in America. And then when you demanded to see the the birth certificate, he finally admitted that, OK, Obama was born in America. And then a couple months later, he changed his mind, said he wasn’t all over again. It’s just like, you know, Tuesday, Obama was was not born in Hawaii. Next Thursday, he will be born in Hawaii.

0:16:19
CW: Yeah, I don’t know if it’s memory problems or purposeful dodging and weaving here. But yeah, the other the other panic he instilled in a lot of the voting public was that public schools are a thing to be feared. You know, if they’re not teaching your kids terrible things about white people and making them feel bad because seven generations ago they had a slaveholder or something, they then they’re taking your little boy and they’re surgically altering him to become a girl without your knowledge or consent. And again, I was speechless at some of these things that he can just put that forth and people believed it. I mean, and nobody asked, no journalist, well, I didn’t see any journalists push him on like, what school are you talking about? Can you give us where in the country this is happening? That, you know, children are being given gender changing operations against their parents, you know, wishes. Where? What school?

BR: Yeah, and in a future episode, we’re going to have a folklorist friend of mine, Gil DeVos, who’s going to be talking about similar rumor panics in schools regarding the furry kids.

0:17:34
CW: Yeah, yeah, it all kind of overlaps because again, you have this notion of like, oh the kids are wanting to be opposite genders, next they’re going to want to be animals and it’s a slippery slope. And again these are all arguments that were made against the gay community a generation ago. And skeptics have got to sort of fill the role of historians here and hand in hand with historians, I should say, and note that this has come up before. This is folklore. This is, you know, I can’t believe he’s used folklore so effectively. I don’t know if it’s on purpose or just instinctual for him. Do you think he’s purposeful?

0:18:11
BR: No, I sincerely believe that most of Trump’s actions are, they’re not carefully planned out. I don’t think, I don’t see how they could be. I mean again. I He said he doesn’t says what he thinks will serve him at the moment He is famous for taking both sides of any given issue. That’s that’s part of his success is he condemns the white supremacist and then in the same breath He says well, there’s some good people on both sides Donald Trump has has condemned racism, and he’s promoted it. He is. I mean, I’m virtually in I looked into this a couple of years ago. Virtually any issue you can find, he has taken one or another opposite stance. And one thing that does it. No one confuses people. Number two, it allows people to see them through whatever prism he wants them to see him. Right.

CW: So it’s like a Barnum effect.

0:19:10
BR: Whatever statement you make about Donald Trump, he can justifiably point to examples where he said the opposite. And so I think part of the issue here is that at the end of the day, Trump is in it for Trump. He’s basically without a moral compass or overriding ideology. And I think this is one of the things that many progressives got wrong about him. I don’t see him as this evil sinister mastermind who’s carefully constructing his own version of America. He is a guy that surrounds himself with flatterers and yes men. He’ll say whatever he thinks of crosses his mind at the moment to achieve his ends and earn more money and things like that. And that’s sort of a unique thing, right? Is it typically with presidents and frankly most people, you sort of can sense their center. You can sort of sense this is what they are like in terms of this is their ideology, this is what they believe in. I don’t know what Trump believes in. I genuinely don’t. I mean, yeah, there’s been a lot of speculation.

0:20:22
CW: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, he certainly, you know, when he’s addressing union crowds, he’s a union guy. When he’s addressing Elon Musk, he’s talking about union busting. When he’s addressing Southern Baptists, he’s a fundamentalist Christian. I mean, he stands everywhere on it. Yeah, he’s both pro and anti-abortion. If he’s talking to a group of women, he’s like, oh, no, no, I’ve always believed that it should just be up to the states. And then he’s bragging the next day about, yeah, I ended Roe v. Wade. You know, the last thing I had on my list of lies and manipulations and panics that I think got him elected was he talked about the deep state. He was confirming every crazy Uncle Frank’s conspiracy theory that some kind of deep Illuminati like powerful entity deep in the government has powers like it can steer hurricanes one way or the other and somehow collect, I don’t know, lithium from under people’s houses. I forget what that was all about, but is there anything else I’m forgetting here in terms of the list of misinformation and manipulations that got him elected here?

BR: We don’t have time to dig into all of them. It’s a laundry list. Yeah, it’s conspiracy theories about the death of Samuel Alito. He shared –

0:21:50
CW: : Oh, that’s right.

BR: Yeah. And, of course, he was on Alex Jones’ show endorsing just across the board. modern president or no president ever has so successfully employed conspiracy theories to his benefit.

CW: Yeah, we didn’t even touch on Joe Rogan. He spent two hours on Joe Rogan.

0:22:10
BR: Yeah. And again, it’s always, he does the, well, you know, one pin down, like, well, they’re saying this or I’m hearing this, right? It’s always this caveat stuff. And you can see why to a skeptic and a critical thinker it’s very frustrating. He’s like, no, just what do you mean? Like, don’t just quit being evasive. Just tell us what the hell you think. But of course, you know, he’s an entertainer and he’s always been an entertainer. And that’s one of the facets here is that people love entertainers. And so that’s part of Trump’s appeal is he is entertaining.

CW: And so many skeptics, myself included, were so distraught over this outcome is because it’s just made us realize how impotent we are in cutting through lies and bullshit and wrong information. It’s made me feel very ineffective.

BR: I think there’s a couple things going on here. One is, I think it’s important not to overestimate his influence. I’m sure I’ll get pushback from people on that. But I think I think in many cases and I can touch more on this later. But I think that in many cases, Trump’s influence is far less than he claims it is, because, of course, he thinks he thinks he’s omnipotent and he can end the Ukraine-Russian war with a stern look and a handshake or something.

CW: And also bypass the constitution. And yeah, I mean, so I really hope you’re right that he’s overestimating that.

BR: Well part of the issue here is that Trump and to to a lesser extent Kamala Harris were portrayed as boogeymen and boogie women, in her case, and of course, this is a topic. We did a show on it. There’s a whole folkloric thing and and part of the role of boogeymen as I talked about in my in my last book, America, the Fearful, is it serves as a scapegoat, but it also serves as a crystallizing force, right? So if you want to get people on your side, you pick the boogeyman. In Trump’s case, of course, he has many boogeymen to pick from. There’s immigrants, there’s the deep state, there’s Biden, there’s George Soros, take your pick. In Harris and Biden’s case, Trump is also a boogeyman. And I know it may sound weird to call Trump a boogeyman because he is sort of self-evidently that role, but it’s important to recognize that part of the strategy to get people to vote for Biden and later Harris was to build Trump up as this terrifying evil force who the second he takes office and quoting him, right? I’m a dictator on day one, right?

0:24:58
CW: Yeah, strong man. Yeah, a boogeyman is a strong man in this case.

BR: Exactly.

CW: So they built him up as of course did, both sides in this election have spent literally years talking about how terrible and bad and influential the other one is. And what happens is that sooner or later one of them wins. And when that person wins all of a sudden the people that were opposed to them have a sobering, frightening, frustrating, terrifying, waking up the next morning saying, oh my god what now? We’ve been told for years and years how terrible this person is, how they’re going to destroy America, they’re going to burn the whole thing down. Come January, they will be in office.

CW: Yes, that’s how I feel. That is how I feel, yes. Thank you for encapsulating it.

BR: Exactly.

CW: And so you’re saying that’s wrong.

0:25:53
BR: Well, there’s some nuances here. First of all, keep in mind that Trump already was in office. He was in office for four years. Did he do damage to the country? I believe so. Did he burn the place to the ground? No. What’s interesting is I remember very clearly when on the eve of the previous election, there were memes circulating on conservative social media, particularly Facebook, these images of destroyed neighborhoods on flames and it was like, this is Biden’s America. And I got some screenshots of it. It was it was very clearly like if you vote for Joe Biden, as soon as he takes office, there’s going to be rioting murders in the streets, raping, pillaging. The whole thing is going to hell. Well, yeah. And this year it was like, oh, the suburbs are going to be burned down by gangs and criminals. And here’s the thing, it didn’t happen. This is not to make light of the potential dangers and threats that Trump can cause, because they are significant, but it’s to say that typically people overestimate the power of the presidential office. Oftentimes presidents, because they like to feel they’re all powerful, right? They’re president of the United States, leader of the free world. Yes and no. There are guardrails, there are checks and balances, maybe not perfect ones, but in fact, in many cases, presidents cannot do, they literally cannot do, what they want to do or claim they’re going to do. Example A, Trump’s wall. Remember his wall with Mexico? Part of that’s in my home state.

CW: All two feet that he built? Yeah.

0:27:32
BR: Yeah. All two-thirds of a mile or whatever the hell it was, right? And keep in mind, this was not some sort of ancillary promise. This was central to his campaign. Build the wall. Build the wall. It was huge. It was going to be his crowning achievement of that Trump’s wall, he was going to keep out the dirty, scary Mexicans and everybody else, and he failed. He completely, completely failed. The wall was not built. Parts of the wall were built. Mexico didn’t pay for it, by the way. And and they don’t talk about it anymore because it’s a clear, shiny example of something that Trump promised to do and didn’t deliver on.

0:28:15
CW: So I not to be the naysayer here or the fear monger, but a lot of people are worried about the fact that this time he’s going to have the both the Senate and the House on his side, it’s looking like at this point, I think we still have a few races that are wrapping up, but it’s looking like the Republicans could get both houses of Congress. And we have the Project 2025, which will take a lot of people out of good expertise-led positions and replace them with flunkies that are loyalists.

BR: I agree and that is one of the dangers, you know, is being surrounding yourself by yes-men. And, you know, there are people who had some integrity in Trump’s first campaign and first administration. Many of them, of course, when he first was getting elected, he said he was going to pick the best people. Some of them are in jail. A lot of them came out in recent months talking about how unfit he was for president. These are his buddies. These are his friends. These are the guys that know him best. They’re saying this guy should not be in office.

CW: And it is possible that he will continue to have a rotating door of people that he tries to work with that end up thinking, OK, he’s insane. I can’t work with him. And so nothing gets done. So we’ll see.

0:29:40
BR: Yeah, but I mean, keep in mind, I mean, the reason that the the Mexico wall didn’t get built wasn’t because he didn’t have control of the Senate. Right. I mean, that wasn’t it wasn’t like, oh, if only those Democrats were keeping us from building the wall. That wasn’t why that that crowning achievement of Trump would fail. I kind of lost track of why he never finished that, like what was blocking him at every turn? Well, one of my favorite stories was that one of the Trump adjacent, one of his buddies, cronies, it wasn’t in his inner circle, but it was someone else. They set up, I think Steve Bannon was part of this. It was yet another scam to rip off Republicans. So there was this whole scandal where Republican donors were pouring, I don’t know, 1.6, 2.3 million, whatever it was, into this campaign to fund the wall. And they embezzled it and bought yachts and cars.

CW: Yeah, that’s what ended up getting Steve Bannon convicted. Yeah, the fraud.

0:30:42
BR: Grifters gonna grift. I’m always just bemused every time Trump comes out with some, you know, sneakers or NFTs or a Bible or something. And, you know, and his all his all his supporters are talking about how they can’t afford milk. They’re dropping, you know, $800 on some some some shoes. I just I don’t get it. With with that in mind, there are some policies that even this early in the game have been voiced.

0:31:11
CW: And I wanted to go through why skeptics can be very instrumental in fighting against some of this if it happens. Because, first of all, as you just said, we don’t know what he’ll actually pursue. He’s been famously inconsistent. You know, you know, one of the things he promised immediately was that he was going to lock Hillary Clinton up. Last I saw, she was free and not locked up. So we’ll see if he actually does all the enemies listing and everything else he’s been promising. But one of the things that seems to be happening, according to him on his acceptance speech, and according to RFK Jr., who tweeted about it, is he’s going to appoint RFK Jr. to whatever post he wants. It’s looking like public health. I know you have some things to say about that. And RFK has tweeted that he, the first move of the administration will be to remove fluoride from the water because it’s a toxin and industrial waste and blah, blah, blah. Do you have any thoughts on RFK being in charge of public health?

BR: Oh, yes. Yes, I do. I know you have to bleep out words, so I will, I will try, I will try to avoid you having to just bleep continuously for six or seven minutes.

CW: Sometimes it’s worth it.

BR: So as listeners know, a couple of years ago, I got a master’s degree in public health from Dartmouth Geisel School of Medicine. That’s the Dr. Seuss guy for those who don’t know. So in my class, in our class, of course, we have many doctors and people who of course doing research into public health and and looking at some of the some of the public health successes. As it happens two of the ones that Trump and R.K. Jr. talking about are two of sort of among the top 10 or 20 crowning achievements of public health which is vaccinations and water fluoridation. To see those being targeted with no real cause or rationale is deeply troubling. Particularly when you understand the incremental and fragile nature of public health gains. It’s very easy to reverse or just plateau efforts to vaccinate people, to stop the spread of diseases, to do any number of things just by stopping diligence or stopping vaccination or things like that. So you can, it is not hyperbole to say that without careful due diligence, you can undo decades of progress in public health through mismanagement and incompetence. And that’s my concern.

CW: Yeah, I wasn’t sure if RFK was talking about just the COVID vaccine that he wants to do away with or all vaccines? Because, I mean, you’re worried about decades of progress being lost. That would be centuries. We’d be going back to like the 1800s and not like the rosy, bright colored 1800s of like Bridgerton, like the 1800s where everybody’s teeth are falling out and you have eight kids and three of them make it to being teenagers.

0:34:23
BR: Yeah. One thing that some people may have forgotten, but you remember when during the pandemic there was that completely garbage bullet conspiracy video that had that fake doctor and it was all it all turned out to be an advert advertisement for the book, Plandemic. You know who wrote the foreward to that book?

CW: RFK, Jr.

BR: That’s right. That’s right. He was front and center advocating for this completely debunked, harmful conspiracy theory that, again, it was all in service of promoting a book. It was so this woman could sell more copies of her book, her anti-Fauci book. In terms of water fluoridation, we could do a whole show on that. In a nutshell, yes, it is potentially toxic. What’s one of your favorite phrases, Celestia?

CW: The poison is in the dose.

BR: Exactly. The dose makes the poison. So this notion that it is untested or unproven, no. Fluoridation has been well recognized and well studied for many, many years. At high levels, yes, it’s harmful. Those are not the levels that you find in drinking water. And furthermore, I actually got into an issue with a guy on Twitter recently who was pointing out that, well, you know, they don’t fluoridate water throughout Europe. You know why? Well, he suggested it was because it was banned. Yeah. No, it’s because there’s already naturally occurring high levels of fluoride in the water anyway.

0:36:04
CW: Yeah, we just fluoridate it to get up to like, it’s like 0.7 parts per billion or something, and they already have like, like one. So they’re like a little higher than what we fluoridate our water to get to. And the fact that it’s a naturally occurring element in the water is just completely, RFK is like, oh, it’s industrial waste. No, it’s not. It’s naturally occurring and we’re just regularizing the amount at the right level so that, you know, if you have too much fluoride you end up with kind of brown teeth and if you have not enough you end up with a lot of cavities. And there have been places that have taken the fluoride out of their water and then the number of cavities kids get just skyrockets.

BR: So yeah, I don’t want to spend too much time on it, but no that is the idea of Kennedy being in charge of The the Department of Health or anything like that is just horrifying and as I said before I mean one one silver lining here just to repeat myself slightly is that in many of these agencies, you know, they have been through multiple Administrations as was Dr. Fauci, you know, despite being first praised and then condemned and later praised again and condemned again by Trump, he served under, I think, four or five presidential administrations, Democratic and Republican. He was not part of the deep state. He is, well, he’s recently retired, but he was doing his best to navigate. So I’m a fan of Fauci’s and I bought his recent book. I haven’t opened it yet, but it’s there. Anyway, the point here is that in many of these agencies, there are some safeguards. That’s not to say that a new person leading it in the wrong direction can’t do harm, but there are people there who have been working there for decades who will try and steer it and sort of like, Mr. Kennedy, yeah, we like that. That’s a great idea. We’re going to do a study on that. It may take four years, but we’ll do a study on that. And as soon as the results are in, we’ll get right on that.

CW: Yeah, well, we can hope. Now, I also want to say what skeptics can do as sort of a call to action here, because a lot of people are feeling paralyzed. I know I certainly did for the first several hours, like, what do we do about this? But as a skeptic, you can start educating your friends and family about fluoride. Look it up. Show them where to look it up. Explain to them that it is a naturally occurring thing in the water. Explain what you need to so that everybody you know understands fluoride is not, you know, the devil. Write a letter to your local newspaper for the editorial section about what a idea defluoridating the water would be. Grassroots skepticism is going to become so important for the next four years, so we want to give you ideas. Same with, it’s going to be like it’s the early 2000s all over again, people. You’re going to need to start explaining to everybody how vaccines work. I know it feels like we just did that for COVID, but find resources that people can understand. There’s a brilliant comic by a fellow named Darryl Cunningham about the disgraced Dr. Wakefield, the no longer Dr. Andrew Wakefield and his horrendous study that wasn’t really a study, it was fraud, where he claimed there was a link between the MMR vaccine and autism. And it’s a comic, you can read it in like five minutes and it conveys the idea. Just look up the case of Dr. Andrew Wakefield by Darrell Cunningham and you will find it on his blog and you can link it. It is a very good source. So again, grassroots skepticism. We’ve got to turn these public opinions around. If they’ve been pulled under the thrall of Donald Trump and RFK Jr. and think that vaccines and fluoride are what we have to worry about. Now, the next thing that I notice Trump has been hostile toward is, of course, green energy and climate change in general. They just being willing to acknowledge climate change is a thing that is happening. And the greenhouse gases that we’re pumping into the atmosphere are having an effect on it. Do you have any thoughts on on what people can do about that?

0:40:21
BR: Well, there’s a couple of things. You know, I think at this point, everyone’s pretty, pretty well polarized on the climate change issue. I mean, the fact that the earth is warming is undeniable. It is crystal clear. It’s also very clear this man-made and man-caused. But even if you don’t believe that, even though it’s true, but even if you don’t believe that, recognize that there are agendas here. There are reasons why people are trying to tell you that climate change isn’t real or things like that. Just recently on social media, there was a guy who was posting this absolutely absurd graphic. And it was about this guy, I think Chris Marks was his name. And when I clicked on the link, it turns out he is a comedian and a part-time meterolkogy student.

CW: Well in that case, I am a comedian and a part-time neurosurgery enthusiast.

BR: Go do some brain surgery So this guy his thing is that he used to be a a climate change alarmist And then he then he got the facts and I asked the guy that post this like who’s this guy? You’re quoting is like oh, he’s a scientist. Like he is a meteorology student. I’m not trying to be elitist here, but a meteorology student is not a scientist. I have a bachelor’s degree in psychology. I am not a psychologist.

CW: Yeah, he’s not even sharing his grades, is he? He might be a bad student.

BR: Right, right, exactly. And so I’m looking at this and I didn’t wanna go too far down that rabbit hole, but this particular post I saw just last week was saying that, well, despite what the alarmist wants you to think, the global warming is actually saving lives.

CW: What?

0:42:12
BR: And I’m like, I don’t think that’s… So I looked at it, and I could tell what was wrong with it. Of course, it was posted on his page. It had like 4.1 thousand likes and shares, not a single skeptical comment or anything. I’m looking at it, and so basically, he showed two graphs, which I assume are accurate, and he’s saying, well, here’s the thing, despite what they want you to think, global warming is saving lives because more people die of exposure to cold than exposure to heat. Oh, for crying out loud. Again, it took me three or four seconds to recognize the fallacy here. I wrote on his page, I said, this doesn’t make any sense. I mean, first of all, even if his numbers are accurate, and they may or may not be, very few people die of exposure to heat or cold. A few do every now and then, but most of the general public doesn’t die of exposure to heat or cold. The dangers of global warming far outweigh the benefits. One obvious example is vectors for disease. As the earth warms, more places, for example, that have a gypto mosquitoes, it gets warm, right? It didn’t used to get so warm, but now these disease-carrying mosquitoes are moving out of the tropics because it’s now warmer there. It means that more areas, often populated, are coming into contact with disease-carrying mosquitoes and ticks and other things as well. So it was self-evidently wrong, and yet it was all framed as like, well, don’t let the climate change alarmist fool you. Ha ha ha, we’re gonna have fewer people dying of exposure to cold.

0:44:01
CW: Yeah, not to mention the fact that climate change has created climate extremes. We get a lot of extreme cold because of climate change as well.

BR: Yeah, and his response was interesting. I posted it and he’s like, well, what do you know? I’m like, well, actually, I have to know something about this. He’s like, and he started trying to argue with me about whether climate change was manmade or not. I said, you’re missing the point. It doesn’t matter. Yeah, the mosquitoes don’t care. That’s not relevant to the discussion. The guy you’re quoting is flat out wrong and he’s wrong regardless of whether climate change is driven primarily by humans or not. And he just didn’t get it. And I just gave up. But anyway.

0:44:41
CW: And before we leave the topic of climate change, I wanted to quote Professor Mark Maslin. He teaches climatology at the University College London, he said, quote, Donald Trump has won a historic second term as US president, and this will have a profound impact on the domestic and international climate change agenda. Trump declared during his election campaign that he does not believe in climate change. During his first term in office, he withdrew the US from the Paris Agreement, and many of us predict he will do the same again. So he also at the same time, Professor Maslin said that it’s hard for Trump to keep denying physics and so the very real effects are happening in every state. And green energy is also moving forward in the private sector no matter what. You can’t just, you know, hamper that. I mean, maybe he could try to ban it. I don’t see that really being successful if he does. But you know, the next four years will be eye-opening. We’ll see what happens.

BR: Yeah, and of course, you know, Trump has made fun of and mocked electric vehicles, and he’s also said that he loves them.

CW: That’s another example where he goes both ways. Now, the call to action we would urge all you grassroots skeptics out there to do is, of course, share sources with everybody, show that businesses and every branch of science recognizes that the climate is changing. I mean insurance companies know it, private businesses, people who sell survival gear all know it. You know, people are going to do what they’re going to do and a lot of businesses are looking at the models of climate change and that’s affecting how they try to make money. So you can point to all these things besides just the quote unquote evil woke scientists that are pushing some agenda. There’s also a lot of private people that are following the models because it makes them money. I also remember what Michael Mann, climate scientist Michael Mann of the famous hockey stick Michael Mann, he stressed this at the recent CSICon and it’s something that I’ve heard him say many times, namely don’t buy into the doomsday hopeless scenario that you see all the time. Corporate interests are often behind the whole, oh we’ve already bypassed you know this many degrees and everything’s you know everything’s lost we’re all you know it’s too late, it’s too late. Because when you’re faced with the notion that it’s all too late there’s nothing we can do, you know people throw their hands up and they just give up and you they don’t want to think about it. So this type of thinking prevents actual remedies. It prevents action and legislation that can deal with it. So don’t lose hope. Climate scientist Michael Mann will assure you that there’s still plenty we can do. We just have to get on it. And Trump’s going to be a hindrance more than a help, but he’s not the only one that’s going to be making decisions.

BR: Yeah, I would second that. And, in fact, that sort of leads into a couple of my recommendations. One of them is recognizing cognitive biases, and, of course, this is part and parcel of skepticism 101 in critical thinking. If you can identify logical fallacies, it helps you to recognize them, either in your own work or other people’s, right? So, of course, you don’t need to memorize, you know, lists and lists of them, but if you can recognize some of the most common logical fallacies, and you can start to see them in advertisements and political claims and other people’s and so on. So simply being aware of and recognizing cognitive biases helps you think more clearly. And that’s also true within the Trump 2.0 era. As Man said, I mean, there’s a tendency to catastrophize. Man said that, Steven Pinker, of course, wrote a couple of books on that, including Better Angels of Our Nature and so on, and I touch on this in my last book. But there’s a tendency, and this sort of goes back to what I was talking about before about boogeymen. We build up our political enemies as being these terrifying, evil, omnipotent figures that will ravage the country and destroy America, if not the entire world, at the first chance they get. And again, this is not to suggest that Trump or any other president can’t do some genuine harms to the economy, to global stability, world peace, and many things, including, as you just touched on, getting out of treaties, getting out of multinational agreements and climate change and so on. But I think it’s helpful to recognize the catastrophism that is inherent in political campaigns and also just in our thinking. We think of the worst possible thing that can happen. I’ve done this before, a test I’ve taken, right? I’m obsessing over, oh my God, I’m going to freeze up. Or you go on a date and you’re just picturing the worst possible thing that could happen. And it’s a natural human tendency, but it’s not necessarily productive because oftentimes the worst thing you can think of doesn’t actually happen.

0:49:52
CW: I’m a fan of imagining the worst that could possibly happen and then reassuring myself, okay, that’s the worst that could possibly happen. Most likely it won’t.

BR: I think there’s another cognitive bias that I want to touch on, and that is assuming that if you believe that Trump is racist, and many people do, although of course he has many African-American supporters including Snoop Dogg and Kanye West and so on, if you believe that then it’s easy for people to say, well, his supporters must by definition be racist, right? How you have this figure who is by multiple accounts a dishonest criminal, he was found liable for a sexual assault, let’s not forget that, raping Eugene Carroll, all his outrageous statements, I mean just on and on and on, the fact that he cheated on his wives, I mean this is all public knowledge and so on. And I’ve seen this over and over again with with my progressive friends, like well you know how could a Republican vote for this person unless they themselves think that’s OK?

CW: And that’s that’s the sentiment that’s going all over the skeptic blogosphere and, you know, Facebookosphere, whatever you call that. I’m going to quote one of them. No illusions said I’m paraphrasing what he said. He said, well, I know the good people of America are going to suffer under this Trump administration. But now I know there aren’t that many of them. Cleverness aside, that is lumping everybody together and saying, okay, everybody who voted for Trump has his exact same moral compass. They believe he is guilty of all those things because plenty of people don’t bother to dig up anything. They’re just like, oh, Trump’s not racist. Oh, he didn’t really commit any of those sexual assaults. So he didn’t they just they just flat out and don’t believe it.

BR: Yeah, but in a lot of cases that they do believe, but that’s not the salient feature. And this is I think we touched on this in the previous episode on politics, but I think it bears repeating, which is that there again, it goes back to the boogeyman effect. There’s a tendency to demonize rightly or wrongly, ish, the opponent, right? And so you paint them in the worst possible light. And if you frame them that way, then it’s obviously, it’s obviously sort of shocking and disturbing and surprising that anyone would vote for this. I hate to use the word caricature of, um, of this, this sort of boogeyman that you’ve built up. But the fact is that if you go beyond the rhetoric, if you go beyond the political ads and the Facebook posts and things like that, if you actually talk to Republican supporters and Trump supporters, and this has been done many, many times, they will tell you they are not shy about sharing their opinions on the topic. What they will consistently tell you is that they’re voting for Trump despite, not because of, those qualities.

CW: Well, well yeah, most of the ones I’ve heard and they claim stuff like, oh the anointed one, the God has chosen many imperfect men before. It’s almost like this this confirmation bias of like, oh because he has all these flaws, that’s what’s telling me that God wants me to vote for him.

BR: I mean there’s always gonna be the sort of extremist fundamentalist faction, but I think you know that overlooks the bulk of voters many of them women many of them Latinos and African Americans Voted for Trump and the reason they did again, you can find the the reporting on this is actually some pretty good work in The New York Times and in Washington Post and elsewhere They say well, no the reason I voted for Trump, you know, I don’t like his his comments about the immigrants I don’t share his opinions about this and that.

CW: I don’t think Puerto Rico is a floating island of garbage. Yeah.

BR: I don’t think that. Or again, take your pick. There’s a laundry list of things that they will flat out tell you, I don’t agree with him, but I do support his overall wanting to make America great and he’s going to improve the economy.

CW: I want my tips to no longer be taxed.

BR: You know, yeah. Yeah. And so, yeah. And so the point here is that while Democrats have understandably focused on Trump’s badly flawed character with some justification, that’s not what the Republican voters, that’s not what’s gaining them traction. That’s not what they care about. So it’s this sort of disconnect where the Democrats are saying, how can you possibly vote for this deeply flawed con man, serial whatever else. The reason we’re voting for him is because he’s advocating for other policies that I like. I want to earn more money. I don’t want immigrants or anybody else breaking into my house and stealing my stuff. Again, there’s this disconnect. I think that’s part of why so many Democrats were so shocked about Trump’s election was they had misunderstood Trump’s appeal among his voters.

CW: Yes, I definitely agree. You have a point there. The last thing that I wanted to discuss was Project 2025, and I’m not going to discuss it in depth. If you if you want a more in-depth look at it, we covered it on Episode 232 a couple of months back, and I was hoping that was all we would ever have to talk about it because he wouldn’t be elected and we wouldn’t have this problem. But like I said, a lot of people are extra worried about this term, even though his last term was not as harmful as we worried it might’ve been. This time he’s got sort of this playbook from the Heritage Foundation. And two things are converging to worry me here about this. Number one, this higher level of organization that he has this time around with candidates for various administrative offices that are hand-picked by the foundation, ready to go, ready to be put into spots. It’s easy and we know Trump likes the easy way to do anything so he’s just going to plug these people in. That’s coupled with number two, the recent Supreme Court ruling in June of this year overturning the Chevron deference doctrine. Do you recall the Chevron doctrine?

BR: I vaguely recall that, yes.

CW: Basically it strips power the overturning of this decision, strips power away from people in agencies who have expertise in a certain field. Think of the people who are figuring out where hurricanes are going to go. And it moves that power into the hands of the judiciary. So prior to this ruling, because of Chevron deference, federal agencies had the power themselves to interpret the laws as they saw fit. If there was any ambiguity, they could read it the way that it made sense to them. And as long as their reading of it was quote unquote reasonable, that was it. The courts would defer to them. Now, since this has been overturned, I’m going to read you something here from Amy Howe, who wrote in SCOTUS blog about the decision. Chief Justice John Roberts rejected any suggestion that agencies rather than courts are better suited to determine what ambiguities in a federal law might mean, even when those ambiguities involve technical or scientific questions that fall within an agency’s area of expertise, Roberts emphasized. So anybody who believes in scientific expertise is a little nervous about this. And I’m honestly not sure what having, I mean, we’ve got two confluences happening here where we’ve got the Chevron deference is taking the power away from the agencies and putting it into the hands of the judiciary at the same time that RFK Jr. might be getting put in charge of an agency or I don’t know if he can run more than one, but he’s definitely gonna be doing some stuff as will other people who might not be qualified. So in that case, the judiciary might actually be a safeguard keeping regulations in place that the agencies with new leadership might just be ignoring. So we’ll see what happens. I don’t know how reliable the agencies are going to be, depending on how many people get flushed out of them over the next four years. And I don’t know how good the judiciary is going to be in having oversight of any of this stuff. So it’s all going to be a grand experiment, you might say.

BR: Yeah, and just to circle back to the point I made earlier is I think that the extent to which Trump will embrace and enact the Heritage Foundation’s policies is the extent to which Trump thinks it will benefit himself. I honestly don’t think he cares at all about it. I don’t think he wakes up with any sort of Overall mission or guidance to do the world good or harm He just sort of goes along and whoever kisses his ass and and promises him more money He goes for it and that’s sort of mixed blessing on one hand. That’s that’s sort of sad, you know, in another way, it could be saving grace because the Heritage Foundation and their project 2025 and all that, they’re hoping that he’s going to, you know, follow their policies. He’s not a believer. He doesn’t care. He’s not one of them. He’s not one of anybody. He’s in it for himself. So he’s unpredictable and that’s what makes everybody nervous on both sides and internationally too.

CW: Foreign policy does not enjoy unpredictable actors here. So we’ll see what happens.

0:59:43
BR: : Yeah, and I’ll just wrap up by saying that when I was very young, when I was a couple of years old, my parents, actually soon after I was born, my parents traveled down in South America, in Africa in a camper van. And part of the reason they did that was to look for a new place to move. They were very disillusioned with the Nixon administration at the time. And part of the reason they were traveling in a camper van with a newborn, which doesn’t sound like the best of ideas, is they’re saying, you know what, America’s going to hell, this is 1970, as Vietnam was going on, of course. They just were not happy. And in the end, we moved back to the States and settled in Louisiana. And my dad told me that part of the reason was that in traveling throughout Latin America and Africa and elsewhere, they saw just how bad other countries were. Not that they were terrible garbage or anything, all countries had their problems, third world countries especially. And America for all its many flaws, both in the 70s and now, there’s still democracy, there are still institutions, there are still people that are trying to improve the country, and that’s one reason why immigrants are coming to this country. We have people who are leaving Venezuela and Colombia and Guatemala and Ecuador and Brazil and the Middle East. They’re traveling thousands of miles, sometimes on foot, through the Darien Gap and through there, partly because they know that America is in some ways the shining city on the hill, despite all its flaws. So I would just end with that, is that, yeah, there’s lots of problems in this country. You can argue that they’re worse today than they were last week, but there are still some institutions and guardrails, and that overall it is demonstrably better than many other places for political, economic, social, and other reasons.

CW: Yeah, and the pendulum swings. It seems like every time one party gets in and messes things up, the other party comes in and cleans that thing up. So, we just have to get through the next four years and see what happens at the end of it. Or even during the middle of it. I’m very curious to see if Trump will make it through the entire term. I was curious last time if he’d make it through unimpeached and he didn’t. He got impeached twice, but he did never convicted. So we’ll see what happens.

1:02:18
BR: Yeah, I mean, Trump is not a paragon of health. You notice that. He’s got that weird orange pallor, which I’m assuming is makeup but I don’t know and then of course the prospect then is is Vance’s president and In some ways, I think he’s more concerning because I think he does have a core ideology. I mean, I agree with it, but I think he In the same way that you know sort of they talked about how Dick Cheney was the brains behind the George W Bush administration, with some validity that might be the case here. We’ll see.

CW: Yeah, we live in interesting times. And be strong, everybody. Take care, hug your loved ones, and do the skeptical activism work that needs to be done. Somebody has to.

BR: Yep.

CW: Take care.

BR: Courage.

1:03:07
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