Propaganda and Conspiracy: Part 2 - The Strategic Use of Bad Arguments for Propagandistic Purposes

Bad arguments are not merely the byproduct of sloppy thinking. We can often get tunnel vision, assuming the act of putting forward an argument signals commitment to an honest exchange with an interlocutor. In reality, there are often very subtle and strategic effects of advancing an argument. Bad arguments have a performative aspect to them. They’re built (or deployed) to achieve social effects like overwhelming, signaling group identity, or muddying the evidence landscape, rather than to establish truth. In other words, bad arguments can often serve broader propagandistic motivations.

I first began thinking about the use of argument as an antidote to the bad thinking patterns that proliferated, seemingly unchecked, prior to the 2020 election cycle. This was around the same time studies in network science were being published that identified measurable polarization in social networks using Facebook user data. Motivated by this fact, my idea was that by teaching argumentation and critical thinking, people would have the tools effective to sift through seemingly obvious nonsense proliferating on social media. I soon realized that argumentation alone is insufficient, leading me to expand my hypothetical curriculum into broader domains like data literacy, epistemic virtue, systems thinking, model thinking etc. It is not enough to know how to identify a bad argument. One must also be able to embed that argument within the broader narrative it's used to bolster, identify institutional mechanisms that propagate the bad argument, and understand the strategic use of such argument.

I am obviously not the first to identify this phenomenon. Researchers have actually been studying the multilateral aspects of argumentation; embedding argument within a broader social context and identifying why certain bad arguments seem convincing. Here are a few well-studied patterns where weak arguments are used strategically:

Shotgunning many weak points (a.k.a. the Gish Gallop). By firing off a long list of tenuous claims, the speaker exploits time limits and attention; each point is cheap to make but costly to refute. Science-education scholars coined and described this tactic in debate contexts.
High-volume repetition (the “firehose” model). Propagandists sometimes emphasize volume, speed, and repetition over consistency or accuracy. This saturates channels, keeps targets busy, and leverages psychological biases. RAND analyzed this pattern and why traditional fact-checking struggles against it.
Distributed Amplification ("Flooding the Zone with Shit"): This is a propaganda tactic where a campaign mobilizes many people to spread a message (misinformation, propaganda, or otherwise) widely using their personal social media accounts or offline networks. The goal is to seed the message across many platforms so that even if one is moderated or flagged, it persists elsewhere, and to overwhelm the public information environment—creating confusion, distrust, or making it hard to distinguish truth from falsehood.
Media Manipulation Casebook
The goal is to seed the message across many platforms so that even if one is moderated or flagged, it persists elsewhere, and to overwhelm the public information environment—creating confusion, distrust, or making it hard to distinguish truth from falsehood.
Repetition as a truth cue (illusory truth). Simply hearing a claim repeatedly can make it feel true, even when we “know better.” That fluency effect is robust across trivia, headlines, and more. See Knowledge Does Not Protect Against Illusory Truth.
Truths used to mislead (paltering). Not all manipulative arguments are outright lies. Paltering uses literally true statements to create false impressions (e.g., cherry-picked truths). Experiments show people do this, especially in negotiations.
Motte-and-bailey. A speaker advances a bold, indefensible “bailey” claim; when pressured, they retreat to a safer, more defensible “motte,” then later slide back. The move has been analyzed in philosophical rhetoric.
Manufacturing ignorance (agnotology). Beyond single arguments, entire campaigns aim to create doubt; for instance by seeding many low-quality objections so the public perceives “controversy.” Scholars call the study of such engineered ignorance agnotology.

Why do any of these strategies work? First, because there is an asymmetry of effort. It’s faster to assert than to refute; even accurate corrections often have weaker psychological impact than the original claim. Secondly, they work due to cognitive load and attention economics. Overload pushes audiences to heuristics like fluency (“sounds familiar”), coherence within an in-group, or simple count of “points,” rather than quality.

Much of this research has been conducted in response to this new information landscape we find ourselves in. However, I think the use of these tactics stretches far back into history. I want to provide a list of bad arguments; some of which have deep historical roots, other are more modern. These arguments are typically used to propagate conservative political or religious agendas.

Motivated Skepticism in Religious Debates

While watching a debate with young earth creationists, they advanced a plethora of pseudo skeptical arguments attempting to undermine normal scientific uncertainty. In this example, for the age of the earth using radio metric dating, they say “I don’t trust that measure, it’s not accurate” or something along the lines of that, calling into question the consistency and validation of the technique. Normally, people would get stuck here trying to show the method is indeed accurate within normal confidence bands. I first want to show a better method of engagement with this type of highly motivated pseudo-skepticism. Very often, your interlocutors want you to go down that rabbit hole. This can be easily avoided. Second, I want to show how this fits into a set of broader propagandistic methods that are used outside of these ridiculous debates.

Propositions have implications. I think people forget this. They are so narrowly focused on insulating their position from criticism that their defense undermines other commitments they might hold. In this case, let's start by saying "Ok, I accept that suggestion, but what would it imply?" It might imply that our understanding of half life's for nuclear weapons or nuclear power are not understood. Or it might imply the negation of another scientific consensus they accept. Or it might imply that an engineered system is fundamentally unreliable because it would be based on a misunderstanding of the scientific principle it depends upon, so we would expect failures. We can accept their absurd hypothesis temporarily, then show it would lead to absurd consequences or imply observations that we don't see in the world. Formally, this is known as the Argument ad Absurdum. Here is a compact playbook for radiometric dating, but you can see that it can be applied literally anywhere else:

Pin the claim: Restate it crisply and globally enough to have consequences; “So you’re saying radioactive decay rates (and thus radiometric dating) are too unreliable to infer ages.”
Steelman and scope: “Let’s assume they’re wrong by a lot—enough to invalidate billions-of-years ages, not just tiny lab uncertainties.”
Map the implications (consilience test): Ask: What systems depend on the same physics? What observations would flip if this were true? Make the list outside geology so it’s not just “more geology.”
Predict concrete, near-term consequences: “If X were true, then today we should see A, B, C.”
Compare with reality: If the predicted consequences don’t exist, either the premise is wrong or it’s been qualified down to harmless trivialities.

Now lets go ahead and show that if "radiometric dating is unreliable", all of this would follow:

Nuclear engineering & medicine would be chaotic
- Nuclear reactors, power plants, and weapons rely on stable nuclear properties (decay probabilities, cross-sections, resonance energies). Big, recent swings would scramble reactivity calculations and safety margins. We don’t see unexpected reactor behavior or systematic mispredictions of fuel burnup.
- Radiopharma & radiation therapy dosing depends on precise half-lives (e.g., I-131, Tc-99m). If real-world half-lives wandered wildly, patient doses and imaging would be consistently off, and clinics would have noticed instantly. They haven’t.
- Every household ionization smoke detector (Am-241) is a quiet, long-term half-life test. If decay drifted hugely, millions would fail in correlated ways. They don’t.
Fork: If they say “the changes only happen in rocks, not labs or reactors,” they’ve introduced ad hoc special pleading—same nuclei, same forces, somehow different only when measuring ages.
Natural nuclear “clocks” in the wild would disagree
- Multiple, independent isotope systems (U–Pb, Rb–Sr, Sm–Nd, K–Ar, etc.) often agree on the same rocks and meteorites. To erase old ages, all would need to conspire in just the right way. That’s vanishingly unlikely without a mechanism that also avoids breaking #1.
- Astrophysical clocks: supernova light curves are largely powered by well-known decays (e.g., Ni-56 → Co-56 → Fe-56). If decay rates varied wildly over cosmic time, distant supernovae would show inconsistent brightness–time shapes. They don’t—light curves line up with the same half-lives.
- Natural reactor at Oklo (Gabon, ~2 billion years ago): analysis of fission by-products tightly constrains changes in nuclear constants over geologic time. Large swings that would “fix” dating would have left a signature there. They didn’t.
Fork: If they suggest “decay changed only during brief windows,” those windows would still have to avoid leaving traces in Oklo-type records, supernovae, and engineered systems—an increasingly fine-tuned coincidence net.
Earth’s heat & particles would betray it
- Radiogenic heat: To compress billions of years into thousands, long-lived isotopes would need to decay much faster in the past, dumping enormous heat. The crust would have partially melted; we’d see a very different geothermal history.
- Geoneutrinos: Underground detectors see neutrinos from ongoing U/Th decays in Earth. The flux matches an old, slowly cooling planet—not a recent, hyper-decay event.
Cross-checks that don’t use radioactivity still say “old”
- Tree rings (dendrochronology), lake varves, speleothems, coral growth bands, ice cores—all are independent, layered records with their own annual/seasonal signals and volcanic tie-points. They overlap and stack into timelines far beyond a few thousand years. To rescue a young Earth, you must also assert that all these clocks fail in coordinated ways.
- Plate tectonics & seafloor magnetism: Reversals recorded symmetrically on both sides of mid-ocean ridges form time-stripes that correlate globally. You’d need global, synchronized errors across ocean basins.

Bottom line of the reductio:

Big, frequent decay changes → a world full of broken reactors, failed medical doses, odd supernovae, melted crust, wrong neutrino fluxes, and disagreeing clocks. We don’t live in that world.

Tiny, rare changes → far too small to erase deep time; radiometric dating remains valid within known uncertainties.

If decay were that unstable, reactors/medical isotopes/supernovae would misbehave. Which of those are you willing to give up? → This exposes special pleading and shows how the doubt would break their everyday world.

If no amount of cross-checked evidence could change your mind, this isn’t about methods → it’s about commitment.

This line of argument obviously applies to any other domain. But in particular, within this domain, there is a clear line of motivated skepticism; belief preservation. It's a very shitty argument, but it is one of many in an arsenal that young earth creationists use to insulate their belief system from external scrutiny. Obviously, not all Theists believe this nonsense, that's not my point here. But different apologetic circles have different collections of arguments that share this same structure; motivated skepticism towards an established fact that conflicts with their worldview. These arguments are often used to prop up the world view in an attempt to establish a grain of intellectual credibility, essentially under a false pretense of serious engagement. These kinds of arguments are not aimed at discovering truth, they are tools for motivated skepticism and belief inoculation. Here's the propagandistic job they do and why they spread so well:

Identity signaling: Casting doubt on mainstream methods marks the speaker as part of the in-group (“we don’t bow to secular science”). It’s a badge, not a hypothesis. In many communities, trusting mainstream science risks social costs; doubting it does not. Propaganda exploits that payoff structure.
Identity-protective cognition: Doubt functions as a shield that lets people keep belonging without feeling irrational.
Burden-shift machine: It moves the burden of proof onto the scientist to defend every assumption at infinite resolution. The doubter never has to specify an alternative or quantify anything.
Nirvana fallacy lever: It frames normal uncertainty as disqualifying: unless a method is perfect, it’s worthless. That lets them reject any finite level of evidence while keeping their preferred belief intact.
Fogging for the audience: A few technical-sounding doubts create the impression that “experts disagree,” which is often enough to paralyze non-experts (“guess it’s controversial”).
Asymmetric skepticism: It trains people to be hyper-skeptical of disfavored science while being extraordinarily credulous about congenial claims. The double standard is the point: protect the doctrine, not evaluate all claims equally.
Resource sabotage: It forces opponents into time-consuming rabbit holes (explaining half-lives, error bars, cross-checks) instead of discussing bigger-picture coherence. It’s a Gish gallop with “uncertainty” as fuel.
Plausible deniability: Because it’s framed as “just asking,” it looks reasonable to fence-sitters and keeps platforms from moderating it as misinformation.
Gateway to conspiracy: If standard methods are “unreliable,” then institutions that rely on them look corrupt or incompetent, priming a conspiracy narrative that absorbs counterevidence (“of course they would say that”).
Overton-window nudge: Repeating doubts normalizes them, making “teach the controversy” or “equal time” sound balanced rather than manipulative.
Cognitive off-ramp: It gives adherents an easy, portable script to avoid dissonance: you don’t need to learn the science—just repeat, “the dating’s not reliable.” “It’s unreliable” is cheap to learn and easy to repeat; the rebuttal takes time and nuance.
Special pleading: Claim that problems only occur where the doctrine needs them (e.g., “decay only misbehaves in rocks”), exempting reactors, radiotherapy, supernovae, etc.
Availability & repetition: The same few doubts circulate in sermons, videos, and forums, becoming “common sense” through familiarity alone.

In short, the propagandistic role of these arguments isn’t to win on evidence; it’s to maintain allegiance, create stalemate, and move the conversation onto terrain where certainty is impossible and doctrine is safe. The reductio approach works because it restores symmetry, demands commitments, and reconnects claims to the world we actually observe.

Asymmetric Standards: The "Context" Defense

Many religious people will get defensive when you identify problematic biblical verses that seem to contradict their conception of god, contradict other verses, or seem to conflict with accepted ethical standards. They will often claim “you are taking that out of context”. This is such a common rhetorical tactic that people have made parodies of it, especially when they apply ridiculous double standards about whether context is important. I would like to argue, that the religious completely take the Bible out of context, when you think of the socio-political, historically dependent, and cultural context more broadly. They completely remove the context in which the canon was constructed, the context of the alleged events described in the Bible, the broader Hellenistic context and near eastern context in which these events allegedly took place, the context of the authors, the philosophical context, etc.; it seems like the religious are actually the ones taking the words out of that context and selectively apply contextual standards when it suits them. I'll first address this common argument. Then I show how this is actually a broader pattern of argumentation that might be used as one of the oldest propaganda techniques known in modern media studies.

There are two senses of the word "context". Micro-context (what apologists usually invoke), consists of the surrounding paragraph, the original Greek/Hebrew word, a pastor's explanation, or a harmonization with other "clear" verses. Macro-context (what actually matters and is what's normally disregarded), consists of who wrote/edited the text, when, for whom, under what politics, with which sources, genres, and philosophical assumptions; and how the canon itself was assembled and later reinterpreted. Apologetic defense fixates on micro-context, extracting the text from its macro-context, which is the real "context" determining meaning. By arguing that the critic is "taking the book out of context", the apologist fails to recognize the many macro-contextual aspects that undermine their defense. Below are five common ones:

Canon construction (the library’s context): The Bible is a stitched library, not a single-author treatise. Different communities disputed which books counted, copied variants, and favored texts that served their theological and political needs. If “context” matters, then treating the final canon as a timeless, seamless whole is already a context removal: you’re ignoring the editorial and communal battles that produced it. The more you honor that history, the less plausible it is to demand that every line cohere perfectly.
Ancient Near Eastern & Hellenistic ecosystems (the neighbors’ context): Creation floods, law codes, divine council language, apocalyptic tropes, logos-philosophy—biblical authors are in dialogue with surrounding cultures. That macro-context often explains the content more cleanly than later theology. Once you allow that, “in context” becomes a reason not to universalize commands or cosmologies as uniquely divine or timeless.
Authorial plurality and redaction (the writer’s context): Different books/strata promote different theologies (e.g., priestly vs. prophetic priorities; wisdom vs. apocalyptic hopes; Paul vs. the Pastorals). Appeals to “you misread that verse” usually presuppose a single, consistent voice. But the real context is many voices over centuries. If context matters, you can’t demand a harmony that the library itself doesn’t offer.
Social function (the power context): Household codes, conquest narratives, slavery regulations, purity systems: these serve concrete community needs and power structures. If we take that context seriously, the texts look descriptively culture-bound more than prescriptively universal. That undermines the move where apologists say, “This hard verse is culturally limited, but that other favorite rule is timeless.”
Reception history and philosophy (the afterlife of the text): Much that is treated as “the biblical meaning” is really later interpretation—Greek metaphysics, medieval scholasticism, Reformation polemics, modern evangelical distinctives. If those are your real guides, then appeals to “original context” are selectively applied only when they rescue doctrine.

Here are some common double standards seen in these discussions:

Literal vs. metaphorical swing. Miracles and prophecies: literal. Genocide commands or eternal torment: “hyperbole, metaphor, or ANE war rhetoric.” That’s not principled context; that’s triage.
Timeless vs. time-bound swap. Sexual rules: timeless. Head coverings or women’s silence (1 Cor 11; 14): time-bound. Where’s the rule that sorts them? It’s rarely derived from the text; it’s imported.
Law triage (moral/civil/ceremonial). Those categories aren’t in the text itself; they’re later frameworks to keep what we like and discard what we don’t.
Burden of proof asymmetry. Critics must master ancient languages, archaeology, and three commentaries to object to a plain reading; believers may proof-text devotionally. If context is essential, it cuts both ways—or the standard is rigged.
“No True Context” fallacy. Any counterexample is dismissed as “not the right context,” so the view becomes unfalsifiable. That’s not interpretation; that’s insulation.

Applying various tests exposes selective contextualizing. For example, symmetry tests quickly identify "context" being used as a form of special pleading. This often happens when certain religious groups accepted loose contextual standards for their own problematic scripture while holding other religious groups to much stricter requirements. You could ask for a clear, advance rule that predicts which teachings are culture-bound versus universal—before you know the moral stakes. If the rule tracks modern intuitions rather than textual features, it’s ad hoc. A meaning reversal test can also help identify this rhetorical strategy. Here are some questions you could ask yourself or your interlocutor:

“Which kind of context do you mean—authorial, canonical, historical, social, or philosophical? Let’s pick one and stick to a rule.”
“What’s your decision rule for timeless vs. culture-bound? Can we apply it to five topics (slavery, war, women, vows, sexuality) consistently?”
“If the same method would not rescue a troubling verse in another religion, why is it valid here?”
“What evidence would count against your reading? If nothing could, that’s not context; that’s a force field.”

Very generally, the argument within the religious context looks something like this:

Your negative/unfavorable interpretation of some content lacks the required context
This context is relevant and significantly undermines these negative interpretations
Therefore, the interpretation is incorrect

As I have shown above, often this argument fails because it cherry-picks and constructs ideal contextual considerations which often result in special pleading, applies standards inconsistently, and fails to elucidate a broader understanding. This is very often driven by motivational forces such as theology or group identity preservation. Nevertheless, it is convincing to many people; the micro-context argument, despite being quite bad, continues to have persuasive force. I am interested in this, because I think this pattern of argument and rhetorical strategy extends beyond this biblical dialogue. Bad arguments like these are often used and serve as propagandistic content. Consider the traditional media, this is a common tactic; selective inclusion of contextual features that might emphasize or highlight certain features while downplaying others, framing this context as relevant despite a broader context undermining the message etc. Selective context is not just a bad argument, but a deliberately strategic argument used to propagate a message, frame a broader narrative, and silence dissenting opinion. This theological context provides a crisp example of just how generalized the method is. Let's now consider how the same tactic used by apologists frequently occurs in normal life.

Selective context narrows the frame to a hand-picked sliver that flatters the message while excluding the wider frame that would dilute or reverse it. Once you spot the pattern, you’ll see it everywhere; in political messaging, corporate PR, cable-news chyrons, even in the way charts are cropped on social media. The method is simple: control the horizon of relevance, and you control the conclusion. Here’s a field guide to how that works, why it persuades, and how to counter it; well beyond the biblical setting. Think of context in rings: micro → meso → macro (sentence/scene → document/episode → system/history). The tactic is to freeze the debate at the ring that makes the claim look best.

First, the time window. Choose a start date where the line points up, not down; pick the year before a crisis, not the decade that explains it. Rotate the window until the trend flatters your thesis, then insist that “the context” is that window. People rarely ask why this span is the yardstick. Second, the reference class. Crime “in the city” vs. “in the downtown core” vs. “per capita vs. absolute totals”; unemployment for “prime-age men” vs. “overall labor force.” By shifting the group or denominator, you can invert valence without altering any facts. The frame tells you whom to empathize with and whom to treat as background noise. Third, the comparator. Every story is relative to a counterfactual: compared to what? Compared to last month? Neighboring countries? A global trend? A different policy regime? By swapping comparators, you can transform failure into “doing better than peers” or vice versa. Once “the right comparison” is declared “the context,” alternatives look like cherry-picking—never mind that the choice was arbitrary. Fourth, vocabulary. Call it “collateral” rather than “civilian deaths,” “enhanced interrogation” rather than “torture,” “rightsizing” rather than “layoffs.” Word choice is context in linguistic form: it imports a network of associations that makes some inferences seem natural and others seem melodramatic. Fifth, causal ordering. Place events in a sequence that highlights the cause you prefer. The order may be real, but the implied causation rides on what’s omitted. If you center “provocations” rather than “conditions,” or “deficits” rather than “automatic stabilizers,” you pre-assign agency before anyone analyzes mechanisms. Finally, genre. Treat a sermon as if it were a statute, a press release as if it were audited data, a parable as if it were policy. The declared “context” smuggles in expectations about precision, universality, and authorial intent. Genre mislabeling is one of the quietest ways to shrink or inflate a claim’s scope.

None of these steps necessarily falsify anything. That’s what makes the technique resilient: it produces true-but-selective portraits that feel responsible because they gesture toward “context,” while ensuring the lens never widens to the frame where the portrait would be recognized as partial. Once you notice the dials, the cross-domain continuity becomes obvious.

In scripture debates, the micro-context defense quarantines a verse inside a narrow linguistic or situational bubble and refuses the larger historical, editorial, and philosophical background that would make the verse look contingent rather than timeless. In cable news, the same move appears as clipcraft: show a 12-second confrontation without the preceding hour; the clip is “in context” because we hear both voices—but the omitted staging, crowd dynamics, or police orders would reverse the audience’s intuitions about provocation and restraint. In corporate PR, a quarterly miss is explained with “macro headwinds” (broad frame) when it spreads blame, and with “one-off restructuring charges” (narrow frame) when it shrinks blame. The frame expands or contracts to follow the company’s interests. In political speech, a policy is justified with the most charitable local example (“this program saved a small business on Main Street”) while critics cite system-level effects (“it crowded out credit for thousands”). Each side insists theirs is “the relevant context.” The truth requires toggling scales and asking who chose them and why. Even in science communication, selective context thrives. Climate skeptics highlight a cold month against a warming trend; nutraceutical ads trumpet relative risk reductions without absolute baselines; public-health panics cite raw case counts shorn of testing volumes. The details vary, the architecture holds: define the frame that turns ambiguity into certainty, then anathematize competing frames as “no context.”

Macro-context is expensive. It demands longer attention, more background knowledge, and a tolerance for ambiguity—traits that don’t fit our media economics or our psychological craving for closure. Selective micro-context has two big advantages: speed and salience. It meets us at the level of story and sensation. If you design a message for virality rather than veracity, you’ll always lean into frames that are (1) narrow enough to be legible and (2) curated enough to be unthreatening to prior commitments. That’s why propaganda prefers micro-context even when it banners “full context.” Yet macro-context is the only arena where competing causal stories can be tested on common ground. When you restore the longer time series, add the missing comparators, re-situate the actors in their institutional incentives, and admit the text’s or dataset’s production history, many “contextual rescues” stop rescuing the thesis and start explaining its local plausibility. The frame that once felt exculpatory now reads as an artifact: “This sounded right in that slice because the slice was doing the work.”

There are various methods you can use to identify this pattern. Test window sliding. Ask what changes if we shift the start date backward or forward by one natural unit (one business cycle, one election, one fiscal year, one editorial redaction layer). If the conclusion flips, the argument was window-dependent, not mechanism-dependent. Demand comparator transparency. “Compared to what?” If no explicit counterfactual is stated, the frame is smuggling in a benchmark. Make it explicit and see if the argument still stands when you swap in three reasonable alternatives. Probe the denominator. Numbers love costumes. A claim that nationals committed “X crimes” or “Y overdoses” might be raw counts, not per capita; might be per capita, not age-standardized; might exclude or include categories that move the needle. Ask what happens to the ratio when you normalize by population, time at risk, or base rates. Many scary stories deflate on contact with this simple question. Ask for the rule before the case. If someone argues that a difficult verse, policy failure, or violent incident must be read “in context,” ask them to state a general rule for when to expand or contract context in advance of the topic at hand—and then apply it across ideologically inconvenient domains. If the rule keeps collapsing back to “the frame that saves my prior,” the context is doing propaganda’s job. Finally, try a counterframe inversion. Restate the same facts under a different plausible frame—a wider time series, a different reference class, a neutral vocabulary—to see whether the narrative contour is robust or brittle. If a single reframe swings moral intuition from outrage to shrug (or the reverse), the original “context” was scaffolding, not structure.

The micro-context retort—“you’re taking it out of context”—sounds like a commitment to care. It’s often a commitment to control. The antidote is not to sneer at context but to universalize it: insist that context include provenance (who made this text/metric/clip and why), scale (what time and space make mechanisms visible), comparison (what are we implicitly choosing as the counterfactual), and costs of omission (what goes missing when we crop here). When you widen the lens in a principled way, two things happen. First, many tidy claims dissolve into mixed pictures—less fun, more honest. Second, and more importantly, you expose how the tidy claim was built. You can show that the context being offered was not the neutral, necessary backdrop but a deliberately tuned stage. Once an audience sees the stagecraft, the spell breaks.

In propaganda, selective context becomes a filter. The context offered is exactly large enough to neutralize an objection and exactly small enough to prevent the next question "What if we widen the lens?" Selective context is persuasive because people experience information through schemas, not in a vacuum. Present me with a small, vivid frame—a 20-second clip, a two-verse gloss, a single inflation print—and my mind helpfully “completes the picture.” That’s efficient cognition, but it’s also where the trick slips in. Micro-context feels like texture while it quietly pre-loads a worldview: which agents matter, which causes are plausible, which comparisons count, what time window defines “normal,” and what moral vocabulary fits. The very act of naming the context decides the baseline. If you accept the baseline, the conclusion often follows without much push.

At a cognitive level, selective context rides our fastest, most economical habits. Small, vivid frames are easy to process—clips, quotes, two-verse glosses, a single time window on a chart. They produce cognitive ease (it “clicks”), and we’re wired to treat ease as truth. They also mesh with schema completion: given a partial story, the mind fills gaps in ways that protect prior beliefs. Add motivated reasoning and identity-protective cognition—the tendency to defend what our group values—and the curated slice becomes not just plausible but comforting. The “missing context” accusation doubles as a status move: it paints the critic as naïve and the defender as conscientious and expert. That social cue (“I’m the careful one here”) is itself persuasive.

Selective context also benefits from asymmetry of effort. It is cheap to allege that something was “out of context,” and expensive to audit the claim. To rebut, a critic must recover longer time series, alternate baselines, production histories, genre conventions, and counterfactuals. That investigative overhead rarely fits the media formats where persuasion happens; short-form environments reward the quick contextual gloss, not the full reconstruction. The technique therefore scales: a propagandist can field dozens of micro-context defenses faster than a careful analyst can unwind one. This is why it thrives in news cycles and social feeds.

Emotion is another multiplier. Micro-context is where identifiable stories live—the single crime, the one rescue, the striking quote. Macro-context lives in aggregates and counterfactuals—abstract, statistical, slower to move people. Propaganda exploits that asymmetry by letting the anecdote carry the moral while the “context” supplies the rationalization. The feeling lands first; the curated context trails behind to make the feeling feel earned. That sequence (“hit emotion, then bless it with context”) is remarkably hard to dislodge afterward because of the continued influence effect: even when people learn a frame was partial, its narrative residue persists. Media economics and platform design supercharge all of this. Algorithms privilege content that is short, vivid, and engagement-heavy—exactly the kind of thing that thrives on narrow, dramatic frames. Cropped charts and clipped videos are not only cheaper to produce; they’re more shareable and more memorizable. Repetition of the same micro-context across outlets then triggers the illusory truth effect: familiarity masquerades as accuracy. By the time a sober macro-analysis arrives, it feels like nitpicking against what “everyone already knows.”

Selective context works as propaganda because it feels like fairness while functioning as control. It borrows the moral prestige of “being careful” and spends it on narrowing the world to a slice where the preferred conclusion is almost inevitable. It exploits our cognitive shortcuts, our social incentives, and our media environments—all while wearing the respectable mask of nuance. That’s why it keeps winning, even when it’s wrong.

The modern media didn’t invent selective context; it industrialized a playbook that religious apologists had already refined over centuries. When your foundational claims must remain true—because they anchor identity, authority, salvation—interpretation becomes a technology for preserving plausibility under pressure. The most reliable tool in that kit is shaping “the relevant context.” Long before cameras and chyrons, scribes, preachers, and commentators learned how to tilt the horizon of a text so that apparent contradictions, moral embarrassments, or historical anachronisms stop looking like problems and start looking like misunderstandings.

You can see this logic at work as far back as late antiquity. Church fathers faced a library of texts written over many centuries, in different voices, under shifting politics. They couldn’t simply say, “These don’t fit.” So they built methods that made fit inevitable. Harmonizations stitch together divergent stories into a single chronology; allegory and typology float troubling passages into the realm of symbol; the “rule of faith” (regula fidei) declares that scripture must cohere with established doctrine, so any friction proves the reader’s error, not the text’s. Notice what these methods accomplish rhetorically: they define, in advance, which frame counts. If a verse jars, you are told to zoom in (word studies, immediate setting) or zoom out (grand narrative, typology) exactly as needed to protect the thesis. That is selective context functioning as a safety mechanism.

Once you appreciate the institutional incentives, the continuity with modern propaganda is obvious. A priest or theologian is tasked with maintaining the intelligibility and moral authority of a fixed canon to a living community; a press secretary or cable host is tasked with maintaining the intelligibility and moral authority of a party or brand to an audience. Both jobs reward the same skills: deciding which time window reveals “what’s really going on,” which comparator is “fair,” which genre label should govern expectations (is this law, poetry, parable? is this a data point, an anecdote, a trend?). Both jobs also share the same asymmetry: it’s cheap to assert “you’re missing the context,” and expensive to audit that claim. Over time, traditions that survive are the ones that mastered efficient, repeatable ways to steer context with minimal friction.

Apologetics also had centuries to perfect something the media later scaled: elastic framing that feels principled. If a literal reading wounds doctrine, appeal to genre (“ancient war rhetoric”), or to authorial intent (“pastoral counsel to a crisis church”), or to salvation history (“shadow fulfilled by Christ”), or to philology (“the Hebrew can also mean…”). If the opposite move is needed—if a favored rule should be timeless—invoke creation order, natural law, or “clearer passages interpret the unclear.” Each move can be presented as fidelity to context, but the direction of the move is guided by the non-negotiables. That’s exactly how modern messaging works: swap in “industry headwinds,” “context that the clip didn’t show,” “the data once you control for X,” and you get the corporate or political equivalent—a system of context choices that always seems to land on the party line.

Even the mediums rhyme. Medieval glosses in the margins and catenae of patristic quotations are essentially curated sidebars—the original “explainers”—that travel with the text and pre-interpret it for the reader. Sermons are serial reframings: a crisis, a puzzle, a difficult saying, then context that resolves it in the community’s favor. Pamphleteering in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation era did what thread-long posts and reels do now: crop the world to a vivid slice, front-load the frame, and make alternative framings look both ignorant (“you don’t know the Greek!”) and morally suspect (“you’re attacking the faith”). The social incentives are the same, too: framing confers status. The person who “knows the context” appears both more expert and more virtuous—exactly the posture that propaganda wants for its narrators. Why does this prehistory matter? Because it explains the method’s durability. Religious apologetics had to reconcile texts to doctrines across centuries of moral change (slavery, conquest, gender, cosmology). That pressure cooker created a repertoire that can absorb almost any contradiction by changing the scale or genre of reading. Once such a repertoire exists, it migrates: lawyers use it in briefs, marketers in brand guides, officials in crisis comms. The media era didn’t discover selective context; it found a mass-distribution system for it.

And there’s a final, subtler continuity: both apologetics and propaganda operate on communities, not isolated individuals. The goal isn’t merely to convince you of a point but to keep the group coherent and the story liveable. Selective context excels at that. It offers just enough explanation to preserve dignity (“we’re not fools; there’s more to it”), just enough ambiguity to absorb dissent (“perhaps you haven’t seen the whole context”), and just enough moral cover to keep participating (“this hard passage, rightly understood, isn’t what it sounds like”). That social balm—the promise that our story can handle anything once properly framed—is the real product. The media sell it at scale. Apologists perfected the recipe.

Reification Fallacies

Reification (aka hypostatization or Whitehead’s “fallacy of misplaced concreteness”) is treating an abstract idea, model, or statistical construct as if it were a concrete thing that can act, cause, want, or be located. X is an abstraction → we talk as if X were a thing/agent → we infer from that “thing” as if it had causal powers.

A great example of this is IQ. Many believe it is some inherent and observable feature of humans; in reality it is a test score summarizing performance on certain tasks. The score correlates with a hypothesized latent construct that's measured through statistical inference. It is not a "thing", in the sense of a rock being a "thing". Another common example is the concept evolution. It is not a "thing". Evolution does not "design" anything. It is a theoretical framework for generating and testing hypotheses about observed biological phenomenon. "Society" is not a "thing"; rather it is an aggregate of interlocking functions, groups, and processes. This shows up quite literally everywhere you can imagine. In everyday talk, people personify collectives. In social science and policy, we often treat categories ("The Voter" for example) as essences rather than labels or variables. In psychology and education, latent constructs are treated as inner substances rather than operational measures. In tech and AI, we often ascribe intentions to tools and algorithms (ie; The Algorithm).

This is a problem because it results in bad causal inference. It masks real agents, incentives, and mechanisms. It turns fluid categories into fixed essences, which contributes to stereotyping. And most fundamentally, it results in category errors; it confuses measures and models with the phenomena they summarize. These are abstractions that are useful to facilitate discovery and dialogue about the real world. Confusing the map with the territory muddies communication and prevents critical dialogue.

A related but distinct concept is the "synecdoche". This is a figure of speech that uses a part for the whole, or a whole for the part. For example "All hands on deck", where hands refers to sailors. Reification is distinct in that it's a reasoning error; it treats an abstraction as a concrete thing/agent with causal powers. It's distinct in that metaphors and abstractions are functionally different; "all hands" is not an abstract concept like "intelligence". Synecdoche decodes cleanly without changing the claim’s truth: “All hands on deck” → “All sailors on deck.” Reification however, often adds false implications: "The economy is being held back by these policies" → there is no entity that can be held back. With synecdoche, part↔whole substitution among concrete referents. With reification, a category, model, or process is promoted to a thing (e.g., “intelligence,” “society,” “the average voter”). If the noun is a model/metric/category (risk score, GDP, intelligence, “the electorate”) it's reification. If it's a stylistic choice that doesn't obfuscate meaning, its likely synecdoche.

All of this is background for something I realized while listening to discussions about the "Hard Problem of Consciousness". I didn't quite realize to what extent people can confuse abstractions with concrete reality, and how these confusions can be exploited for propagandistic purposes. In cognitive science and philosophy of mind, many people are "functionalists" about the mind. This means that "the mind" is not a "thing" distinct from the brain, but a collection of functions and processes carried out by brains. Since this is not a post about philosophy of mind, I'll just leave my crude reduction of the literature to this description. What's of interest to me is the frequently cited alternative theory of mind called "Mind-Body dualism" that postulates the mind as a "non physical thing" that is of distinct substance; mind and matter are fundamentally distinct types of "things". By contrast, functionalists are typically monists, there are not two distinct "things", rather the concepts "mind" or "consciousness" are abstractions we use to refer to complex brain processes and functions. Of course, there has been zero demonstration of a separate metaphysical foundation distinct from the physical. Mind-Body dualist arguments, are typically IBE arguments that infer the existence of a distinct substance. I find these arguments incredibly poor and unconvincing, and are muddied by theistic assumptions. That's what lead me to realize they're an instantiation of the reification fallacy.

Reification fallacies occur quite frequently in philosophy of religion. For example, people will argue "there is moral law, therefore there must be a lawgiver." A clear example of reification, It treats “moral law”—an abstract norm or pattern of judgments—as a thing like a statute that literally requires an author. Another example that frequently occurs during discussions about "Laws of Logic": “Laws of logic are immaterial and prescriptive, so they must be grounded in a Mind.” This is reification because it treats “laws” as edicts (a kind of object that needs an issuer) rather than regularities, constraints, or truths. Another quite annoying example is in cosmology and the semantics of "nothing". People will say, “Nothing can’t cause the universe, therefore God did." But this is yet again, reification. It Treats “nothing” as a something with properties. In physics, what’s meant is typically a quantum vacuum (very much a something); in some apologetics, opponents are caricatured as positing literal nothing-as-cause. Another, yet again, incredibly annoying example is treating "information" as a substance. Someone will say “Information is non-material, so it must come from a mind.” It treats “information” as a stuff instead of (a) a measure (Shannon) or (b) semantic content realized in physical media. Finally, something that happens way too often, is treating "evil" or "sin" as entities, rather than normative descriptions of some state of affair or behavior. In philosophy of religion, reification often smuggles in agency or ontic status for abstractions, making the leap to a personal God look easier than it is. The strongest arguments avoid that slide: they define terms precisely, argue from features that really require persons, and keep metaphors from doing hidden logical work.

Let's go ahead and construct an argumentation scheme called "Argument from Reified Abstraction" that captures these aforementioned dynamics. This refers to a class of arguments that treat an abstraction as if it were a single agent (e.g., “the market,” “the Left,” “GDP,” “the algorithm,” “history”) and then draw causal or normative conclusions from that “agent.” Here, A1-A2 refer to typical auxiliaries that identify how the move is padded:

A1 (Inevitability gloss): “There is no alternative to R because T demands it.”
A2 (Representative gloss): “T speaks for all (or nearly all) of D.”
P1 (Abstract referent): Term T denotes an abstraction summarizing some domain D (a model, metric, category, process, or loosely defined collective).
P2 (Agentive ascription): T is described with agentive predicates or authoritative status (e.g., wants, decides, commands, proves, punishes).
P3 (Agency–to–upshot bridge): If an agent with those properties existed, R (policy/claim/recommendation) would follow.
C (Conclusion): Therefore, R.

Hidden assumptions (the unstated commitments):

Unity: T is coherent and coordinated enough to count as one agent (erases heterogeneity in D).
Category fit: Agentive language aptly applies to T (no category mistake).
Authority/force transfer: The “will” or “decision” of T carries causal or normative force over the situation.
Stable operationalization: The meaning of T is fixed across the argument (no equivocation).
Mechanism sufficiency: There exists a clear mechanism from T to outcome O that makes R apt.
Exogeneity: T is not just a product of human choices being laundered (no “the algorithm decided” to dodge accountability).
No rival explanations: Non-agent mechanisms or named actors don’t better explain O.
Is→ought slide resolved: Any normative leap (from description to prescription) is justified, not smuggled in.

Critical Questions (CQs) for evaluating ARA:

CQ1: Definition/operationalization: What exactly is T? Is it a metric, model, category, coalition, legal person, or process? How is it measured or delimited?
CQ2: Ontological fit: Is T the kind of thing that can intend, decide, or command? If not, is the language merely metaphorical?
CQ3: Representativeness/coordination evidence: What evidence of internal unity is there (votes, platforms, binding procedures, formal statements)? What variation exists within D?
CQ4: Mechanism specification: Through which agents, institutions, or rules does T allegedly bring about O? What intermediate steps are posited?
CQ5: Accountability and levers: Who can be named and held responsible? What levers would change O if we tried? If none, is this just inevitabilism?
CQ6: Disaggregation test: How does the claim hold across subgroups, times, and places? Do counter-patterns inside D undercut the monolithic portrayal?
CQ7: Metric/model audit (when T is a measure or algorithm): What is the construction, data, target, error rate, and sensitivity of the model/metric? Would alternative specifications reverse the result?
CQ8: Alternative explanations: Are there named actors, incentives, or non-agent processes that better explain O without positing a unified T-agent?
CQ9: Metaphor strip-down: If you rewrite the claim without metaphor (replace “punished,” “demanded,” “chose”), does the inference to R still go through?
CQ10: Normative bridge check: Even if T reliably correlates with O, why does that entail R? Is there an appeal to nature/inevitability or is→ought slide?
CQ11: Scope creep/equivocation: Does the referent of T expand or shift during the argument (“T” starts specific, ends up meaning “whoever I oppose”)?
CQ12: Falsifiability: What observable conditions would show that T does not act as claimed? Are there counterinstances already?
CQ13: Comparative cases: Are there cases where similar T’s produced different outcomes? What differences in mechanism or context explain that?
CQ14: Burden of proof: Has the proponent supplied positive evidence of agency and mechanism—or merely relied on rhetorical convenience?

This general structure occurs quite frequently outside of these philosophy and apologetics debates. They serve propagandistic functions quite often. It personifies collections; a politician might say "The People have spoken", moving from a messy plurality to a single will which erases dissent and heterogeneity. This language is used to essentialize out-groups, quite politically expedient (for example, "immigrants are destroying society"). A label becomes a thing with motives; variation within the group disappears. As mentioned earlier with IQ, measurements or models are presented as "things" or "essential properties" to legitimize outcomes and dodge accountability. The argument is often very subtle, utilizing metaphorical language to harden ontology. For example, "crime is cancer" reifies descriptions of behaviors in relation to a legal system as "things" needing to be "cured". You can imagine the political agendas this serves.

Reification often simplifies complexity for mobilization. One voice (“the people”), one threat (“criminals”), one cure (“toughness”). Simple stories travel farther and faster. Propagandists need small, bite sized nuggets to travel through social networks efficiently. Reification also moralizes and licenses harsh responses to perceived issues. If the reified entity is sacred (“the Nation”) or diseased (“the Body Politic”), drastic actions become morally framed as duty or hygiene. Reification creates a durable enemy; abstractions (“globalism,” “wokeness,” “degeneracy”) are shape-shifters; they absorb new targets without revising the narrative. This sort of rhetoric exploits deep cognitive vulnerabilities, including essentialism biases, cognitive ease (simplifying and reducing complex processes to a single agent), and identify protection. It shape shifts, having an unfalsifiable scope; the reified thing grows to fit new facts ("globalists" did it, regardless of the event). One-word explanations with no mechanisms are easy to consume without having to do much analysis; they provide a sense of clarity without any actual understanding. Reification in propaganda launders agency, manufactures inevitability, and licenses moralized action by turning abstractions into pseudo-agents. The antidote is tedious but effective: pull the mask off the abstraction and force the argument to name who did what, how, and with what evidence.

Very often, reification and synecdoche are used interchangeably. Politicians start with a synecdoche/metonymy (“the Left” as shorthand for a large, diverse set of people and groups), then slide into reification when they talk as if that abstraction were a single, coordinated agent with one will and set of intentions (“The Radical Left wants X, is doing Y”). Reification is the fallacy; synecdoche is just a figure of speech. Political diversity is reduced to singular agency; “The Left decided / wants / is plotting…” → treats an abstraction as a concrete agent. This erases heterogeneity, it assumes uniform motives across millions, a classic out-group homogeneity bias. It exploits the unfalsifiable scope creep of reification. The label stretches to cover any disliked person or policy (for example, "woke"). This is very useful for political propaganda. It manufactures inevitable threat; a monolithic "left" looks coordinated and unstoppable, justifying strong countermeasures. One enemy with a goal is easier to sell than messy coalitions. Simply ask, "how did 'The Left', do this - what was its decision path" or "are there counterexamples on "the left" that undercut this claim?" as a quick way to identify the fallacy. “The Left is doing XYZ” is harmless synecdoche only when it’s clear shorthand for specific, named actors. It turns into reification—and propaganda—once it imputes a single mind, motive, or action to an abstraction and uses that to draw causal or moral conclusions.

Double Standards: Tom Sowell on Intellectuals

Tom Sowell might be one of the most irritating conservative intellectuals, but not for the ordinary reasons. I actually value his intellect, he is a clear thinker for the most part. It takes a bit of digging to understand his problems. That's not my goal here, I will defend that later in my Economics series. The main point is that he's more or less been a significant voice in the traditional conservative sphere; but his economic ideas are quite frankly, absurdly out-dated and inconsistent with the field. You will simply not find his work in any mainstream or even heterodox discussions. None of his works are cited by other economists, he makes pretty much zero contributions to the field, and is entirely reliant on his post as an ideologue at the Hoover Institute. As an economist, one of the most frustrating things about figures like Sowell, is that because of his influence, the public thinks this is what economists think. Now, like I said, I am not going to elaborate on that here. Instead, I want to take a look at one of his ridiculous arguments that I'll be summarizing from his book "Intellectuals and Society". We will then look at its propagandistic function within conservative circles.

Thomas Sowell is highly critical of intellectuals, particularly those he refers to as "intellectuals who have no direct responsibility for the consequences of their ideas." In his book Intellectuals and Society, he argues that many intellectuals—especially in academia, media, and policymaking—tend to prioritize abstract theories over practical outcomes, often promoting policies that sound good in theory but fail in practice. Sowell has a few main points. First, there is a lack of accountability. Sowell believes that intellectuals operate in a sphere where they are rarely held accountable for the real-world impact of their ideas. Unlike engineers or doctors, who face immediate consequences if their work fails, intellectuals can propose flawed policies without personal repercussions. Second, he critisizes the overestimation of expertise. He argues that intellectuals often assume that their intelligence in one field grants them authority in others, leading to misguided social and economic policies. Third, Sowell argues that "intellectuals disregard empirical evidence". Quite a bold claim. Sowell criticizes intellectuals for focusing more on ideology than on empirical evidence, often ignoring historical data that contradicts their theories. Lastly, he asserts intellectuals prefer social engineering and are elitist. He contends that intellectuals frequently advocate for top-down social engineering, believing that society should be reshaped according to their vision rather than allowing organic, decentralized processes to unfold.

Now, if you have any awareness of major conservative talking points, this should ring a bell. Sowell's points here aren't necessarily absurd; he's clearly referring to a subset of "intellectuals" of a certain type. But you can see how this feeds into narratives about "centralized planning" and "free markets"; and how this fits into broader talking points of conservatives that attempt to justify market fundamentalism. But this really is just a strawman. Many economists are aware of the problems with centralized planning (See In Soviet Union, Optimization Problem Solves You), but nevertheless recognize the role for some form of coordination mechanics from governing agencies. This is not really even discussed anymore in economics. But Sowell is very fucking old, and as mentioned earlier, has not evolved with the discipline. Sowell isn't "anti-intellectual" per-se, rather he has a deep skepticism toward the unnamed and un-identified "intellectuals" who prioritize "abstract theory" over "practical reality". I think it should be rather obvious why this is so irritating; Sowell thinks he is "just looking at the facts", but fails to realize he's internalized a plethora of theoretical commitments that guide his analysis and interpretation of "the facts". Many economists are theorists; this is necessary, empirical work is intrinsically connected to a set of theoretical commitments.

Many of the criticisms Sowell levels at intellectuals could, in turn, be applied to him. His strong advocacy for free markets and his skepticism of government intervention often align with what some critics would call market fundamentalism—the belief that markets are inherently self-correcting and that government interference tends to do more harm than good. This position, while influential in economic and policy circles, is not universally supported by empirical data, and some would argue that Sowell himself falls into the same intellectual traps he critiques.

Sowell often paints intellectuals with a broad brush, implying that they are almost always wrong when proposing state intervention. However, history provides examples of successful government interventions (e.g., the post-World War II economic boom, the success of state-driven industrial policies in East Asia, the New Deal’s role in stabilizing the U.S. economy). He dismisses Keynesian economics and state intervention without fully engaging with the nuanced empirical evidence that suggests markets are not always efficient or self-correcting. If intellectuals should be held accountable for their influence on policy, the same should apply to free-market economists. Deregulation, financial liberalization, and austerity—policies championed by many market-oriented economists—have led to significant economic crises (e.g., the 2008 financial crisis, which resulted from excessive deregulation of financial markets). Sowell does not seem to acknowledge how free-market policies can produce failures just as much as government intervention can. In other words, zero accountability for his unexamined theoretical commitments. Furthermore, Neoclassical economics, which heavily informs Sowell’s work, is often criticized for being overly theoretical and detached from real-world complexities. While it relies on mathematical models, many of these models assume perfect competition, rational agents, and equilibrium dynamics that do not always hold in reality. His mentor and advisor, Milton Friedman, famously asserted that economists should model economies "as-if" rather than "as-is"; something that can easily be construed as radically detached from reality. Heterodox economists (such as institutional, post-Keynesian, and behavioral economists) argue that neoclassical frameworks ignore issues like power dynamics, irrational behavior, and structural inequalities; again, a consequence of unexamined theoretical commitments. He literally just assumes markets are naturally self-regulating, without adequately addressing how institutions and historical legacies often shape market outcomes in ways that contradict classical economic assumptions.

So in other words, Tom Sowell is a great example of the pot calling the kettle black; which is why I find his position on intellectuals so amusing. He is quite frankly, ideologically capture and merely uses the term "intellectual" as a catch-all criticism for anyone who disagrees with his assumptions. These assumptions are very often not empirically supported; quite ironic to claim these detractors to be uninterested in empirical evidence. It's just funny to me. But there is a broader problem. Sowell obviously uses the term in a derogatory way. But this obviously extends into the visceral anti-intellectualism in conservative circles, and honestly more broadly in American culture. Regardless of any nuance Sowell might have in his arguments; they are nevertheless used for quite different purposes. In public discourse, the term is used as a tar-and-feather to dismiss criticism, and honestly mainly to discourage critical thinking. Labeling someone as an "intellectual" means they're unconcerned with reality, corrupt, elitist, and just want to control you. Quite an amazing fear mongering tactic.

Sowell’s work is often used by conservatives to justify free-market absolutism, even when historical and empirical evidence contradicts his claims. His broad dismissal of government intervention and redistribution often aligns with ideological preferences rather than rigorous economic analysis, making his position susceptible to the same flaws he criticizes in others. While he criticizes intellectuals for being detached from real-world consequences, he does not acknowledge that free-market policies he supports have sometimes led to crises (e.g., deregulation’s role in the 2008 financial collapse). While he condemns left-wing intellectuals for pushing failed social programs, he rarely applies the same scrutiny to right-wing economic policies that have produced negative outcomes. For example, trickle-down economics and extreme tax cuts for the wealthy (as seen in the Reagan and Bush administrations) have consistently failed to produce promised growth, yet Sowell defends market solutions as inherently superior. Sowell often highlights failures of government intervention while ignoring market failures or cases where regulation and state involvement were successful. He frequently dismisses Keynesian economics, despite substantial evidence that countercyclical government spending has stabilized economies during downturns. His arguments against affirmative action and welfare programs often focus on specific negative cases while overlooking broader positive impacts. In other words, he literally cherry picks data. This is what I mentioned earlier, he is "concerned with the data", a nice sounding motto, but frequently violates principled data analysis for strategic and ideologically motivated purposes. What's worse, is Conservative policymakers and media figures frequently cite Sowell’s work to justify privatization, deregulation, and austerity, even when these policies have failed in practice. His arguments often reduce complex social and economic problems to personal responsibility, ignoring structural and historical factors (such as racial wealth gaps or labor exploitation); something consistent with the evangelical community who idolize him.

"Experts" at think tanks, like Sowell, are there to justify policy; to give a policy the veneer of legitimacy which justifies enacting the policy. It's quite ironic that Sowell criticizes the overreliance or over-trust of intellectuals, when his literal position at a think-tank is to provide "expert justification" for political policy. The irony literally fucking kills me. He is the "expert" disconnected from the effects of his "abstract theories" which he so heavily criticizes. The phrase "every accusation is an admission" seems quite pertinent here. His mentor Milton Friedman, directly influenced the the Chicago Boys, a group of Chilean economists who were educated at University of Chicago under Milton Friedman, who advised the brutal dictator Pinochet to implement Shock Therapy, which literally has consequences to this very day. This ideology, not by coincidence, is the driving force behind Argentina's economic reforms. It was also the major economic doctrine implemented in post-soviet states like Russia, which paved the way for the Russian Oligarchs to seize resources. Sowell fails to realize that he is the the very thing he's criticizing; intellectuals who have zero accountability for the effects of their "intellectualizing". He is unaffected by the success or failure of these policy regimes. He has zero accountability of it fails.

These anti-intellectual arguments are self-defeating and hypocritical. Nonetheless, it does not stop people from propagating them. As mentioned earlier, framing your opponent as "overly intellectual" is a rhetorical tactic: their claims are framed as detached, impractical, or elitist before anyone hears any evidence. It's a delegitimization tactic that acts more or less as a thought-terminating cliche. First, poison the well. Label the other side “ideologues” so their data and methods look biased a priori; your own commitments go unexamined. Next, turn “ideology” from “a framework of ideas (which everyone has)” into “dogmatism,” and “intellectual” from “someone who reasons with evidence” into “out-of-touch elite.” Finally, cast “common sense” and “practical people” as morally superior to “the Ivory Tower,” shifting debate from facts to identity and loyalty. Here are the spreading dynamics:

Message pipeline: Think tank talking points → op-eds/TV hits → politician sound bites → social clips/memes → local talk radio & newsletters → repeated in community spaces.
Contrarian credentialing: A small set of “house experts” provide quotes that appear to rebut mainstream scholarship, giving journalists “both sides” and creating false balance. This is the think-tank dynamic.
Anecdote beats aggregate: Vivid stories (a failed program, a silly academic paper) travel farther than datasets, reinforcing the frame that “experts are clueless.” In the context of economics, people will highlight the soviet union, showing how the "experts" are left-wing and therefore their policy prescriptions will lead to that outcome.
Algorithmic boost: Short, moralized content (“out-of-touch elites want…”) is optimized for shares; platform design rewards outrage and identity signaling.
Astroturf & echo effects: Front groups and influencer networks recycle the same phrases, making the frame feel ubiquitous (“everyone knows these eggheads are ideological”).
Crisis piggybacking: After any policy failure, the narrative is ready-made: “See? Experts did this.”

This is very effective as a propaganda method. It exploits our cognitive resource scarcity. Simple heuristics (“use common sense”) beat complex explanations under time/attention constraints. It's just "common sense" that free markets are the best. Any form of critical thinking is met with in-group suspicion. Accepting an expert claim can threaten group identity. I think this was quite fucking obvious during the pandemic. There is a moral aspect to this as well. Calling something “ideological” signals you’re pragmatic and neutral—even while advancing your own ideology. Lastly, its very ambiguous, which is beneficial for propaganda. The smear is non-specific. It sticks without needing to engage in any argument.

The effects of this propaganda are obvious. Trust in universities, journals, and public data erodes; conspiracy and “DIY expertise” fill the gap. Evidence-based proposals get stalled as “ideological,” while deregulatory or culture-war moves slide through under the banner of “common sense.” Complex, redistributive, or long-horizon policies are pre-framed as elite social engineering, narrowing viable options. When market-first or austerity policies fail, blame returns to “intellectuals,” not to the framers’ own commitments. This is quite common with market fundamentalists. If the policy fails, it must have been because of some intervening government. It's entirely unfalsifiable.

Misrepresenting Thinkers: Adam Smith on Regulation

The act of misrepresenting a thinker has been a significantly potent method of propaganda. This typically happens when the thinker being misrepresented is influential or authoritatively significant in some respect. The misrepresentation is used to legitimize whatever the speaker is trying to advance; so on this view it acts as a fallacious appeal to authority. It really is the combination of multiple fallacious strategies; including quoting out of context, The Tobacco Industry Playbook, and False Attribution. Consider for example, people who assert that Albert Einstein believed in God. This is typically done within the context of people arguing that science somehow depends on religion, or intelligent people believe in God therefore you are justified in believing it. But obviously on closer inspection, Einstein didn't believe in a traditional theistic God, but as a naturalistic Spinozan God that is the sum total of natural forces; no prayer answering, no miracles, no divine intervention. This does not stop the misrepresentation from proliferating among certain echo chambers. It's a minimal example, but nevertheless has some force that contributes to reinforcing theistic belief.

Some misrepresentations form the backbone for entire policy programs. This brings me to the topic of this section. Adam Smith is known as the "Father of Modern Economics". Many people take this to mean he has some form of legitimacy among academic or practicing economists. This is not the case; his influence is much more removed than many would assume. Most undergrad and even graduate students in economics departments will not have read "The Wealth of Nations" or "The Theory of Moral Sentiments" unless they are specializing in the history of economic thought, which most do not. This is mainly because Adam Smith was writing at a time where economics was still classified as "Political Economy"; he was more involved in moral philosophy than anything recognized in modern economic curriculum. He is significant in that he represented a radical break from Mercantile orthodox views of economic exchange and inspired subsequent generations of thinkers. He was also a major thinker in the Scottish Enlightenment, so in that sense he not only influenced views on economics but more broadly secular governance. I bring this up not to downplay his significance, but to put him in the correct context. He is not influential in the sense that Robert Solow, Kenneth Arrow, or Eugene Fama are influential. The latter three economists literally form the backbone for a significant portion of economic methodology, which directly impacts policy. Rather, he is influential in the sense that any philosopher is influential; much broader in scope and less connected to immediate concrete realities. In economics departments, no one goes around quoting Adam Smith in the same way no one goes around quoting Galileo or Kepler in physics departments. Economists don't value Smith as an immediate authority on anything, but he nevertheless played a role in the development of the discipline. The public however, does not understand this. When they hear someone quoting the "Father of Economics", this is significantly more persuasive to them than a direct quote from living economists with massive significance in academia. Very often, these quotes misrepresent or misinterpret the actual views of Adam Smith, and give legitimacy to the ridiculous policy agendas by the people doing the misrepresentation. Often, it's market fundamentalist policy hacks at places like Heritage Foundation and Adam Smith Institute; obviously using Smith to legitimize deregulation. A closer inspection of Smiths writings reveals a quite different picture than what's painted by think tanks.

Adam Smith’s views on regulation, financial systems, and the role of government are more complex than the often simplistic portrayal of him as a pure free-market advocate. While he strongly favored free markets and competition, he also recognized the need for government intervention in specific areas to prevent market failures, promote fairness, and ensure long-term stability. His ideas around free markets were a precursor to ideas about self-organization and decentralized decision making; that the causes of wealthy nations were a function of this social structure, and that markets as an institution facilitated this wealth creation. They were not motivated by the common misunderstanding that he someone believed free markets were essential for democratic freedoms, an idea that I personally think has been absolutely detrimental.

Smith outlined three fundamental duties of government in The Wealth of Nations. First, they provide defense. The government must protect the country from external threats, as national security is a public good that private markets cannot provide effectively. Second, they provide a system of justice. A well-functioning economy depends on the enforcement of contracts, protection of private property, and legal mechanisms to resolve disputes. Third, they provide public works and institutions. The government should provide infrastructure (roads, bridges, canals) and institutions (schools, basic education) when the private sector lacks incentives to invest in them. These responsibilities establish Smith’s belief in limited but essential government intervention, ensuring that markets function efficiently and fairly.

Smith recognized the dangers of financial speculation and instability. While he believed in market efficiency, he also saw the need for regulatory safeguards in banking and finance. Smith offered plenty of warnings on banking and credit. He criticized banks for overextending credit, as it could lead to economic instability. He supported usury laws, which placed caps on interest rates to prevent predatory lending and financial crises. He believed in restricting the issuance of small-denomination banknotes, arguing that excessive printing of paper money without sufficient backing could cause inflation and economic collapse. Smith saw banks as essential institutions that facilitated trade and investment. However, he warned against reckless lending, particularly speculative investments that could destabilize economies. He acknowledged that government regulation in banking was necessary to prevent banks from acting in ways that could harm society. Smith’s ideas anticipated modern debates on financial crises and the regulation of banks to prevent excessive risk-taking.

Although Smith was a champion of free markets, he acknowledged that markets do not always function perfectly. He identified several key failures where government intervention was justified:

Monopolies and Anti-Competitive Behavior: Smith was strongly opposed to monopolies and their ability to manipulate markets. He criticized the British East India Company, which had a government-sanctioned monopoly on trade in India, as an example of how monopolies led to inefficiency, corruption, and consumer harm. He believed the government should intervene to break monopolies and ensure fair competition.
Moral Hazards and Financial Speculation: Smith warned against reckless speculation, particularly in finance, as it could destabilize the economy. He was concerned about moral hazards, where individuals or businesses take excessive risks knowing they will not bear the full consequences.
Fraud and Corruption: Smith believed that government regulations were necessary to prevent fraud in commerce and finance. He was aware that businesses, if left unchecked, might exploit consumers, workers, or investors.

People often contrast Smith with Marx; but Smith was writing against his contemporaries. Smith was a fierce critic of mercantilism, the dominant economic system of his time, which promoted heavy government control over trade, protectionist tariffs, and state-sponsored monopolies.

Free Trade vs. Mercantilism: Mercantilist policies focused on accumulating gold and silver through trade restrictions, which Smith saw as misguided. He argued that free trade benefits all nations by allowing each country to specialize in the goods it produces most efficiently (an early form of comparative advantage). He criticized tariffs and trade restrictions, arguing that they led to inefficiency and higher prices for consumers.
The "Invisible Hand": Smith introduced the idea that self-interest, when channeled through competitive markets, leads to the best economic outcomes. However, he did not argue that markets always regulate themselves perfectly—he acknowledged areas where government intervention was necessary. If you don't read Theory of Moral sentiments, you'd be mistaken in thinking he was some advocate of dog-eat-dog capitalism.

Smith was not against government spending but believed it should be used efficiently for essential services like infrastructure, education, and security. He warned against excessive government debt, fearing it could burden future generations. But Smith also supported progressive taxation, the idea that those with greater wealth should contribute more to society. Smith praised the British tax system. Completely contrasting the modern neoliberal nonsense. He outlined four principles of good taxation:

Equity – Taxes should be proportional to an individual’s ability to pay.
Certainty – The tax system should be predictable and transparent.
Convenience – Taxes should be collected in a way that minimizes burden on taxpayers.
Efficiency – Taxes should not discourage productive economic activity.

This couldn't be farther from the modern conservative position that taxation is theft. But if we need even more evidence of the divergence from Smith and his current champions, consider his views on labor, wages, and inequality. Smith recognized the power imbalance between employers and workers. He noted that employers often colluded to keep wages low, while workers had fewer means to negotiate better conditions. He believed that higher wages improve productivity and social stability and that wages should be sufficient to cover subsistence; in other words, it is good economics for employers to pay their workers sufficient wages. Smith did not argue for absolute economic equality but believed in providing opportunities for upward mobility, mainly in the form of education for the poor as a way to improve economic conditions. Smith also warned that excessive inequality could destabilize society; arguing that the rate of profit is not correlated necessarily with the rise in prosperity of society, and that there's a risk of regulatory capture and rent seeking when inequality becomes exacerbated. He saw it as a symptom of market distortion and a cause of moral corruption, which undermines the flourishing of a prosperous society. This derives from his arguments in The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Generally, in terms of governance, Smith did not call for a completely laissez-faire system but rather a balanced approach, where government steps in when necessary to ensure fairness, competition, and stability.

Adam Smith’s economic philosophy was not about unrestricted capitalism but about creating a system where competition, fairness, and stability coexist. He supported free markets, but with safeguards against monopolies, speculation, and fraud. Smith recognized the role of government in providing public goods, regulating industry, and ensuring a just legal system. He believed in progressive taxation and public spending within reason. He supported fair wages and opportunities for the poor, recognizing the risks of inequality. If you've never read smith, or have only heard of Smith through propaganda outlets, you'd probably be surprised to be reading this.

A similar thinker who is largely misrepresented is Friedrich Hayek. He is yet another thinker that is misattributed the beliefs of extreme market fundamentalism and complete laisse-faire economies. In reality, he acknowledged a limited but essential role for government, contrary to the way his work was later interpreted—particularly in the Reader’s Digest abridged version, which omitted key passages about the role of government. While Hayek is often associated with free-market libertarianism, he was not an anarcho-capitalist. In The Road to Serfdom, he argued that centralized economic planning leads to totalitarianism, government should not control prices, production, or the means of production because this inevitably leads to coercion, and democratic institutions and personal freedom are threatened by excessive state control over the economy. You might think this is a case closed; Hayek was a market fundamentalist. You'd be mistaken, Hayek explicitly wrote that the government should provide a safety net for the poor. He supported programs like social insurance, stating that "there is no reason why, in a society that has reached the general level of wealth ours has attained, the first kind of security should not be guaranteed to all." Similarly, he argued that public goods such as roads and infrastructure require state involvement. He understood that some goods and services would not be adequately provided by the free market alone. Similar to Smith, he also argues that regulations against monopolies and fraud are necessary. Hayek acknowledged that unregulated capitalism could lead to monopolistic structures that distort markets and harm consumers. Contrast these statements with the massive political agenda to de-regulate absolutely everything and it becomes obvious "free market advocates" were far from free market fundamentalists.

A little bit of history is of note with regard to Hayek. After his book was published, Reader’s Digest released an abridged version that became widely circulated, particularly among right-wing conservatives in the U.S.. This version cut out many of Hayek’s discussions on the legitimate roles of government, making it seem as if he advocated for absolute free-market fundamentalism. As a result, many conservatives in the U.S., especially in the mid-20th century, mistakenly believed Hayek was against all government intervention, when in reality, he supported a limited but active government in areas like welfare, public goods, and anti-monopoly regulation. This misrepresentation propagated during the 80's, reaching figures like Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, which directly contributed to the political narrative of that day, and still is with us today (albeit, even more distorted and twisted). Hayek later clarified and stressed that his opposition was to centralized planning, and not all forms of government intervention. In The Constitution of Liberty (1960), he reaffirmed the importance of a legal framework to ensure fair competition and the role of government in preventing extreme poverty. He also distanced himself from anarcho-capitalists, recognizing that markets need legal structures to function properly. This is in direct contradiction to people like Javier Milei and other advocates of austerity and shock programs. Everything I am claiming here is well documented in Naomi Oreskes book "The Big Myth: How American Business Taught Us to Loathe Government and Love the Free Market". The abridged version of The Road to Serfdom omitted Hayek's nuanced views, leading to a distorted understanding among many conservatives.

As I mentioned earlier, modern economists don't rely on arguments from thinkers like Hayek or Smith directly. Direct quotes are simply insignificant. These thinkers nevertheless have sway in political contexts in which people use their writings to justify some sort of political ideology. Austrian economists for example, are more or less not present in academia. Instead, they exist at think tanks that have direct access to politicians and massive media outlets to propagate misrepresented views of Hayek, under the guise that "they are legit economists". These misreadings don't spread by accident. There’s a pretty standard playbook for turning a nuanced text into a slogan, laundering it through “expertise,” and piping it to TV studios and the West Wing. Here is a step-by-step pipeline of how the machinery works:

Selective simplification: Start with a long, careful book or report; extract the emotionally potent parts and drop the caveats. Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom was famously condensed for Reader’s Digest (April 1945) and then turned into a comic-style “Cartoons” version in Look magazine—later reprinted as a General Motors pamphlet. Those versions massively increased reach and emphasis while shaving off nuance. Historian Bruce Caldwell notes that the Digest condensation omitted Hayek’s explicit insistence that he wasn’t describing an “inevitable” slide to tyranny and italicized a much starker line about socialism and Nazism, thereby shifting tone and inference. Meanwhile, the Look “Cartoons” were packaged by GM for broad distribution. Nuance wasn’t entirely erased: the well-known passage where Hayek endorses a state-organized system of social insurance appears even in the condensed text. But emphasis changed, and caveats were easy to miss in a 10-page excerpt or a cartoon strip.
Reframing with message discipline: Next comes language engineering—turn complex debates into friendly phrases and “talking points.” GOP pollster Frank Luntz’s 2002 memo advised downplaying “global warming” in favor of “climate change” and, crucially, to keep scientific uncertainty front-and-center. This is classic “manufacture doubt” framing that later reappears across think-tank briefs and interviews.
Credentialing through “white coat” authority: Produce glossy “white papers,” “backgrounders,” and even full “reports” that look peer-reviewish but are aimed at media and staffers. On climate, the Heartland Institute’s NIPCC reports were designed to mimic the IPCC’s authority while promoting contrarian claims; science organizations have documented how these reports look the part while failing credibility tests.
Amplification in mass media: Comms teams pitch op-eds, place experts on cable news, and flood reporters with quotes and ready-to-use charts. This works: randomized experiments show op-eds measurably shift attitudes among both the public and policy elites. Media outlets also routinely index “expert” citations from think tanks, which keeps these brands perpetually in the news stream.
Packaging for policymakers: At the governing interface, ideas arrive as executive playbooks, one-pagers, and hearing testimony. A prototypical case is Heritage’s Mandate for Leadership series—thousands of pages of agency-by-agency recommendations shepherded to incoming administrations since 1981; Reagan literally handed copies to his Cabinet, and many authors were recruited into government. Today’s editions continue that model.
Policy “plumbing” in the states: Parallel networks convert briefs to bill text. ALEC (a legislator–industry forum) circulates model legislation that shows up—often verbatim—in statehouses. Analyses describe how this quiet pipeline gets complex changes passed with minimal scrutiny.
Build feedback loops and indexes: Think tanks mint their own indices (e.g., “economic freedom”) that reduce multi-variable realities to a single score—perfect for headlines and talking points. Critics have flagged methodological and framing issues, but as media devices they’re extremely sticky; especially in a world where Brandolini's Law (The bullshit asymmetry principle) is true.
Funded echo systems: Donor networks, foundations, and advocacy groups finance overlapping entities—academic centers, litigation shops, comms outfits—that quote and cite one another, creating the appearance of broad consensus (“citation loops”). Scholarship has mapped those networks in detail across U.S. politics, especially on the right.
Availability cascades: Repeat a simplified claim across many outlets and “experts” and it becomes the thing people can most easily recall—therefore the thing they believe. Political scientists call this an availability cascade; think-tank media operations are designed to spark them.

As mentioned earlier, various tactics enable this such as quote-mining, authority mimicry (NIPCC vs IPCC), language pivots that reorient the discussion, templated "bills" for politicians, and doubt manufacturing. Obviously, it's difficult to consume a 500 page book; it's simply easier to engage with these shortened version. These institutions exploit our cognitive scarcity and ambiguity aversion by propagating these misrepresentations. It fits into a larger issue with reporting in general. Reporters need quotable experts on deadline; staffers need ready-to-file language; administrations need thick transition binders. Think tanks are built to supply that on demand. Over time they become “boundary organizations” straddling academia, media, and politics. The issue of misrepresentation is inherently connected to the institutional structure of media and the way governance is done. Think tanks fill a niche; and have massive influence on the general public.

Tying this back to the original objective of this post, many arguments for market fundamentalist style policies are simply not grounded in our modern understanding of economics. They rely on misrepresentation of thinkers and pseudo-authority for the arguments to seem persuasive. That's why I think this class of arguments are just obviously fundamentally flawed. Therefore, their proliferation needs explaining, and I think this is done by looking at how people deliberately misrepresent and propagate these misrepresentation for purposes much larger than mere intellectual curiosity.

Overextending a Concept: Vilfredo Pareto

Concept creep is the phenomena where concepts or conceptual frameworks are overextended to include entities or topics that weren't originally envisaged to be included under the concept. It also denotes the misapplication of the concept in inappropriate ways. This term originally comes from the observation that psychoanalytic concepts tend to be susceptible to expansive interpretation; words like "gaslighting" for example. I think many terms from economics suffer from this as well. In this section, I'll be making the case that fundamental concepts initially postulated by Italian polymath Vilfredo Pareto tend to be overextended and exploited, that this exploitation is easily identifiable and refutable, and that despite the obvious misuse, the concept creep plays an essential propagandistic function.

Vilfredo Pareto was an Italian engineer, economist, and sociologist known for his contributions to economic theory, social sciences, and political philosophy. His work laid the foundation for modern microeconomics, particularly in the study of income distribution, market efficiency, and social dynamics. He's known for a variety of concepts including Pareto Efficiency, the Circulation of Elites, critiques of democracy, and "The Pareto Principle", which will be the topic of this section. Pareto observed that in many natural and social systems, a small percentage of causes often accounts for a large percentage of effects. This insight led to the Pareto Principle, commonly known as the 80/20 Rule, which states that approximately 80% of outcomes come from 20% of causes. For example, 80% of wealth may be held by 20% of a population and 80% of work is often done by 20% of employees. In his analysis of income distribution, Pareto discovered that wealth follows a power-law distribution, meaning that a small percentage of people control most of the wealth in society. Pareto's research on income distribution suggested that wealth inequality is a natural and recurring phenomenon, following a consistent mathematical pattern across different societies and historical periods.

I don't think I need to explain how his conclusions are quite seductive to those with political ideologies that justify economic dominance, inequality, and anti-redistribution policies. In other words, these results fit quite nicely with conservative ideology. So naturally, we find bastardized misapplications and misunderstandings of Pareto's results in conservative echo chambers. You will often hear justifications for economic hierarchies directly using the 80/20 principle or implicitly assuming it to be some inescapable fact of reality. But this misunderstanding couldn't be farther from the correct interpretation of Pareto's results. Let's unpack this in detail.

First, it confuses correlation with a fixed law. People often assume that the 80/20 ratio is some universal fixed law that applies exactly to every scenario. In reality, the 80/20 rule is an observation about power-law distributions and not an exact mathematical formula. In some cases, the ratio may be 90/10, 70/30, or even 95/5. The key idea is that a small portion of inputs often lead to a disproportionately large share of outputs, but the specific numbers can vary. This isn't the main crux of the problem, I just think it's worth noting that power law distributions do not need to result in 80/20. This is because power law distributions are governed by underlying data generating processes which generate the observed results. Different data generating processes can result in entirely different distributions. In other words, Pareto doesn't provide is with the causal mechanisms that generate the observed data. This is crucial for understanding some of the next points I will make later.

The second point is that many people wrongly conclude that the bottom 80% is irrelevant or should be eliminated. The fact that 20% of inputs generate 80% of outcomes does not mean the other 80% is worthless. It may still contribute in essential ways that are not immediately visible. In a company, 80% of revenue might come from 20% of clients, but the remaining 80% of clients could ensure market stability, brand reputation, or future growth. In a team, 20% of employees might generate 80% of results, but the other employees may provide essential support functions that allow the top performers to excel. I think this is certainly true for professions like DevOps engineering who do not directly generate revenue but nonetheless provide essential functions that enable the possibility for sales people to scale up their connections, leads, and executions. This is important because misunderstanding Pareto's conclusions might lead say, a business manager, to underinvest in non-direct mechanisms that nonetheless have a significant impact on the direct profit generating mechanisms. So in other words, the 80/20 rule tells us nothing about the underlying system dynamics that lead to the observations. It tells us nothing about the system structure that produces said measures. Distributions describe outcomes, not causes.

My third point is that people misuse Pareto's observations on wealth distribution to argue that economic inequality is natural, inevitable, or even desirable. Pareto’s wealth distribution finding describes what happens under certain conditions, it does not imply that extreme wealth concentration is good or should not be addressed. Some argue that because 20% of people control 80% of wealth, redistribution efforts are futile. However, wealth inequality is often shaped by policy, access to education, systemic advantages, and historical injustices, not just natural economic laws. Incidentally, many who misuse Pareto's results are likely to be unacquainted with the research conducted by modern economists who study these factors contributing to the observed discrepancies in outcome. There is a large body of literature that finds that massive inequality is not inevitable; that it's a function of underlying dynamics. Some economists also find that massive inequality can lead to structural instability, similar to how imbalances in biological systems or ecosystems can lead to problems.

My last point is that people often assume it explains everything. While the Pareto Principle is useful, not everything follows an 80/20 distribution. Many processes in science, psychology, and nature do not conform to power laws. For example, you can’t assume 20% of workouts will give you 80% of results, sometimes consistency matters more than intensity. And yet, it's not too unlikely to come across some health regimen or workout routine where someone justifies it by implicitly referencing the Pareto Principle.

Power-law distributions like those described by Pareto are descriptive, not prescriptive; they tell us what is happening in a system but do not inherently explain why it happens or whether it is a stable, universal truth. Many people mistakenly assume that power laws, such as Pareto's wealth distribution, represent a fixed, natural order, as if they are immutable laws of nature. However, these distributions arise from specific underlying mechanisms and can change if those mechanisms change. While Pareto observed that wealth often follows a power-law pattern, this is not an intrinsic or inevitable outcome of human society. It results from historical, social, and economic structures such as property rights, political institutions, market structures, inheritance laws, and access to capital and education. If you change these factors, the resulting distribution might look entirely different. Historical fluctuations in the distribution prove that it's not an eternal law, but the result of changing social and economic dynamics.

Power laws depend on the data generating process (DGP). They do not explain causality, the describe a statistical relationship between variables, but do not tell us why that relationship exists. For example, why do 20% of people control 80% of wealth? Could it be because of natural talent, effort, and merit, as conservatives frequently assume? Or is it because of historical privilege, monopolistic practices, and inherited advantages? Is it disrupted by technological shifts and revolutions? Take another example, why do only a few products tend to dominate market sales? Is it because of their superiority or because of network effects, brand dominance, and marketing power? Thinking of the Pareto Principle as an immutable rule is misleading, often deliberately. That is because many power-law distributions exist only under certain conditions and can collapse when those conditions shift. Such shifting conditions are threatening to those controlling the wealth. We often see massive pushback in markets for example, when new competitors have a disruptive technology that could undermine the market power of incumbents. The 20% who are entrenched in the system will frequently engage in some sort of anti-competitive behavior like rent seeking to avoid losing market power. Similarly, social movements and policy interventions that tackle extreme wealth concentration are opposed for the same reasons. Policies like progressive taxation, universal education, and wealth redistribution can break Pareto-like wealth concentration. So, take the New Deal for example; corporations massively pushed back, ironically using the same propaganda I am referencing right now, to justify anti-redistribution policies. So if we focus only on describing power laws instead of understanding their causes, we risk treating inequality and imbalance as inevitable rather than as problems that can be addressed. This is quite favorable to those in power. If we passively accept these distributions as "just the way things are", we overlook the root causes and overlook interventions that could change the underlying DGP.

It's quite ironic to me, that the very people misusing this concept, often at least implicitly acknowledge these facts. Through their behavior in the political and economic sphere, we can often see that the policies they support and legal agendas they advance, are done to avoid probing into the causal mechanisms that result in the power law distribution. Another important aspect often implicitly understood is the role of economic networks in determining economic outcomes. Power laws often emerge from underlying network structures, but these structures are frequently assumed rather than explicitly analyzed, leading to oversimplified interpretations of power-law distributions. Many real-world phenomena that follow power laws—like wealth distribution, internet traffic, or social influence—are actually manifestations of complex network dynamics. Many power-law distributions do not exist in isolation but arise because of how nodes (people, companies, web pages, etc.) interact within a network. Some of the key network structures that give rise to power laws include preferential attachment model, small world networks, and hierarchical network structures. Because many assume power-law distributions arise naturally, they often overlook the network mechanisms that sustain them. This results in absurd misinterpretations such as:

Wealth distribution is “natural” → No, it emerges from financial, political, and economic networks that control access to capital, education, and opportunities.
Social media influence is purely meritocratic → No, network effects and algorithmic amplification favor early adopters and highly connected individuals.
Scientific citations reflect pure intellectual merit → No, existing networks (institutional prestige, collaboration circles, and journal visibility) shape citation patterns.

If power laws arise from network structures, then modifying the network can disrupt or alter the distribution. For example, large tech companies that dominate because of network effects can be targeting with anti-monopoly interventions that alter the underlying network structure, breaking the power-law concentration. Let's consider another example. In highly unequal societies, elite schools, professional networks, and capital access create a “closed” economic network that perpetuates power-law wealth concentration. Expanding access to education, financial services, and mentorship programs modifies the network, potentially weakening power-law distributions in wealth. It should be obvious that much of the pushback to policies targeting network structure are often the result of people understanding that "their network is their net worth", not the result of inherent skill, merit, or talent. Expanding access to education, financial services, and mentorship programs modifies the network, potentially weakening power-law distributions in wealth. Many real-world systems are shaped by preferential attachment, feedback loops, and structural hierarchies, which drive power-law distributions. Assuming power laws as eternal or universal ignores the role of system design, historical context, and underlying causal mechanisms.

Very often, people will often misunderstand and exploit the notion of efficiency to undermine redistributive policies. Opponents of redistribution will claim that government intervention will "distort" the economy, leading to inefficient outcomes. This is absurd. Anyone with an understanding of economics would understand that this is nothing but market fundamentalist ideology. While it is true government intervention can introduce distortions, it is not true that every intervention will cause distortions. Many people do not understand the way economists understand the concept of "efficiency". Again, ironically, those quoting Pareto often have no familiarity with the rest of his work; especially when it comes to efficiency. Pareto optimality (or Pareto efficiency) is a fundamental concept in economics and decision theory, describing a situation where resources are allocated in such a way that no individual can be made better off without making someone else worse off. However, Pareto optimality relies on several key assumptions, many of which are often unrealistic in real-world settings. For example, it is assumed that economic agents have complete and well defined preferences. But in reality, this is consistently violated. Pareto optimality also assumes there are no market externalities; meaning all costs and benefits of an economic decision are fully accounted for by the decision-makers. Each individual's consumption or production does not impose unintended costs or benefits on others. Again, this is obviously violated, markets are full of externalities. It also assumes perfect competition (no market power), but obviously this is violated with the existence of monopolies and information asymmetry. It also assumes no transaction costs such as search costs, bargaining costs, and enforcement costs. Again, often violated. Another assumption is of voluntary trade and no coercion; but again very often in labor markets we observe power imbalances that do not reflect "choices" of individuals. I can go on and on, the point is that markets are not Pareto Optimal and hence, are inefficient in an economic sense. Government interventions can often increase efficiency. But even if these assumptions held and the American economy were Pareto efficient, it's an incredibly weak social criterion. It does not guarantee equity or fairness, a society where a billionaire has everything and millions starve can still be Pareto efficient (since redistributing resources would make the billionaire “worse off”). slavery-based economy could be Pareto optimal if slave owners are happy and slaves cannot be made better off without harming the owners. A society consuming all its resources today in a way that leaves future generations with nothing can still be Pareto efficient. Arguing for the "inefficiency" or wealth redistribution is quite honestly absurd and narrow minded.

The existence of the Pareto Principle is strong evidence that the economy is not Pareto Efficient. In order for a DGP to produce a power law distribution, one or more of the assumptions required for Pareto efficiency must be violated. Power-law wealth and market structures contradict the assumptions of perfect competition. Market failures implied by the 80/20 rule prevent efficient resource allocation. Path dependency and preferential attachment prevent competitive equilibrium from being reached. Pareto efficiency assumes everyone can participate, but the 80/20 rule suggests mass exclusion. In other words, policies intervening on this DGP are certainly justified because the current distribution is certainly not efficient in the economic sense and is far from socially desirable.

In practice, a lot of “80/20” talk in conservative policy circles functions as a rhetorical shortcut: if a small minority “creates” most value, then policy should mainly serve that minority. Here is how it's usually brought up to justify policy:

Tax & capital policy: “The top ~20% of earners/investors generate ~80% of investment, jobs, philanthropy—so lower their taxes and lighten regulation to maximize growth.”
Deregulation & antitrust leniency: “Superstar firms account for most productivity; concentration is a natural 80/20 outcome—so don’t ‘distort’ markets by breaking up winners.”
Welfare/state capacity cuts: “80% of spending serves 20% of ‘problem cases’; cut the long tail and target only the most ‘efficient’ programs.”
Education & labor policy: “A small share of ‘star’ teachers/engineers drive most outcomes; emphasize merit sorting, weaken broad labor protections, and pour resources into the top.”
Criminal justice: “A small cohort commits most crimes; harsher incapacitation of the ‘persistent 20%’ improves public safety.”
Immigration: “A small slice of high-skill entrants creates outsized benefits; prioritize them over broad family or humanitarian flows.”

It should be obvious why these talking points are fundamentally flawed, given everything we have discussed so far. The 80/20 pattern is an empirical description of skew, not a moral claim or a policy rule. Jumping from “outputs are concentrated” to “therefore concentrate benefits at the top” is a classic misunderstanding of correlation versus causation. Power laws arise from specific data-generating processes (preferential attachment, network effects, institutional rules). If outsized success reflects network position, path dependence, or policy-created advantages, then amplifying the already-advantaged may entrench rents, not create efficiency. Conservative uses often smuggle in the claim that serving the top moves us toward “efficiency.” But the heavy-tail reality implied by 80/20 (market power, barriers to entry, informational asymmetries) violates the conditions under which Pareto efficiency is even defined (perfect competition, no externalities, etc.). You can’t cite 80/20 and claim competitive-market efficiency at the same time. From “20% account for 80% of output” it doesn’t follow that the other 80% are dispensable. Complex systems rely on complementarities: broad human capital, infrastructure, demand, and institutional stability. Remove the “long tail” and the top’s productivity often collapses. If skew is produced by platform economics, IP regimes, lobbying access, school and professional networks, then policy can redesign the network (antitrust, interoperability, open standards, public options, equal access to capital). Treating 80/20 as “just the way things are” erases the very levers policy controls that enable economic mobility. Favoring current “superstars” can suppress entry and experimentation, producing dynamic inefficiency (less innovation over time). Concentration may look efficient today and be stagnating tomorrow. Using 80/20 to cut the “long tail” of beneficiaries flips the logic of effective policy: the highest social returns often come from investing in the most disadvantaged (early childhood, preventive care, neighborhood amenities), precisely because of diminishing marginal returns at the top. The 80/20 story often moralizes outcomes as pure merit. But in heavy-tail settings, luck, timing, and accumulated advantage loom large. Policy that presumes desert risks rewarding rent extraction rather than value creation. Therefore, using the Pareto principle to justify policies that favor incumbents or the top percentile confuses a contingent statistical pattern with a universal efficiency claim. Once you account for network structure, market power, externalities, and the gap between 80/20 heuristics and Pareto efficiency, the argument collapses.

Now, I think the absurdity of arguments relying on the Pareto Principle should be clear. Unfortunately, talking points like this tend to persist outside of academic circles because "80/20" sounds mathematical and neutral. It's also very concise and easy to absorb by the general public who have little mathematical training. Two perfect attributes required for a message to be easily propagated; a pseudo-authoritative sound bite. It's also usually wrapped within "merit" based arguments which are quite appealing to a general audience: "they have all that wealth because they worked hard, you just want to give it to someone who is lazy and undeserving". Think-tanks and lobbyists port this meme into white papers: the heuristic becomes “evidence,” then “economics,” then “common sense.” Business books and slide decks generalize it to productivity, sales, and “life hacks.” It becomes inundated within the mind of the culture, not because of it's internal validity, but because of propagandistic mechanisms that deliberately simplify it, with the intent of normalizing it as a talking point so anti-redistributive policies can pass legislation easier. Here's how the propaganda typically looks:

assert heavy-tail facts (often cherry-picked): “20% of firms create 80% of jobs.”
moralize the 20%: call them “makers,” “innovators,” “job creators.”
conflate with efficiency: imply that aiding the 20% maximizes total welfare.
paint the tail as cost: portray the 80% as drag, bureaucracy, or “dependency.”
prescribe concentration-friendly policy: tax cuts at the top, deregulation, antitrust leniency, narrow means-testing, harsher policing of “high-risk” groups.
close the loop: resulting concentration deepens the heavy tail, which is cited next round as proof the policy “worked.”

This propaganda is used to give credibility to austerity policies, anti-antitrust laws, policies that redistribute funding away from public education, regressive tax policies, and even appears in anti-universal healthcare debates. It's used to treat users/beneficiaries of the tail of the distribution as waste, sucking up resources of the "deserving" and hardworking rich; ignoring all the complexities that give rise to the distribution. It demonizes redistribution, calling it "communist" or "anti-american" or "woke". The 80/20 rule is routinely conscripted to justify concentrating benefits and power. once you account for network structure, endowments, and the gulf between heavy-tail descriptives and true efficiency, that rhetorical edifice collapses.

Misrepresenting Opponents: Christian Forgery of Oracles

The Sibylline Oracles are a fascinating collection of prophetic writings that were not originally Christian but were later adapted, and in many cases, forged, by early Christian apologists to support Christian theology and legitimize the new faith in the context of Greco-Roman culture. The term originally referred to a body of pagan, Greco-Roman prophetic literature attributed to sibyls—female prophets believed to be divinely inspired. These texts were widely respected and circulated throughout the ancient Mediterranean world. The canonical Sibylline Books (kept in Rome) were distinct from the later Sibylline Oracles, which are the ones Christian writers reworked.

From the 2nd century CE onward, Christian writers began to forge or heavily rework Sibylline prophecies to serve apologetic purposes. These revised oracles were pseudepigraphic—written under the guise of earlier, non-Christian authorship. The goal was to provide apparent pre-Christian validation of Christian doctrine, demonstrate continuity between Christian teachings and ancient prophetic traditions, and compete with Jewish and pagan claims to prophetic authority. They used various methods of forgery and rewriting including:

Interpolation: Inserting Christian messages into existing Jewish or pagan Sibylline texts.
Pseudepigraphy: Creating wholly new "sibylline" texts in the voice of a pagan prophetess who mysteriously "predicts" Christian events.
Syncretism: Blending classical Greek imagery, Jewish eschatology, and Christian theology into a single prophetic voice.

Writers like Augustine and Lactantius cited these forgeries to argue that even pagan prophets foretold the coming of Christ, that Christianity fulfilled the ancient wisdom of both Jewish and pagan traditions, and that Christian doctrine wasn't a recent invention but part of a long-standing divine plan. This tactic made Christianity appear both ancient and universal, which helped it gain legitimacy in a culture that valued old, traditional wisdom.

Scholars have identified the Sibylline Oracles as Christian forgeries or redactions comes from careful historical, linguistic, and literary analysis. Scholars did not find a single “smoking gun,” but rather a cumulative case built from multiple lines of evidence. The most obvious giveaways are historical and theological anachronisms—statements that could not have been made by a pre-Christian or even early Jewish prophet. They have also identified the use of Christian vocabulary and theology, concepts that don't appear in Pagan or Jewish traditions. Scholars analyzing the Greek used in the oracles noticed stylistic inconsistencies; older strata using classical or Hellenistic Greek while later strata contain koine Greek, suggesting multiple stages of composition and tampering. Many passages in the oracles are clearly borrowed or paraphrased from known biblical sources; often direct copies from the New Testament or later Christian literature. Early Church Fathers like Justin Martyr, Lactantius, and Augustine quote these Christianized oracles as if they were ancient and pagan—but modern scholars can see that these quotes often match Christian interpolations exactly, the Church Fathers often omit parts that don’t align with Christian theology—suggesting they were selective or already dealing with edited versions, and their use of the oracles reveals an apologetic strategy, not a neutral use of ancient sources.

This is not an isolated incident. Very often early Christian writers manipulated truth in ways modern scholars would call forgery, fabrication, or rhetorical deceit; often under the assumption that the ends justify the means. Here are well known examples:

Pseudepigraphy (Writing Under False Names): Non-canonical Gospels are very common, but even some canonical letters, like 2 Peter, are widely regarded by scholars as pseudepigraphical.
Forgery of Prphetic Texts: Like with the Sibylline Oracles, early Christians created or altered texts to look like ancient pagan or Jewish prophecies that foretold Jesus. The Testimonium Flavianum in Josephus' Antiquities of the Jews is likely partially forged or heavily redacted by Christian scribes to include a glowing endorsement of Jesus.
Invented or Embellished Martyr Narratives: Stories of early Christian martyrs—like those in The Martyrdom of Polycarp or The Acts of the Martyrs—often contain miraculous elements and clear literary invention. These tales were used to inspire faith, encourage loyalty, and demonize pagans, regardless of their historical accuracy.
Rewriting History: Christian apologists sometimes reframed or distorted history to create a triumphalist narrative. Eusebius of Caesarea, often called the "father of Church history," openly admitted in his Praeparatio Evangelica that it's sometimes necessary to lie for the benefit of faith: “We shall not mention those things which it is not proper to put into writing, and we shall pass by everything that is not appropriate to raise the soul.” His Ecclesiastical History selectively reports facts to present Christianity as more widespread, unified, and persecuted than it likely was.
Demonizing Opponents: Apologists often portrayed pagans, Jews, and heretics not as intellectual or spiritual rivals, but as demon-possessed, worshippers of idols, or conspirators with the devil. Writers like Justin Martyr, Tertullian, and Lactantius used extreme rhetoric to vilify non-Christians, sometimes making claims they likely knew to be exaggerated (e.g., that pagans engaged in ritual infanticide).
Creating Fake Pagan Endorsements: Some apologists fabricated or altered quotes to make it appear that respected pagan philosophers endorsed Christian ideas. Plato and Socrates were sometimes described as "Christians before Christ" because of their belief in a single divine principle.

Many argue that in a context where Christians believed that truth was spiritual, the ends (saving souls) justified the means, and that they were in a cosmic war against the devil, invention, embellishment, and pseudonymity were often seen as acceptable; even virtuous. I do not think this is acceptable. These same methods occur in modern propagandistic forms and have adapted to novel use-cases. Why does this matter? Well, remember that some of the earliest and most dominant voices in Christianity relied on these fabrications to advance a theological agenda. Augustine quoted fabricated or Christianized texts like the Sibylline Oracles, believing them to be authentic ancient witnesses to the truth of Christianity. This was not unique to him, it was standard apologetic practice in Late Antiquity. The implicit argument could be formed as:

P1. Even our enemies have acknowledged the legitimacy of our doctrine
C. Therefore, it is true.

This is not the only form of truth manipulation, as mentioned earlier. Persecution narratives are powerful motivators that reinforce belief and bind individuals to group identity. Therefore, it is not unsurprising to see fabricated stories circulating throughout antiquity. Many of the stories about the martyrdom of the apostles are later legendary fabrications, not historically verifiable events. The idea that "the apostles died for what they believed" is a powerful modern apologetic argument, but it's built on highly shaky historical ground. Most of the detailed martyrdom accounts of the apostles—like Peter being crucified upside down, or Thomas being speared in India—have no early historical evidence and were invented centuries later. They were part of a hagiographical tradition, meant to inspire faith, assert authority, and legitimize the Church, not record verifiable facts.

Martyrdom stories often come from later traditions, often in the form of apocryphal Acts (e.g., Acts of Peter, Acts of Andrew, Acts of Thomas), written 100–300 years after the fact, church Fathers writing long after the apostles had died (e.g., Irenaeus, Eusebius, Tertullian), and legendary medieval accounts, like The Golden Legend (13th century), which mixed myth, folklore, and theology. These are not reliable history. They often contain contradictions between accounts and heavy theological stylization. Apologists use these fabrications to evangelize or reinforce belief. The argument might look like this:

P1. No one dies for a lie
P2. The apostles died horrific deaths for the beliefs
C. Therefore, everything in the Bible is true

I've written about this argument in prior posts. Modern apologists still use it today. In earlier posts, I just pointed out the weakness of the argument. But we can see now how it serves a propagandistic function to reinforce belief. The stories were shaped to model apostolic virtue, defend Christian orthodoxy, and combat heresies.

I'd like to touch on another method of strategic misrepresentation commonly used within Christian communities today. There is a trope of the "regretful atheists"; one who realizes too late "the truth of Christianity". These stories are actually hilarious to me because they are such obvious forms of propaganda. They are deliberate inventions designed to reinforce belief and appeal to fear. The video “Famous atheists last words before dying - DEBUNKED” provides great detail. I'll cover the method briefly.

Many of the dramatic deathbed conversion or regret stories of famous atheists, skeptics, or non-Christians were fabricated, exaggerated, or unverified accounts circulated by Christian writers, often generations after the individuals had died. The goal was not necessarily historical accuracy, but emotional persuasion: to show that even the “enemies of God” realized the truth at the end. They usually follow a predictable narrative pattern: The famous atheist mocks God in life → falls ill → experiences terror → repents or dies in despair → “See? Even they knew!”; but when you trace the origins of these stories you find there to be no reliable eyewitnesses, contradictions, heavy embellishment or outright invention by religious authors. Here are some common examples:

Voltaire - Claim (Christian legend): He died screaming in terror, regretting his atheism, with his nurse saying, “For all the wealth of Europe, I would not see another atheist die.” In reality, Contemporary witnesses (including his doctor and close friends) said he died peacefully, the dramatic story comes from later polemic sources with no verifiable documentation and Voltaire wasn't even an atheist—he was a deist, critical of organized religion but not belief in God.
Thomas Paine - Claim: He cried out “Oh Lord, help me! Jesus Christ!” and begged for forgiveness. In reality, reports from friends and his housekeeper say he died quietly, affirming his beliefs. Christian biographers contradict those closer to him and often relied on hearsay decades later.
Charles Darwin - Claim: He recanted evolution on his deathbed and turned to Christ, supposedly telling a Lady Hope that he regretted his work. In reality, this “Lady Hope story” is a total fabrication. Darwin’s children and wife publicly refuted it. He died surrounded by family, not religious figures. There is no evidence he converted or recanted evolution.
David Hume - Claim: He died in existential despair, terrified of judgment. In reality, Multiple eyewitnesses (like Adam Smith) said Hume was calm and even cheerful before his death.

Why do these stories spread? They reinforce the idea that Christianity is the only source of peace at death. They are emotionally potent and useful for sermons, tracts, and conversion efforts. These stories often circulated in an era with no fact-checking or widespread literacy; there was zero accountability. Lastly, there are obvious theological motives. If atheists die peacefully, it challenges the claim that life without god is empty or fearful. This fits within the broader pattern:

Forged prophecies (Sibylline Oracles, as discussed)
Fake martyrdom accounts
Invented miracles or saints’ lives
Selective quoting and editing of opponents' works

When I learned about this, I realized this is a blatant form of Black Propaganda. This is the false or fabricated content deliberately attributed to someone else (an out-group, neutral authority, or anonymous “eyewitness”) to boost credibility. In contrast, in white propaganda the source is acknowledged, and with gray propaganda, the source is unclear and the truth status is mixed/ambiguous. Black propaganda is very effective:

Borrowed authority: putting words in an opponent’s or neutral arbiter’s mouth (“even they admit it”) short-circuits skepticism.
Fear & mortality salience: deathbed tales weaponize terror-management psychology (people seek worldview comfort when reminded of death).
Source laundering: once a forged claim is quoted by a “respectable” secondary source, it gains a durable afterlife.
Illusory truth effect: repetition across pulpits, pamphlets, and now social feeds makes the claim feel true.
Narrative fit: stories that perfectly confirm group identity needs (“we were foretold,” “truth wins in the end”) face less internal scrutiny.

This happens literally all the time outside of the religious context. Here are some examples:

Elections & politics:

Forged letters/documents presented as coming from opponents (e.g., historical examples like the “Zinoviev letter” in the UK) to sway voters.
Astroturfing: front groups (“Citizens for…”) that hide corporate/party sponsors to simulate grassroots consensus.
False-flag incidents: staged or misattributed acts to discredit a movement (e.g., vandalism pinned on protesters).

Geopolitical disinformation:

State “active measures” that plant fabricated stories in foreign media under local bylines (“a local journalist reports…”).
Covert radio/online personas posing as disaffected insiders to demoralize enemies or widen social fissures.

Corporate & issue advocacy:

“Independent think tanks” or “consumer coalitions” that are actually industry fronts; ghostwritten op-eds under experts’ names to cast doubt on scientific consensus.

Social media operations:

Networks of fake personas impersonating activists, scientists, or community leaders; forged screenshots and fabricated quotes designed to go viral.

This has a variety of individual and societal effects. It hardens beliefs; dramatic narratives entrench in-group confidence and inoculates against counterevidence. It distorts policy. Voters and donors mobilize around false premises. It dehumanizes opponents and often creates reputational harm. It breeds a form of cynicism; if nothing is to be trusted this benefits the bad actors pushing the propaganda. Corrections rarely catch up, the myth becomes common knowledge.

Is-Ought Fallacy: Secular Ethics vs. Theism

It is quite common in the religious community to propagate the claim that "life has no meaning without god". They will follow up on this by saying "what's stopping someone from murdering and pillaging" claiming that without a deity, "anything goes". When i hear this, I see nothing by obvious fear mongering. It's simply a non-sequiter to assert this conclusion. I'll first discuss the issues with this implicit (and many times explicit) argument. The I'll take a look at it's propogandistic function.

In many forms, people will often just beg the question; "Life has no meaning without God" is just a metaphysical assumption disguised as a necessary truth. But many secular philosophers (e.g., Sartre, Camus, Nagel) and humanists argue that meaning is something we create, not something imposed externally. The absence of an eternal, divine being doesn’t negate meaning—it just shifts the source from the transcendent to the immanent. This is where fear mongering and moral pessimism often creep in. The idea that belief in God is the only barrier between order and chaos is empirically dubious (many atheists live moral, fulfilling, compassionate lives), philosophically shallow (it dismisses moral theories like consequentialism, virtue ethics, or contractualism), and intellectually lazy (it assumes people are only moral out of fear of punishment). It sets up a false dichotomy: either divine command theory or nihilism. But there are many robust secular ethical systems that ground morality in empathy, social cooperation, human flourishing, or rational consistency. More on that later. Apologists trained in philosophy should know they are misrepresenting the secular view. Some (like William Lane Craig) knowingly fall back on emotional appeals like the “horror of a godless universe,” rather than engaging with secular ethics on its own terms. This is strategic: it’s persuasive rhetoric aimed at lay audiences more than rigorous argumentation.

More importantly, there is a glaring issue with this view of morality. Formally, we could construct the argument like this:

P1. If there is no God, then there's nothing stopping you from murdering, cheating, lying...
P2. If there is no prevention mechanism, then why not do these things
C. Therefore, you should do these things

The "Should" operator is crucial here. It assumes that, by not having divine commands, it's in our best interest and nature to do these things. If there is no formal rule system preventing this behavior, you should do it. But this is a classic example of the is-ought fallacy. Hume observed that you cannot derive an "ought" purely from an "is"—i.e., you can’t validly conclude prescriptive moral claims just from descriptive statements without some bridge principle. Apologists will say something like:

Premise (is): If there is no God, then there is no objective grounding for morality.
Implied Conclusion (ought): Therefore, people ought to act however they want—rape, steal, kill—because nothing ultimately matters.

This leap from the lack of a cosmic moral anchor (a descriptive claim) to the conclusion that one ought to act immorally (a prescriptive claim) is textbook is-ought fallacy. It is also incredibly incoherent. The "is" (no God) doesn't logically entail that immorality is now permissible or encouraged. It skips over secular ethical frameworks that still provide plenty of normative force even in a godless universe. It treats “lack of divine command” as equivalent to “license to commit atrocities”—a total non sequitur.

This is often dressed up in emotional rhetoricl like: “If atheism is true, why shouldn’t someone murder just for fun?” But again—that "shouldn’t" is a normative claim being smuggled in without justification. They are essentially saying: “There’s no divine moral lawgiver (is), therefore you are morally permitted to do whatever you want (ought)” which not only commits the is-ought fallacy, but also presupposes a very crude view of morality that ignores all non-theistic alternatives. In short, Many apologists implicitly or explicitly commit the is-ought fallacy by starting with the "is" of a godless universe, then drawing an "ought" about what people would be morally permitted (or even inclided to do), in such a universe.

Furthermore, if you really think about it, "ought" implies some normative evaluative criteria, so when running the hypothestical, "ought" literally becomes vacious. Any normative conclusion is literally incoherent. Under the theistic theory, "no God, therefore no objective moral grounding", you cannot leap to any normative conclusion without it being incoherent. Under Divine Command Theory, moral oughts are (roughly) “what God commands.” If ¬G, then the moral operator O(·) is undefined (or has no truthmakers). From ¬G you can’t infer O(bad) or O(¬bad). At most, you get ¬(O(bad) ∨ O(¬bad))—i.e., no categorical moral obligations either way. So their “therefore you ought to do awful things” sneaks a normative operator back in after declaring it groundless. That’s a straight is→ought error plus a category mistake. A deontic sketch:

Premise: ¬G → ¬M (no stance-independent moral facts).
Illicit leap: ¬G → O(bad).
But from ¬M you get: neither O(bad) nor O(¬bad) (moral O becomes truth-valueless), not a license to assert O(bad).

I should be clear, I am not arguing that "ought" has no meaning; only under the theistic categorical moral view. Other types of normativity survive.

Instrumental/prudential ought: If you want to avoid prison or retaliation, you ought not murder.
Legal/contractual ought: Given the rules in force, you ought not murder.
Coordination/coop ought: In repeated-game societies, you ought not defect if you want stable gains.

So the correct inference from “no objective moral grounding” is not “you ought to do nothing,” but “no categorical moral oughts.” Conditional oughts remain fully meaningful relative to goals, laws, or shared practices. Many metaethical theories preserve the categorical "ought" without a deity. In Kantian constructivism, obligations are generated by rational agency and reflection. Contractualism claims that what we owe to eachother arises from principles no one could reasonably reject. Moral naturalism claims that moral facts supervene on natural facts about flourishing or harm. Denying a theistic ground doesn’t force vacuity; it only blocks one kind of ground.

Therefore, If you assume no objective moral ground, then moral ought-claims lose truth conditions; therefore, it’s fallacious to conclude any ought, especially O(bad). ¬G you can’t derive O(bad). You’ve either (a) made “ought” meaningless (so you can’t use it), or (b) you’re relying on some other standard—legal, prudential, contractual—in which case those standards typically yield O(¬murder). If you insist there’s no ground for moral oughts, then you can’t validly say ‘without God you ought to do anything.’ You’ve removed the operator you’re trying to use. Either drop the ‘ought,’ or supply a non-theistic standard—under which murder is still ruled out.

This apologetic argument is clearly bad, but I think it serves dual purposes. It creates somewhat of a moral panic; a rising atheist or non-religious society implies a society lacking morals and therefore something bad. Here's what the claim does, not just what it says:

Boundary enforcement: “Without God, anything goes” draws a bright line between the “moral us” (believers) and the “dangerous them” (non-religious). It polices identity, not truth.
Power preservation: If public morality allegedly depends on religious authority, then clergy/apologists become indispensable gatekeepers. The claim protects status and agenda-setting power.
Crisis manufacturing: By defining secularization as moral collapse, ordinary social change is reframed as emergency. Emergencies justify exceptional rhetoric, resources, and laws.

Sociologists of moral panic (Cohen; Goode & Ben-Yehuda) describe recurring signatures:

Heightened concern: relentless warnings about “rising immorality.”
Hostility & folk devils: atheists/“the secular” cast as corruptors (often tied to elites, universities, or media).
Consensus (manufactured): “Everyone sees the decay,” via echo chambers and authority endorsements.
Disproportionality: vivid anecdotes and worst-case imagery outweigh broad data.
Volatility: waves of alarm peak around elections, scandals, or court cases, then morph to the next trigger.

This utilizes common rhetorical mechanics:

Catastrophizing + slippery slope: “No God ⇒ no morals ⇒ crime/tyranny/chaos.” It compresses a complex causal chain into a single, terrifying slide.
Smuggled normativity: It first declares moral “ought”s groundless, then reintroduces an “ought” (“so people will do evil”), committing the is→ought error while appearing practical.
Availability & vividness: A few shocking crimes or campus stories are looped as “proof.” Vivid exemplars beat statistics.
“Think of the children” framing: Protecting kids activates care/sanctity moral foundations, lowering scrutiny.
Pseudo-empiricism: Selective stats, undefined terms (“objective morality”), and contrived contrasts with caricatured “nihilism.”
Mortality salience: Reminders of death/meaninglessness (Terror Management Theory) push people toward identity-affirming authority claims.

The move is simple: recast a metaethical claim (“without God there is no objective morality”) as a public-safety bulletin (“therefore your neighbors are unrestrained”). This is a bait-and-switch from abstract philosophy to threat assessment. Once the shift happens, the audience isn’t evaluating premises anymore; they’re evaluating risk. And when people feel risk—especially to children, community order, or sacred values—they default to precaution, not careful reasoning. The logic can be faulty and still be persuasive, because it harnesses loss aversion and negativity bias: better to overreact to a supposed moral vacuum than underreact and invite catastrophe. The framing also constructs a stark forced choice: either divine command or moral anarchy. That false dichotomy is crucial for panic generation. By erasing the spectrum of secular normativity (law, reciprocity, empathy, social contracts, virtues), the message compresses the field to two outcomes—obedience or barbarism. In propaganda terms, it collapses complexity to a single axis and then dramatizes motion toward the worst point on that axis. This helps produce what communication scholars call an availability cascade: vivid anecdotes and hypotheticals (the murderer “just for fun,” the thief who “no longer fears judgment”) are repeated until they feel like data. Repetition, not validity, becomes the engine of conviction.

Fear is further amplified by selective moral accounting. The apologetic script elevates spectacular threats attributed to godlessness while treating religious wrongdoing as aberrational (“no true believer”) or individually culpable. That asymmetry creates a moral ledger in which out-group actions count as evidence about the group’s essence, while in-group failures are discounted. Sociologically, this is boundary maintenance: the story turns “atheists” or “the non-religious” into folk devils, symbols of creeping disorder whose presence justifies heightened vigilance. Once a group is coded as a vector of moral decay, ordinary pluralism starts to feel like appeasement. The argument also exploits a classic panic accelerator: sacred-value framing. By tying morality to the transcendently sacred (God, salvation, eternal stakes), any deviation appears profane and dangerous, and compromise looks like betrayal. This turns policy disagreement into a purity test. In that register, even small institutional changes—say, expanding secular ethics curricula or guarding church–state separation—can be narrated as steps down a slippery slope toward civilizational ruin. The slope doesn’t need evidence; it needs only an atmosphere of imminence. “If we don’t act now…” becomes the thesis.

Institutionally, the panic logic is highly portable. It travels well through sermons, talk radio, short-form videos, and op-eds because it’s easy to compress into moral vignettes: a world with God has guardrails; a world without God is a freeway with no lanes. These vignettes are sticky—emotionally charged, cognitively light—and they invite audience participation (“look around: don’t you feel decline?”). That subjective audit (“things seem worse”) doubles as proof, reinforcing the narrative irrespective of mixed or contrary data. The more the story is told, the more it structures perception; the map becomes the territory. Politically, moral-panic framing is a gateway to securitization: redefining a cultural change (rising non-religion) as a security threat that justifies exceptional measures. Once the issue is securitized, proposals that would normally demand robust justification—privileging religious instruction, expanding conscience exemptions, policing curricula, granting symbolic or material advantages to specific faith expressions—can be sold as emergency repairs to a failing moral infrastructure. The message is not “these policies are independently good,” but “these policies are necessary to avert collapse.” Fear supplies the warrant.

There’s also a performative payoff inside religious communities. The argument functions as an identity signal: to endorse it is to demonstrate allegiance to a moral order under siege. That solidarity has organizational benefits—fundraising, volunteer mobilization, turnout—because it converts anxiety into action. In movement ecology terms, panic is a resource: it keeps audiences attentive, loyal, and ready to accept elite cues about which reforms, books, or politicians can restore the endangered canopy of meaning. At the individual level, the “anything goes” script resolves a psychological tension. Many believers intuit that nonbelievers live pro-socially; acknowledging that would concede that robust ethics can arise without their ultimate foundation. The panic narrative avoids that concession by reframing the counterevidence as temporary, fragile, or hypocritical—“they’re borrowing capital from theism,” “they’ll change when it’s convenient.” In doing so, it protects the exclusivist thesis not by proving it, but by rendering alternatives morally suspicious.

There is a strong relationship between bad arguemnts, moral panics, and the propogandistic function they serve to acheive political ends. Bad arguments and moral panics have a symbiotic relationship: the bad argument supplies a simple, dramatic causal story, and the moral panic converts that story into political permission. Because the argument is epistemically weak—built on false dichotomies, slippery slopes, or is–ought leaps—it’s easy to remember, easy to repeat, and easy to graft onto whatever the audience already fears. That cognitive simplicity is a feature, not a bug: it transforms diffuse anxiety into a single, named threat (“godlessness,” “decadence,” “corruption of children”), which is precisely the raw material a panic needs to scale. Once the claim is framed as a public-safety alert rather than a philosophical thesis, audiences shift from evaluating premises to “managing risk,” and precaution replaces deliberation. The panic also pays political dividends that accuracy rarely can. It mobilizes a base (fear is an efficient fundraiser and turnout engine), solidifies in-group identity through shared grievance, and offers convenient out-groups as folk devils to blame for complex social changes. It crowds out rival agendas by monopolizing attention; opponents must spend scarce bandwidth debunking caricatures rather than advancing their own proposals. And once “emergency” policies pass, they create path dependencies—budgets, bureaucracies, legal precedents—that entrench the coalition that pushed them, turning a temporary surge of fear into a durable power arrangement. Finally, there’s a feedback loop: policies born from panic produce spectacles (raids, bans, prosecutions, headline-friendly “wins”) that are then cited as proof the threat was real all along. The system thus becomes self-sealing: the worse the reasoning at the start, the more room there is to dramatize risks, and the more dramatic the response, the more “evidence” appears to vindicate the original claim. In short, bad arguments are not merely tolerated within moral panics; they are instrumental to their propagandistic function, because they trade rigor for velocity, nuance for mobilization, and truth for the political capacity to act.

Persuasive Redefinition: Definition of Culture in Anthropology

Definitions are fundamental for establishing the direction of inquiry. Specifying what a word means has implications for what can be inferred, classified, or valued normatively. Very often in debate or discussion someone will advance a definition that contains an implicit argument. When this happens, someone is proposing or taking for granted the meaning of a term, which contains unrecognized assumptions and commitments that narrow or broaden the range of possible conclusions that can be inferred in an argument, often at the benefit of the person using the definition. I'm providing links below to research on this topic because it's pretty interesting to see the argumentative use of persuasive definition. My point here is to highlight the fact that redefining a term is often done as part of a broader propaganda campaign, designed to alter how people evaluate arguments and the ultimate policy proposals derived from such arguments. We will look at something that's bothered me for quite some time, which fits this pattern of persuasion quite well.

We will look at how to define the concept "culture". Anthropologists typically define culture as the learned behaviors, beliefs, symbols, and institutions that are shared by a group of people and passed down from generation to generation. They emphasize culture as a system of symbols and meanings, its transmission through enculturation, and the idea that every human group has a culture. Sociologists define culture as the values, norms, material objects, language, and practices that form a way of life for a given group or society. Sociologists focus on the social structures and institutions that shape culture, how culture reinforces social norms and identity, and the interaction between individual agency and societal constraints. Very often this term is abused, misunderstood, or redefined implicitly or explicitly to fit political narratives. Thomas Sowell and similar conservative thinkers are textbook examples of this phenomena.

More often then not, Sowell does not even explicitly define culture; so based on his use of the term, we must infer his hidden assumptions. He often conceives of or uses the term the following three ways:

Personal behavior and values (e.g., work ethic, family structure, educational attitudes)
Group-level habits or outlooks that are seen as internally generated and self-sustaining
A tendency to separate cultural traits from institutional, historical, or structural influences (like systemic racism, economic inequality, or segregation)

This version of culture tends to treat it as a kind of independent variable—as though certain groups succeed or fail primarily because of their internal norms and choices, rather than due to the social systems or historical forces that shape those choices. In contrast, academic definitions of culture, especially in sociology and anthropology:

Emphasize that culture is deeply intertwined with institutions, power dynamics, and history
Recognize that cultural patterns emerge within specific material and social contexts (e.g., laws, housing, schools, policing)
Avoid blaming culture for inequality without asking how that culture was formed and what sustains it

When Sowell uses the word "culture", he is implying that it's separable from structures like capitalism, colonialism, or state policy, which radically diverges form how most social scientists understand the concept. This is a key thing to understand because his definition very much determines his analyses and conclusions about what policy we should implement for achieving certain social goals.

Sowell makes some very surprising statements about what he calls "Black Culture". He claims that poverty was declining and incomes were rising before the civil rights movement, and that the civil rights policies caused a decline in living standards. Whether his empirical claims are substantiated is not my focus for this section; I think his analysis is full of errors but it's simply not relevant for my purposes here. But very briefly, his empirical analysis is used to support the absurd idea that the Civil Rights policies actually harmed the Black Community. Many people have addressed this work and have identified numerous methodological and analytical issues with his results, so if you're interested in that feel free to consult the literature. Instead, i want to discuss how his use of the word "culture" contains many implicit and unsubstantiated assumptions and functionally operates as a persuasive redefinition. Remember, the modus operandum for market fundamentalists is to argue that all problems are the result of government interference or personal choice. This is what Sowell aims to do; redefine culture in such a way to substantiate his prior commitments about personal choice. Essentially, "culture" on this view is a collective blame mechanism. Sowell frames the decline in Black family structure, crime, and education outcomes as a cultural collapse brought on by dependency and moral decay, normalized by the so-called "welfare state" and amplified by decisions made by individuals. But this view is:

Decontextualized: ignoring how mass incarceration, discriminatory housing policies, and education funding all shape family stability and community outcomes
Ahistorical: neglecting how past state actions (like slavery, Jim Crow, exclusion from the GI Bill) shaped the very cultural patterns he criticizes
Functionally punitive: in practice, this narrative often becomes a justification for cutting social supports, not understanding the deeper causes of inequality, because on Sowells view inequality does not need explaining; it's fully explained by individual choices (a sort of just-world fallacy masked by outdated economic jargon)

In other words, his redefinition of "culture" masks important features that are present in the anthropological or sociological definition of the concept; reducing it to a mere "aggregate of individual choices". If this sounds like a market fundamentalist definition of culture, you'd be correct. It is simply the application of the Chicago school economic assumptions superimposed on concepts not traditionally covered by economists; a classic case of scope creep. Ironically, Sowell contends that his perspective is marginalized in academia due to ideological bias; an argument conservatives love to fall back on when criticized, a classic persecution complex.

The phrase "Every accusation is an admission" seems very plausible here. Like mentioned in the prior section, Tom Sowell is the ideologue he critiques. In The Big Myth, Naomi Oreskes and co-author Erik Conway document how pro-business elites, think tanks, and corporate-funded PR campaigns in the 20th century aggressively promoted a market fundamentalist ideology—one that framed free enterprise as synonymous with freedom and government intervention as a slippery slope to tyranny. Friedrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom is a key example: while initially niche, it was popularized massively through Reader's Digest and corporate sponsorship, not just by academic merit. Thomas Sowell fits into this tradition in several ways:

Institutional Base: Sowell has spent much of his career at the Hoover Institution, a conservative think tank with close ties to corporate and libertarian funding sources—part of the same ecosystem that promoted Hayek, Milton Friedman, and other Chicago School thinkers.
Messaging Style: Like Hayek and Friedman, Sowell is a skilled popular communicator. His books are aimed at general audiences, not academic peers, and often serve an ideological function—promoting individualism, free markets, and cultural explanations over structural ones.
Appeal to “Common Sense”: Sowell often positions himself as a truth-teller against elite orthodoxy, using a tone of moral clarity and empirical certainty—even when the evidence is far more contested. This rhetorical style was shaped and amplified by the PR strategies that Oreskes highlights.
Cultural Legitimacy: Just as earlier campaigns turned market fundamentalism into “mainstream American common sense,” Sowell’s work has been used by politicians, pundits, and conservative media to legitimize resistance to racial justice policies, affirmative action, or government intervention in poverty.

This is the first thing to understand about the propagandistic function of implicit redefinitions. Sowell's work is deeply entrenched in this ideological network of conservative thinktanks that leverage this redefinition to advance policy agendas and other political narratives. Sowell does not engage with the community of researchers who publish relevant material on cultural studies. He does not engage with economists who also have more nuanced descriptions of the economic dynamics underlying wealth inequality. He is embedded within a thinktank network that propagates his work as talking points for conservative commentators in the media, providing the ideas a veneer of academic legitimacy; the "expert". More on this in a bit.

There seems to be something deeply circular or vacuous about asserting “culture” to be the cause of current socioeconomic conditions, unless you butcher the concept enough. Let's have a little thought experiment. Take Ballet as an example, historically dominated by Russian dancers. Using Sowell's sense of the word “culture” one would say “Russians value classical dance hence the talent hence the overrepresentation”. Essentially, in the aggregate, many individuals value dance, a simple extension of neoclassical assumptions; preferences are given so group outcomes must be the mere aggregation of individual preferences for ballet. A "culture of ballet dancers", under Sowell's definition of culture, is just a reiteration that many people in that community like ballet. To me this seems like just another way of saying “black people perform poor economically because they don’t value high achievement” or something of that sort. So collectively, the “black culture” needs to be more like “those other cultures” that value it more. The argument just seems very shallow: and it allows for ridiculous self insulating unfalsifiable implications. Suppose we observe a poor performing person, we infer “rotten culture”, not allowing for other causes. It also just seems like a very shallow use of microeconomic assumptions, along with a bastardization of cultural analysis. Let me explain more clearly what I mean. The "culture explains outcomes" story is just fundamentally flawed for the following reasons:

Tautology / circularity: If “culture” is defined as “the values that produce outcome Y,” then observing Y becomes proof of the values that supposedly caused Y. That’s unfalsifiable.
Ecological fallacy: Inferring individual motives from group averages (or group outcomes) is a logic error. Poor performance does not equal low valuation of achievement.
Endogeneity: Culture and institutions co-produce each other. Treating culture as an exogenous cause while ignoring housing, schools, labor markets, policing, and law bakes in omitted-variable bias.
Selection on the dependent variable: Starting with an outcome (poverty, test scores) and then retrofitting a cultural “explanation” guarantees confirmation.
Measurement trouble: “Values” are rarely directly measured; proxies (family structure, church attendance, “attitudes”) are noisy and often just downstream of structure.

Lets go back to the Russian ballet example. Overrepresentation is more parsimoniously explained by institutions and history: a century of state patronage in the USSR, elite academies (e.g., Vaganova method) that perfected a training pipeline, strong credentialing (Bolshoi/Mariinsky prestige), and global recruitment networks. That’s path dependence, infrastructure, and gatekeeping—not national “preferences” floating outside of institutions. A crude conceptualization of culture simply misses these details; as I mentioned earlier, definitions literally limit or expand the scope of possible conclusions that can be derived. This is a textbook example. Sowell's framework literally cannot account for these nuances. The "Black Culture doesn't value achievement" clearly fails when we identify the issues with defining culture in neoclassical terms. Survey and time-use research repeatedly finds that Black students and parents report equal or higher educational aspirations than white peers; gaps emerge in constraints and opportunities (school quality, wealth, transportation, exposure to discrimination), not stated “valuations.” If the perceived return to effort is depressed by biased labor markets or unequal schools, optimal behavior changes even when values don’t. Differential discipline, tracking, neighborhood surveillance, and carceral contact reshape behavior through incentives and risks, not deficient values.

Sowell's redefinition essentially narrows the scope of possible derivations to a-priori rule out any possible conclusion that might entail structural reform. No one denies individual choices contribute to observed outcomes. But by focusing on decisions isolated from historical path dependency and how someone's opportunity-set is influenced by such forces, you'll be blind to nuance. That is the power of redefining a concept, or letting a concept pass un-scrutinized. I could go into detail about how Sowell could do a proper economic analysis of inequality that factors in some of these considerations, but that's not my goal with this section. For more information see these economists:

I am less thoroughly read in the Sociology of Culture and Cultural Anthropology so I can't recommend specific modern scholars, but these wiki pages are a good start. Anthropologists traditionally immerse in small-scale or local contexts, focusing on symbols, rituals, meaning, and lived experience. One of my favorite books that engages in deep cultural analysis, focusing particularly on linguistics, is the book "Don't Sleep there are Snakes" by Dan Everett. Sociologists tend to analyze culture in relation to institutions, power, and inequality, often using survey or historical data in addition to ethnography; so this will be more aligned with how economists approach the topic.

Let's go back to the main point of this blog post. Persuasive definitions are a classic propaganda move. Sowell's arguments about culture are not merely bad arguments disconnected from every researcher on the topic; they have a pragmatic function mainly to justify policy. It’s when someone quietly changes a word’s conceptual meaning while keeping its emotive force, so audiences feel like they’re hearing a neutral, factual claim when they’re actually getting ideology smuggled in. From a rhetorical analysis, you can already kind of see what's happening. Sowell frequently relies on persecution narratives to explain why academia rejects or does not contend with his views. This is a hallmark feature of right-wing propaganda outlets; these narratives enhance the believability of Sowells claims. Most people will not engage with primary literature, so the persecution narrative is explanatorily powerful. Think tanks like the one Sowell works for, have massive reach in the media and often produce easily memorable soundbites backed by "experts", flooding the zone with talking points for conservative pundits to regurgitate to their audiences.

In the social sciences, culture is inseparable from institutions, history, and power. The redefinition reduces it to group morals and habits—a stand-alone cause—so inequality becomes a story about choices, not structures. That shifts blame and narrows the policy menu (if “culture” causes poverty, regulation, desegregation, or investment are beside the point). This is textbook framing and agenda-setting: define the problem so preferred solutions follow. “Culture” (in Sowell's sense) is hard to falsify and easy to assert. Its emotive punch (virtue/vice, responsibility/decay) remains, while empirical content thins—exactly the effect persuasive definitions aim for. If counter-evidence appears (e.g., discrimination, wealth gaps from policy), the frame can self-seal: “elites won’t face the cultural truth.” That moves debate from data to identity/loyalty claims, a well-known propaganda dynamic (information laundering and narrative laundering). This is what the think-tank pipeline loosk like from redefinition of culture to public saturation:

Package: Produce short policy briefs and essays that translate ideology into “actionable” takeaways (little method, strong recommendations). This format is explicitly designed to influence decision-makers quickly.
Brand authority: House the argument under a prestigious masthead (e.g., Hoover). The institution’s comms arms push it through media hits, legislative testimony, social channels, and education programs—explicitly to reach “policymakers and the attentive public.”
Earned + owned media: Appear on in-house shows (e.g., Uncommon Knowledge) and partner media. Parallel short-form video outlets (e.g., PragerU) convert long arguments into viral, moralized sound bites anchored to the redefined term. Op-eds are especially potent—experimental evidence shows they move opinions among the public and policy elites.
Citation/credibility laundering: Once a think-tank brief or op-ed lands in mainstream venues, later pieces cite it as “research,” and the definition starts to look like received wisdom across outlets (a well-documented laundering dynamic).
Policy channeling: Allied organizations turn the reframed problem into model bills and talking points for legislators (statehouses are especially permeable). Even if Sowell isn’t writing the bills, the shared frame (“culture, not policy”) primes deregulatory/anti-redistributive solutions. ALEC (American Legislation Exchange Council) is a clear example of how ideas become laws at scale.

This redefinition forms the basis for the general publics frame of discourse for talking about these issues. The message is a deliberately reductive story that's short, moral, and vivid; ideal for viral videos and briefs. Think-tank communications are built to amplify these types of messages. Hoover institutes platform confers authority and credibility, making the reach farther. The public cannot distinguish between legit academic research and nonsense like this published by think tanks. Naomi Oreskes and Conway document how corporate funded networks long ago invested in PR pipelines that popularizes these lassaiz faire conclusions; Sowell fits into this ideological lineage. There is a significant asymmetry between the effectiveness of communicating results to the public that favors these think tanks. Often, the majority of the public cannot cite the actual scholarly work produced by high quality institutions, because universities lack this kind of branding and propaganda mechanisms. Most people for example, interested in economics, cannot name any Nobel Prize winner, but will likely have heard of Tom Sowell due to the outreach of his messages. Meanwhile, these think-tanks undermine the credibility of universities by agitating motivated skepticism. This is a major talking point of right-wing media, subvert institutions by labeling them "elitist" or "intellectual". It all fits into this general pipeline.

Sowells arguments that leverage this implicit redefinition of culture are nonsense and easily refutable. Nevertheless, they are effective and influencing a general public that doesn't know how to engage critically with these arguments. Connecting these arguments to the larger institutions and media networks effectively turns them into propaganda for public consumption.

More Resources:

Ridiculous Fabrications: Colosseum and Pyramid Myths

While visiting The Colosseum with a group of Protestants in Rome, I noticed something quite interesting. We were talking about how the structure was constructed, and pretty much unanimously they claimed "it was constructed to murder Christian's". Later in the discussion, we talked about how marvels like this in the past were constructed, and the pyramids were brought up. They said "the ancient Hebrews were enslaved to build it." I was quite stunned by this level of ignorance. But I realized that it's manufactured ignorance designed for the specific purpose to propagate persecution narratives among right-leaning or religious groups. In this section, I want to discuss how outright deliberate fabrications like these are designed for propagandistic purposes.

For starters, the Colosseum was not built to murder Christians. I've never heard such a self-serving claim in my life honestly. The Colosseum was constructed between 70–80 AD under the emperors Vespasian and Titus. It was used for gladiatorial contests, animal hunts, mock sea battles, and public spectacles. While Christians were persecuted in Rome (notably under Nero in the 60s AD), there's very little historical evidence that Christians were executed in the Colosseum specifically. The structure was not built for the intended purpose to target Christians and display their torture. The strong association of Christian martyrdom with the Colosseum arose centuries later, largely symbolically, especially during the Counter-Reformation when Catholics emphasized Rome as a center of martyrdom.

Next, the ancient Hebrews were not fucking enslaved to build the pyramids. The Pyramids of Giza were built around 2600–2500 BC, during Egypt's Old Kingdom. The biblical Exodus story, even if interpreted historically, is usually dated (by those who try to place it historically) around 1200–1300 BC—a millennium later. There is no archaeological or textual evidence that the Israelites were involved in pyramid construction. Excavations of workers' villages at Giza show paid laborers, not slaves, built the pyramids. They were well-fed and had access to medical care. This myth is largely a product of biblical literalism and later traditions that retroactively juxtapose biblical slavery narratives onto monumental Egyptian works. Even many Jewish scholars today acknowledge that this connection is symbolic, not historical.

After weeks of reflecting on this ridiculousness, it dawned on me that these obvious falsehoods serve broader agendas. There's a strong "us vs. them" persecution narrative that pervades many religious traditions, and Protestant interpretations often highlight Christian suffering under Catholicism or pagan Rome. The myths are emotionally powerful, even if historically inaccurate. They give modern believers a sense of connection with the past, often as moral exemplars or martyrs. Not to mention, the symbolic association is still visually present at the Colosseum and part of the religious tradition, which can confuse people who aren’t digging into the history. More importantly, these a-historical events serve as justification for the broader belief that "we have always been persecuted for our beliefs."

This is a generalized method within propaganda; there are mechanisms and institutions that enable the proliferation of falsehoods that amplify persecution narrative delusions. It is a reusable pattern, take a simple falsehood, wrap it in a persecution frame, and repeat it until it feels true. It is very sticky, and has strong institutional support. At its core, a persecution narrative flips the power story. A relatively strong, numerous, or institutionally advantaged group casts itself as the victim of shadowy elites, out-groups, or corrosive cultural forces. This is what the persecution narrative does:

Creates moral permission: “We’re only defending ourselves,” which justifies harsher policies and rhetoric.
Unifies a coalition: Shared victimhood binds factions and suppresses internal dissent.
Delegitimizes critics: Opponents aren’t arguing; they’re “persecuting” you—so you needn’t engage them.
Explains setbacks: Losses stem from sabotage, not unpopular ideas or poor performance (think the Weimar-era “stab-in-the-back” myth).

Hofstadter called this the “paranoid style” in politics—catastrophe-focused, conspiratorial, and grievance-driven. It recurs whenever leaders need to mobilize followers around existential stakes. This type of propaganda does not work in a vacuum; it plugs into our ordinary cognitive tendencies. It exploits the illusory truth effect; by repeating statements that feel true, they become more entrenched in the community. Persecution is a highly emotional topic, therefore this propaganda exploits this fact enabling outrage-laden messages to travel fast and far within ideological clusters. These groups seek moral high ground by out-suffering the rivals, and exaggerate the in-groups greatness while blaming others for insufficient respect.

In modern times, the institutional dynamics are obviously different from how this form of propaganda proliferated in the past:

Idea factories: Partisan media, advocacy orgs, and some think tanks craft simple persecution frames (“they’re silencing us,” “replacement,” “rigged”).
Influencer & micro-media ecosystems: Talk radio, podcasts, newsletters, and creator accounts iterate the narrative in emotionally compelling, anecdote-heavy ways.
Platform dynamics: Recommenders boost outrage; forwarding is nearly frictionless; brief, de-contextualized clips become “evidence.”
Monetization: Programmatic advertising and attention economics reward engagement—so sensational persecution content pays. (Researchers and NGOs have documented how ads inadvertently bankroll low-quality or conspiratorial outlets.)
Policy & legal gray zones: Democracies often (rightly) protect even corrosive speech; platform governance is inconsistent; transparency about funding or reach is limited.
Movement infrastructure: Fundraising emails, petitions, and “rapid response” ops convert grievance into lists, donations, and votes.

Persecution narratives have a core modular rhetorical form. You start with a kernel-of-truth or an outright fabrication, then generalize. A single incident proves the grander claim. You then use strategic ambiguity so a wide audience can project its own villain; the elusive "they". After that, you prop up anecdotes and vivid stories in favor of a statistical base rate. You then elevate to conspiracy, when asked for evidence, the mere lack of evidence is proof of a cover up. Finally, you scapegoat and create a moral panic. You designate folk devils and claim a crisis requires immediate response. These victimhood frames have massively transformative consequences. For example, think of the "Great Replacement" nonsense that has gripped the United States, fueling far right nonsense. Facts alone often bounce off because they threaten identity, not just information. The falsehood is performing social work: signaling loyalty, resolving uncertainty, and offering a community. Add repetition + emotion, and you have a sturdy memeplex. (The data on repetition and diffusion underscores why one-off fact checks underperform.) These deliberate falsehoods can't simply be "debunked". We are beyond the realm of critical discussion. So, earlier when I brought up the Colosseum and Pyramids, you literally can't correct these falsehoods because they are intimately connected to Protestant identity.

How is this all relevant to my initial comments on deliberate fabrication? Here’s a clear way to think about it: a bad argument isn’t just a mistake—it’s a multi-tool. The surface claim does one job (persuade the inattentive), while the real value is how it mobilizes people, binds an identity, and justifies actions. Persecution narratives work effectively when you can communicate to your audience that you've always been persecuted. It creates an intellectual environment where someone might say in response to criticism "Well, they've always criticized us, this is nothing new". Fabrications like this extend beyind this simple example. Here's a template:

Set the scene with a vivid moral story: “The Colosseum was built to butcher Christians.” (Clean heroes, cruel villains, memorable image.)
Make the leap from anecdote to essence: “Rome’s greatness literally rests on our people’s suffering.” (One site/time → timeless rule.)
Define an ‘us’ under siege: “Christians have always been targeted by elites.” (Today’s critics are equated with ancient oppressors.)
Import contemporary stakes: “So when universities/media/politicians marginalize Christian views, it’s the same persecution.” (Historical myth → present policy.)
Offer a policy or status demand: “Therefore we need special protections/funding/curriculum control/symbolic privileges.” (Victimhood → entitlement.)
Harden belief with pseudo-evidence & ambiguity: A few out-of-context quotes, a plaque, a cross on-site; then: “If you can’t see it, that proves the cover-up.” (Heads I win, tails you lose.)
Build a loyalty test: “Real believers know this history.” (Accepting the claim signals membership; doubting it signals betrayal.)
Pre-empt refutation with motive attacks: “Deniers hate our faith/people.” (Critic = persecutor; now critique itself “proves” the myth.)

These particular arguments about the Colosseum and Pyramids are easy to refute, but it does not matter. The argument isn’t just propositional; it’s performative. Its success is measured by mobilization, identity cohesion, and agenda control, not by truth conditions. Refutation can be co-opted. Critique is reframed as persecution or elitism, which feeds the myth. Network effects beat facts, a claim living in sermons, tours, reels, and plaques has a dozen on-ramps a day; my fact-check has one. The argument dignifies group anxieties—“we suffer because we’re righteous,” not because we’re losing arguments. It's simple, repeatable narrative beats data every time (“ill-meaning them vs. long-suffering us”). Repeating the myth shows loyalty; abandoning it risks social cost. It does not matter if I can show it to be false, the myth is regenerated. There are two common variants of this pattern:

Martyrdom → Entitlement: “We suffered most → we deserve most.” Converts past pain (real or invented) into present privilege, bypassing universal rules.
Erasure → Emergency: “They’re deleting our history → act now.” Manufactures urgency to suspend normal deliberation and lock in policy under the banner of rescue.

Cherry Picking: Homogeneity and National Success

Very often, conservative media advances or implies the argument that ethnic homogeneity within a nation leads to some measure of success. They will often point to relatively ethnically homogenous places like Scandinavia or Japan, and credit the success of these countries to this homogeneity. The argument really amounts to a shitty correlational analysis, implicitly advancing an anti-immigration policy agenda. This argument is one of many used by propagandists to bolster these broader anti-immigration narratives. Let's first look at the argument, show how its garbage, then proceed to analyze it's propagandistic function.

Argument from correlation to cause (causal generalization):

P1. A set of highly successful countries (e.g., Nordic states, Japan) are markedly ethnically homogeneous.
P2. Many troubled or lower-performing countries are markedly heterogeneous.
P3. There is a plausible mechanism: greater homogeneity → higher baseline social trust and shared norms → lower coordination/transaction costs → stronger public-goods provision and institutional effectiveness → prosperity and stability.
P4. No alternative single factor better explains this cross-national pattern with equal simplicity and reach.
C. Therefore, ethnic homogeneity is a significant causal factor of national success (and, conversely, diversity is a risk factor).

This argument relies upon numerous hidden assumptions:

W1. Representativeness: The cited countries are representative rather than cherry-picked.
W2. Measurement validity: “Homogeneity,” “trust,” “public goods,” and “success” are well-measured and comparable.
W3. Causal priority: Homogeneity temporally and causally precedes trust/institutions/success (not vice versa).
W4. Exogeneity: No omitted confounders (e.g., state capacity, geography, historical legacies) jointly produce both homogeneity and success.
W5. Stability: The mechanism (homogeneity → trust → public goods → success) is robust across contexts.

The argument follows the correlation to cause pattern, so it inherits the corresponding critical questions:

CQ1. Evidence: How strong and consistent is the correlation across unbiased samples and time?
CQ2. Mechanism: Is the postulated mechanism independently supported?
CQ3. Alternatives: Are there plausible alternative causes that explain the same pattern?
CQ4. Confounders: Could a third factor be causing both homogeneity and success?
CQ5. Direction: Could success attract diversity (reverse causation)?
CQ6. Scope/limits: In which contexts does the effect fail or flip?

Now step by step, lets deconstruct this argument:

A. Challenge to representativeness (W1; CQ1): The "successful and homogenous" exhibit is a selective sample. There exists homogenous underperformers (counterexamples) and divers high performers (several immigrant-rich economies and cities). Selection bias and survivorship bias make P1 and P2 unreliable as general premises.
B. Mechanism underdetermination (CQ2): The posited mechanism (homogeneity → trust → public goods) has plausible rivals. First, state capacity and bureaucratic quality produce both trust and effective public goods (without requiring homogeneity). Second, inclusive, impartial institutions manufacture civic trust by enforcing fairness across groups. Third, developmental/industrial policy, education, and rule of law directly drive success, and can raise trust in diverse settings. Therefore, there are competing mechanisms that fit the same observations just as well, weaking the abductive claim and P3/P4.
C. Confounding and reverse causality (W3–W4; CQ4–CQ5): The confounders (State capacity/history/industrial policy) can produce both apparent cohesion (or the capacity to manage diversity) and success. There is also risk of reverse causality. Successful, safe, high-opportunity countries attract immigration, which reduces homogeneity over time—so homogeneity cannot be the stable cause of success where success is precisely what erodes it.
D. Measurement and category problems (W2): “Homogeneity” can mean ethnicity, language, religion, or values; these diverge. “Trust” has bonding (in-group) vs bridging (across groups) forms; the policy-relevant form is bridging trust, often produced by fair institutions, not common ancestry. “Success” bundles GDP, health, safety, equality—each with distinct drivers. If key constructs are equivocal, the alleged macro causal chain is unstable.
E. Context and boundary conditions (W5; CQ6): The homogeneity → trust effect (where present) is contingent: it weakens or flips depending on governance quality, inequality, segregation, and elite incentives. Diversity coupled with strong, impartial institutions frequently yields innovation, scale effects, trade linkages, and resilience—benefits unaccounted for in the homogeneity thesis.

Let's consider just a few obvious counter-examples. These clearly counter the narrative that homogeneity alone leads to prosperity. Structural factors like institutions, governance, economic policies, education, and infrastructure have a much greater empirical influence on development outcomes.

North Korea (ethnically homogeneous, yet repressive and impoverished)
Somalia or South Sudan (relatively homogenous in some regions but still struggling due to conflict, corruption, and instability)
Honduras or El Salvador (not hyper-diverse, yet suffering from inequality and violence)

Countries like Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, and Japan have succeeded primarily because of effective governance/low corruption, strong public institutions, universal healthcare, education, and welfare systems, and high investment in human capital. These are the product of deliberate social and economic planning, not merely the result of shared ethnicity. Ironically for the conservative, these countries are highly secular and progressive by global standards. Sweden has one of the highest rates or irreligioisity in the world. Japan blends Shintoism and Bhudism but is largely non-dogmatic and secular. In denmark and sweden, religious practice is very minimal. These traits contrast sharply with the values of many conservatives who advocate for religious traditionalism, raising the question of why they praise societies that contradict many of their core values.

So this argument is a clear-cut case of an incredibly weak correlation to causation argument that's subject to biased sampling, ignores alternatives/confounders, and is fragile in scope. It fails when alternatives offer equal or better fit. There is no reason to think in general, that homogeneity is a causal determinant of national success. Countries succeed when they develop capable, impartial institutions that deliver public goods, constrain predation, and foster human capital and productive investment. Such institutions can manufacture civic trust even in heterogeneous societies; without them, even homogeneous societies can stagnate. Focusing on institutional quality, universalistic welfare, equal protection, education, industrial policy, and anticorruption works regardless of ethnic composition. This is consistent with Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson's Nobel prize winning research into the political and economic instituitions that affect a nation's prosperity. So, not only is the homogeneity argument extremely weak, it's completely inconsistent with how economists think about national success.

So why the selective admiration? This often stems from ideological framing. The argument around homogeneity often serves as a proxy for debates on immigration, multiculturalism, and national identity. By holding up Scandinavian or Japanese societies as "proof" of the dangers of diversity, conservatives attempt to validate anti-immigration or assimilationist positions—while glossing over the complexities and contradictions in those examples. This is not just "bad reasoning", there is a propagandistic logic behind the argument. The function of the argument outweighs its validity. The goal is not to persuade rationally, but to construct emotional, identity-reinforcing narratives that justify predetermined conclusions.

Cherry-picking and confirmation bias are mechanisms of narrative construction. They are not just examples of sloppy reasoning; they are deliberate misuses of data, used as a rhetorical tool to bolster a pre-existing ideological narrative, not discover truth. The causal fallacies are not just bad analysis. They work by simplifying complex sociololitical outcomes into a single digestable scapegoat or magical ingredient. This serves the function of simplifying the world into morally clear categories for propaganda: “Their country is successful because it is homogenous. Ours is failing because we’re too diverse.” Propaganda often works not through blatant lies, but by what it leaves out. People who advance this argument strategically omit social democratic policies of Scandinavia, the religious secularism in these societies, the egalitarian gender norms, and the fact that they are welfare states. These omissions sanitize the narrative and make it easier to co-opt the prestige of these countries to justify unrelated agendas (like xenophobic nationalism). The argument is a clear example of motivated reasoning for identity protection. It's advanced to protect collective identity (white nationalism) and to provide a post-hoc rationalization for deeply felt anti-immigration sentiments. So, when someone cites “Japan” or “Norway” as proof of homogeneity’s success, they’re not appealing to reason—they’re appealing to an emotional, identity-centric worldview. The argument becomes ritualized: repeated not because it's sound, but because it feels right to those who already agree.

Instead of acknowledging how social safety nets or good governance produce success, the propagandist reframes the issue into something essentialist and immutable: “It’s just who they are.” It taps into ethno-nationist myths, civilizational superiority narratives, and fear of outsiders. It's not designed to convince skeptics or engage intellectually with the world. Its used to signal in-group beliefs, silence dissent, reinforce tribal identities, and justify a policy position. It fulfills a strategic ideological function.

Non Sequitur: Christian Nation Fallacy

This example is not just a fallacious argument, but an entire movement to rewrite history for political ends. I want to focus on the core argument behind the normative conclusion, because I think people get too concerned with the factual disputes underlying the argument. These factual disputes involve arguing about whether the American Founding Fathers were Christian and to what extent. The argument relies upon quite absurd assumptions about "what makes" something "Christian"; in other words, the criteria implicit in the argument for "Christian Making" are absurd when you investigate them. Let's grant for the sake of argument, that every significant decision maker involved in drafting the constitution was a Christian. It simply does not follow, that if any or all of the founding fathers were Christian, that this is a Christian nation. It does not follow, it’s a non sequitur. The assumption “because person X has property P , property P transfers to anything X does” is absurd. The argument typically goes as follows:

P1. The founding fathers were Christian
C. Therefore, this is a Christian nation.

And then this is used to justify theocracy

P1. If we are a Christian nation, then religion ought to be mixed with government
C. Therefore, we ought to mix religion and government

Both of these arguments have fundamentally flawed assumptions connecting their premises, I don’t even need to verify if the founding fathers were Christian, I don’t need to get into arguments over defining Christianity and whether it applied to them. It simply does not follow because of the absurd assumption connecting their premises to the conclusion. This idea of a “Christian nation” is vague and nonsensical anyway, and the argument depends heavily on that conceptualization. Even if I were charitable and said we are a Christian nation in the sense that many early inhabitants were Christian, it doesn’t not follow that our national identity is Christian. That’s pure nonsense. Furthermore, the term is ambiguous and vague but is used to justify theocracy, but as mentioned earlier, the second argument is fundamentally flawed because it’s based on these absurd assumptions that because “many people were Christian therefore the government was meant to be Christian” but ignores inconsistencies between the early structuring of government and society based on foundational documents and legal principles.

Even if every single founding father were a devout Christian (which they weren't), it wouldn't logically follow that the United States was intended to be, or is, a Christian nation in any legal, institutional, or constitutional sense.

Argument 1 (The Founding Fallacy), commits what we might call a fallacy of personal attribution; assuming the private beliefs of individuals dictate the public character of institutions they help create. It is identical to saying "Because Einstein was Jewish, the theory of relativity is a Jewish idea". That’s clearly nonsense. The personal beliefs of a creator or founder do not necessarily determine the essence or identity of what is created. Moreover, America’s founding documents—the Constitution in particular—are explicitly secular. The only reference to religion is in Article VI: "...no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States." That's not "Christian governance", it is explicit religious neutrality; explicit institutional secularism. Founders may bring personal beliefs to the table, but those beliefs do not automatically transfer to the structures they create—especially when those structures are explicitly designed to be neutral. The U.S. Constitution contains no mention of Christianity, Christ, the Bible, or divine authority.

Argument 2 (From Identity to Prescription), commits a naturalistic fallacy (deriving an ought from an is), and it also begs the question by assuming the very thing it tries to prove—that being a "Christian nation" justifies Christian governance. But even if it were true in a descriptive sense (e.g., "many Americans are Christian"), that doesn't logically imply normative governance by religious doctrine. That is a separate argument that must involve disputes about ideal/optimal/robust structuring of government. Moreover, the First Amendment makes it crystal clear: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof…” This clause protects religious pluralism and individual liberty, not Christian dominance.

The argument relies upon a strategic vagueness of the term "Christian Nation", and once you proceed to gain clarification, it's obvious nonsense. Does it mean, most citizens are Christians? The founders were Christian? The Constitution embeds Christian values? Government should enforce Christian doctrine? None of these definitions are equivalent, and the lack of clarity allows the term to function like a semantic Trojan horse; smuggling in religious authority under the guise of historical or cultural claims.

Even if early American culture was heavily influenced by Christian norms (which it was), this doesn't translate into a constitutional or legal identity. That’s the brilliance of the First Amendment: it guarantees freedom from state-sponsored religion even as it allows people to be as religious (or not) as they choose. The personal religion of founders does not define the legal nature of the nation they founded. Even if we concede cultural or demographic religiosity, it does not follow that political governance should be based on that religion. Arguments that label the U.S. a “Christian nation” in order to justify theocratic governance rely on logical fallacies, historical distortion, and vague rhetoric. They assume that personal belief dictates institutional design, that demographic majority entitles religious dominance, and that a culturally Christian past warrants a theocratic future. None of these conclusions follow from their premises. Historical evidence supports this reading. Many Founders were deists, not orthodox Christians. More importantly, even those who were Christian took great pains to intentionally separate church and state. Consider Thomas Jefferson’s famous 1802 letter to the Danbury Baptists: “...thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”

This really should be the end of the "debate"; unless someone can justify the absurd assumption linking the premises to the conclusion, it's simply not worth considering. “America is a Christian nation” functions less as history and more as a propaganda frame. Here’s how and why it sticks:

The argument embeds glittering generalities that are strategically ambiguous. “Christian nation” is a feel-good, undefined slogan. Because it’s vague, different audiences can project whatever they like onto it—cultural nostalgia, moral order, biblical law—without the speaker ever committing to a precise, falsifiable claim. That’s textbook propaganda technique. The argument exploits transfer and halo effects. The phrase deliberately associates Christianity with revered symbols (the Founders, the Constitution, the flag) so that the esteem we give those symbols rubs off on present-day political goals. This “transfer” bypasses analysis: if the Founders are sacred and they were Christian, then privileging Christianity must be patriotic. (That’s why inconvenient primary sources—like the 1797 Treaty of Tripoli stating the U.S. government “is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion”—get omitted.) The use of selective history is a textbook propaganda method. Advocates highlight isolated quotations and folk legends while omitting contradicting evidence (Article VI’s ban on religious tests; the Establishment Clause; founder debates). This method is explicit in organized campaigns such as Project Blitz, which uses incremental bills (“In God We Trust” displays, Bible-class bills) to normalize the frame that America is distinctly Christian before moving to more coercive measures. Despite being easily refuted, the argument relies on repetition and the illusory-truth effect. People rate repeated claims as truer even when they know better. A robust cognitive-psychology literature shows that repetition breeds plausibility; that’s why the slogan endures across sermons, talk radio, school walls, and stump speeches. It is entirely based on motivated reasoning and fuses identity to the argument. Once “Christian nation” is fused with American identity, rejecting the slogan can feel like rejecting the nation or one’s faith. Under identity threat, corrections don’t travel far—sometimes they even boomerang. (The “backfire effect” is mixed, but the core point stands: identity filters facts.) And like mentioned earlier, historical revisionism is a common feature of propaganda. A cottage industry of popularizers presents selective quotes as “expert history.” The best-known example is David Barton, whose Jefferson Lies was pulled by its own Christian publisher for factual problems—yet the narrative lives on, precisely because it’s politically useful.

The argument serves a much broader propagandistic role. It normalizes privileging one faith in public space. “Christian nation” frames government neutrality as “hostility to religion” and paints privilege (state-endorsed bible verses, monuments, curricula) as mere “heritage.” Bills forcing “In God We Trust” in classrooms are explicitly marketed as low-conflict first steps. It creates a moral permission structure that bolsters a policy agenda. If the nation is properly Christian, then policies disadvantaging non-Christians or dissenting Christians can be reframed as restoration rather than imposition. Surveys show a distinct constituency that wants government to declare the U.S. a Christian nation and sees political events in providential terms. Lastly, it mobilizes a grievance coalition. The frame forges an “us” (real Americans) versus “them” (secular elites, religious minorities) narrative that’s highly effective for turnout and fundraising, as detailed by researchers and journalists covering Christian nationalism as a political—not theological—movement.

This is already having political implications. The Texas GOP in 2024 leaned into explicitly Christian-nationalist rhetoric in its platform and convention messaging; state leaders pushed Ten Commandments displays in classrooms as “heritage.” Analyses of House Speaker Mike Johnson’s rhetoric and record describe a governing vision aligned with Christian nationalism—using history claims to justify privileging one religion in public life. PRRI’s multi-year surveys map adherents and sympathizers of Christian nationalism across the states, showing how the frame organizes attitudes about whose religion should shape law. This is not just a "theoretical dispute"; it is literally happening.

This nonsense persists because it becomes "common sense". It's simple and identity-affirming, bundling faith and nostalgia into an easy story to propagate. It's repeated across institutions like churches, partisan media, advocacy groups, etc. making it feel self-evident. There are social costs of dissent. In many Christian communities, challenging the slogan risks being labeled anti-Christian. Lastly, decontextualized founding father quotes are quite easy to streamline and propagate. This creates a massive historical illiteracy. Public understanding of the founding gets replaced by a mythos, despite abundant primary sources to the contrary. Once normalized, the frame can justify more aggressive measures (e.g., privileging one faith in law, election rules framed as “spiritual warfare”). Which we literally see this language every fucking day. The “Christian nation” line does double duty. It’s not serious history; it’s a propaganda frame that (1) pre-justifies policy and (2) claims credit for everything people already like.

The first move is to redefine the past so current proposals feel like restoration instead of change. The effect: “we’ve always been a Christian nation” feels true, bills that privilege one faith read as continuity, not imposition. Networks such as Project Blitz explicitly lay out a staircase: start with “low-conflict” symbols (e.g., “In God We Trust” in schools), then climb to curriculum changes and religious exemptions. The playbooks describe normalizing measures as step one toward privileging a particular religious vision in law. This is the tactics pipeline explicated in proposals like project blitz. The myth manufactures a moral warrant for privileging one faith in public policy: “We’re only returning to what America is.” The second move is to fuse Christianity with “everything good” — liberty, prosperity, the Founders’ genius — so gratitude for those goods becomes loyalty to the movement advancing this narrative. The effect: in a period of declining cultural dominance, the claim functions like a brand maintenance campaign: “You can’t forget us; we made this.” The slogan attaches Christian identity to revered national symbols (Founders, Constitution, flag) so esteem for the symbols rubs off on contemporary agendas. This is classic propaganda technique: transfer/halo via repetition and selective memory. (Note: repetition alone increases perceived truth — the illusory-truth effect — even without evidence.) Once the myth fuses with group identity (“real Americans are Christian”), challenges feel like attacks on self. People then filter facts to protect identity, which helps the frame persist despite counter-evidence.

As a counter rhetorical or counter propaganda strategy, we could allow them the premise. Suppose we grant the nation is a “Christian nation”. One could easily argue then, that the genocides caused by the manifest destiny doctrine was Christian, segregation was Christian, etc. by taking this revisionist stance, you inherit all of the bad historical events as well that are directly tied to the religious belief. They would obviously not accept this conclusion, which would beg the question as to what a “Christian nation” even means, which would show their special pleading and persuasive redefinition tactics. Just exposing this could be an anti-strategy to this pattern of historical revisionism. I'm proposing a conditional-concession (grant the premise temporarily) to run a reductio that exposes the propaganda move.

So here is the counter-move: “Okay—let’s assume the U.S. is a ‘Christian nation.’ Then the same label must cover the policies and atrocities historically justified with Christian language. If not, what’s your rule?” The goal is to force them to either (a) own the harms as “Christian,” (b) define a consistent criterion that includes the good and the bad, or (c) drop the slogan. Any selective carve-out equates to special pleading. No one needs to overclaim “Christianity caused X.” You just need to show that the state and leading actors cloaked X in Christian identity or theology—which, under their premise, belongs inside the “Christian nation” ledger. For example:

Territorial conquest & Native dispossession (Manifest Destiny / Doctrine of Discovery): Manifest Destiny was explicitly framed as providential. John L. O’Sullivan argued expansion was “our manifest destiny,” invoking Providence and near-biblical rhetoric. The Supreme Court constitutionalized European Christian discovery norms in Johnson v. M’Intosh (1823); justifying U.S. title against Native nations and describing the “character and religion of [America’s] inhabitants” as the rationale by which Europe claimed ascendancy.
Forced assimilation of Native children (boarding schools): The U.S. Interior Department documents a vast federal system (1819–1969) of Indian boarding schools, many operated with church partners, to eradicate Indigenous culture; hundreds of deaths and burial sites are confirmed (Volumes I–II, 2022 & 2024).
Slavery and segregation defended with Christian authority: The Southern Baptist Convention formally acknowledged in 1995 that its founders defended slavery and that racism is tied to its past.
Bob Jones University v. United States (1983): a Christian institution claimed religious grounds for race-based policies; the Court upheld IRS revocation of tax-exempt status.
White supremacist terror draped in Christian symbols: The KKK long presented its cross-burnings as religious rites and wrapped its nativist program in white Protestant identity.

If “Christian nation” means “our heritage and institutions,” these are part of that heritage and those institutions. If abolition, hospitals, and charity are counted as ‘Christian,’ then so are Indian removal doctrine, boarding schools, Jim Crow rationales, and the Klan’s ‘Christian’ pageantry—unless you have a rule that includes the good and the bad. If they keep the wins (“Christian hospitals”) but jettison the losses (“not really Christian”), point out they’re rebranding outcomes ex post to preserve the halo—i.e., propaganda by persuasive redefinition. But this is precisely what happens in these nonsense debates. If they propose a principled, symmetric rule for what counts as “Christian,” great—now it’s a definitional debate, not a myth that smuggles policy.

Kettle Logic: Theodicies

I'll probably get some pushback from this section, but I think I can make a relatively strong case. I've come to notice that collectively, the available theodicies act as kettle logic. This is a rhetorical device where one uses multiple arguments to defend a point, but the arguments are mutually inconsistent. Someone might argue that god allows evil because of A, then later because of B, but A and B are inconsistent in someway; perhaps assumptions are incompatible or maybe they rely on contradictory sets of evidence. This is an example of kettle logic. You must either accept A or B, or find some argument C that unions A and B to resolve the inconsistencies. Often in discourse, someone will advance A, but when there is pushback they will switch to B, without realizing they are committing to a different set of metaphysical assumptions that are conflicting. Mutually incompatible moves are stitched together to block specific objections, even though they can’t all be true at once. First lets look at the theodicies, along with their problems, and then identify how they are mutually inconsistent:

Free Will Theodicy: God gave humans free will, and evil results from humans misusing that freedom. A world with free will is more valuable than one without it, even if that freedom is sometimes used to do evil.

Counter-Apologetic Rebuttal:
- Logical flaw: Free will doesn't necessitate the possibility of doing horrific evil (e.g., genocide, child abuse). A range of moral options could exist without including extreme suffering.
- Heaven problem: If Heaven is a place where people have free will but do not sin, then God can create a world with free will and no evil. Why not create that from the start?
- Natural evil objection: Free will does not explain natural evils like earthquakes, disease, or tsunamis that kill and maim without human involvement.
- Omniscience issue: God would have foreseen all the evil that would come from creating free creatures. Choosing to actualize such a world makes Him responsible for the outcomes.
Soul-Making Theodicy (Irenaean Theodicy): Suffering and evil are necessary for spiritual growth and moral development. Just as resistance builds strength, challenges help develop virtues like courage, compassion, and faith.

Counter-Apologetic Rebuttal:
- Disproportionate suffering: Many people suffer horrendously and die without any chance of moral growth—e.g., infants, victims of genocides. Their suffering cannot be framed as "soul-making."
- Unjust distribution: The amount and intensity of suffering varies drastically across individuals. A just God wouldn’t arbitrarily allow some people to suffer so much more than others.
- Non-participants: Animals also suffer (e.g., prey torn apart, disease) without any capacity for soul-making or moral development. This undermines the notion that suffering exists for human growth.
- Alternative methods: An omnipotent God could devise less brutal ways to foster character without resorting to horrific suffering.
Greater Good Theodicy: Evil is allowed because it ultimately brings about a greater good, which could not be realized without it. God's ways are higher than ours; we may not understand the full picture.

Counter-Apologetic Rebuttal:
- Means-ends morality: Allowing intense suffering as a means to an end is morally problematic. A being that does this would be considered malevolent by human standards.
- Unknown goods: Claiming "greater goods" we cannot comprehend is unfalsifiable and appeals to ignorance. It removes any moral framework for judging actions, allowing atrocities to be justified if they supposedly lead to unknown goods.
- Incoherent omnipotence: If God is omnipotent, He could bring about the greater good without permitting evil or suffering.
- Trivial examples: Common suffering often doesn't lead to any observable good. E.g., a child dying of cancer brings grief, not apparent greater good.
Punishment Theodicy: Evil and suffering are punishments for sin—either individual sins (as in some conservative views) or humanity's collective fall from grace (as in Original Sin).

Counter-Apologetic Rebuttal:
- Collective punishment: Punishing people today for sins committed by others (e.g., Adam and Eve) is unjust by any rational moral standard.
- Disproportionality: Many suffer far more than others for seemingly lesser wrongs, or no wrongdoing at all. The punishment does not fit the crime.
- Innocent victims: Infants, animals, and those unaware of any religious law also suffer. Punishment makes no sense for beings without moral agency.
- Incompatible with grace: Christianity simultaneously claims that Jesus died for our sins (atonement), yet also says we suffer for sin. Why both punishment and forgiveness?
Best of All Possible Worlds Theodicy (Leibnizian): God, being perfect, created the best of all possible worlds. Any world with less suffering would also be less good in some important way we may not understand.

Counter-Apologetic Rebuttal:
- Absurd consequences: If this is the best possible world, then God's standards are disturbingly low. A world without plagues, torture, or genocide would be better.
- Better alternatives are conceivable: It’s easy to imagine a world with less suffering and still significant moral freedom and development (e.g., no childhood cancer, no natural disasters).
- Assumes zero moral improvement is possible: Suggesting this world is the best denies even the idea of moral or technological progress—an obviously false assumption.
- Complacency danger: It justifies suffering instead of addressing it, which is morally and practically dangerous.
Privation Theodicy (Augustinian): Evil is not a created "thing" but a privation (lack) of good—like darkness is a lack of light. God created everything good; evil arises when beings turn away from that goodness.

Counter-Apologetic Rebuttal:
- Semantic evasion: Calling evil a “lack” doesn’t lessen the horror of real suffering. It merely reframes the issue without addressing the suffering's cause.
- God still responsible: Even if evil is a privation, God created beings capable of falling into that privation. This doesn't absolve Him of responsibility.
- Natural evil left unexplained: How is an earthquake or a virus a “privation of good”? They seem to be active agents of destruction, not just absences.
- Anthropocentric and vague: It over-intellectualizes evil in a way that ignores emotional and physical reality.
Mystery or Skeptical Theism: We cannot expect to understand God's reasons. His wisdom and perspective are infinitely greater than ours, so we should trust that evil has a purpose beyond our grasp.

Counter-Apologetic Rebuttal:
- Epistemic nihilism: If we can't assess God's actions or reasons at all, then we can't say anything meaningful about Him—including that He is good.
- Moral paralysis: It removes any moral standard by which God's actions can be judged. Even the most horrifying events could be “good” in unknown ways, making morality incoherent.
- Double standard: This reasoning wouldn’t be accepted in defense of human actions ("Maybe Hitler had reasons we can't understand").
- Undermines religion itself: If God is so unknowable that we can't understand why He permits evil, how can we claim to understand His will, commands, or love?
Divine Testing Theodicy: Suffering is a test of faith or a trial meant to reveal character and loyalty to God, like the story of Job.

Counter-Apologetic Rebuttal:
- Cruelty disguised as a test: Subjecting people to trauma to “test” them would be morally reprehensible by human standards. It treats people as means to an end.
- Unfair distribution of tests: Some people endure far more suffering than others. If it's a test, it’s highly unequal and rigged.
- No informed consent: A test usually involves informed participation. Most people are unaware they’re being tested by divine standards they never agreed to.
- Incompatible with grace: If salvation is by faith or grace, then why is testing necessary?
Satanic Theodicy: Much evil is caused by Satan or demonic powers, not God. God permits this for a greater cosmic plan involving free will or spiritual warfare.

Counter-Apologetic Rebuttal:
- God’s complicity: If God allows Satan to cause suffering and refuses to intervene, He's still responsible. An all-powerful being could stop evil caused by lesser beings.
- Mythological foundation: This relies on accepting a supernatural worldview, which lacks independent verification and seems ad hoc.
- Fails to address natural evil: Demons causing tsunamis or diseases stretches plausibility and undermines scientific understanding.
- Raises more questions: Why would God create or allow a powerful evil being to roam freely? This introduces a dualism that weakens monotheism.
Process Theology or Open Theism Defense: God is not omnipotent in the classical sense; He is evolving with creation and cannot unilaterally prevent evil. He suffers with us but cannot fully control events.

Counter-Apologetic Rebuttal:
- Rejection of classical theism: This is not a theodicy so much as a redefinition of God. It avoids the problem of evil by denying God’s power, which makes worship and prayer seem futile.
- No assurance of justice: If God is not in control, then evil may go unpunished and suffering unresolved. It undercuts hope for ultimate redemption or justice.
- Unorthodox: Most major theistic traditions reject this view, making it an unsatisfactory answer within mainstream religion.

Theodicy move	Key metaphysical commitment	Conflicts with…	Why it’s a problem
Free-Will (libertarian): moral evil from undetermined choice	Significant libertarian freedom; God permits but doesn’t determine sins; robust foreknowledge	Best-possible-world (implies global optimization), Calvinist/compatibilist providence (God determining choices), Heaven (free yet no sin)	If God can realize free will without sin in Heaven, why not here? If God optimizes worlds, why this one with horrors?
Soul-Making (Irenaean): suffering builds virtue	Suffering is instrumentally necessary for growth; “epistemic distance” from God	Punishment/Original Sin (retributive causality), Privation (evil as mere lack, not tool), Skeptical theism (we can’t know reasons)	It can’t both be deserved punishment and pedagogical tool, and using a “lack” as an instrument is incoherent.
Best of all possible worlds (Leibniz)	God actualizes an overall optimum	Fall narrative (a worse world than the initial creation), Open/Process (God can’t ensure optimality), Free-will + preventable extremes	“Best” jars with obvious, easily-improved features (e.g., pediatric cancers).
Privation (Augustine): evil = lack of good	Evil has no positive being	Soul-making/Greater-good (evil used as means), Satanic agency (positive causal power), Natural evil (active destructive processes)	Treating evil as a tool presumes positive causal roles; earthquakes aren’t mere absences.
Skeptical theism: God’s reasons are beyond us	We can’t assess God’s reasons	Any specific theodicy (which claims to know reasons), Moral knowledge (used elsewhere in theology)	You can’t both say “we can’t know” and then specify “it’s for free will/soul-making/etc.” without toggling standards ad hoc.
Punishment/Original Sin	Suffering is just desert (individual or inherited)	Soul-making (non-retributive), Divine goodness (collective punishment/infants/animals), Atonement (if sins are paid, why punish?)	Retribution for those without agency (infants, animals) or for others’ sins is unjust.
Natural-law theodicy: stable laws entail risks	God values regularity; minimal interference	Miracles (frequent targeted suspensions), Demonic causation (non-lawlike interventions), Best-possible-world	If God often intervenes (scripture, prayer claims), why not to avert the worst horrors?
Satanic/demonic agency	Powerful evil agents cause suffering	Classical omnipotence/providence (God permits but could prevent), Natural-law (randomness vs agency), Privation	Introduces quasi-dualism; God’s non-intervention reintroduces the same problem.
Open theism/Process	God lacks exhaustive foreknowledge/omnipotence	Classical theism (simplicity, immutability, omnipotence), Best-possible-world	Solves some tensions by shrinking God, but then abandons what many apologists elsewhere assume.

A good theory is simple, coherent, and predictively successful. Switching between mutually inconsistent modules (“it’s punishment,” “it’s for growth,” “we can’t know why,” “demons did it,” “laws require it,” “it’s the best world”) sacrifices coherence and adds ad-hoc complexity. Each extra, incompatible auxiliary lowers prior credibility (extra moving parts) and often doesn’t raise the likelihood of the data (the pattern and distribution of suffering). A disjunction of theodicies (“it’s one of these”) still pays a simplicity penalty unless you supply a unifying meta-theory. Skeptical theism, used as a shield, undercuts positive God-talk needed by other theodicies (“God values X for reason Y”). You can’t keep and eat that cake. If someone wants to avoid kettle logic, they need a package deal that hangs together—and own the trade-offs. For example, the augustinian-Libertarian package consists of Privation + libertarian free will + natural-law regularities + eschatological compensation. But this comes at the cost of Heaven/foreknowledge tension; animal/natural evil poorly explained; and arbitrary distribution of horrors. Another example is the Irenaean-Evolutionary Package consisting of Soul-making via evolutionary world + epistemic distance + afterlife defeat of suffering. This one also has costs; it instrumentalizes victims (esp. animals/children); seems morally objectionable; and has a huge burden to show necessity. Another common example is the Calvinist/Compatibilist Package: Meticulous providence; evil ordained/permitted for God’s glory; no libertarian freedom. This one has numerous costs as well. It Makes God the determiner of evils and strains claims of perfect goodness and justice. All the major theodicies function collectively as kettle logic because each one fixes different—and often contradictory—answers to the core metaphysical questions (What can God do? What does God know? What is evil? Why not intervene? What causes natural evil? What is freedom like in Heaven?). In debate, apologists routinely pivot among them, so the ensemble maintains the belief while sacrificing coherence. This is how it functions as kettle logic.

Free-will defense vs Heaven: If (a) libertarian freedom explains sin here, but (b) the saved have freedom without sin in Heaven, then an omnipotent God could have made that arrangement from the start. To escape, one must deny at least one of: robust freedom, omnipotence, or sinlessness in Heaven. In practice the discussion toggles between them—classic kettle logic.
Privation vs “greater-good” instrumentation: Augustine says evil is a lack of good. Greater-good and soul-making theodicies treat evil as a tool that produces goods. A mere lack can’t be wielded as an instrument. The usual pivot: “Evil is lack” when facing the “God created evil” charge; “evil produces virtues” when asked why horrors are permitted.
Natural-law regularity vs miracle culture: Natural-law theodicy claims God rarely intervenes so creatures can rely on stable laws (hence earthquakes, viruses). Yet the same apologetic ecology affirms frequent, targeted interventions (scriptural miracles; answered prayers). You can’t both appeal to non-intervention to justify disasters and advertise routine suspensions when it helps humans.
Punishment/Original Sin vs Soul-making: Punishment is retributive desert; soul-making is pedagogical. They justify the same suffering with incompatible moral logics. When collective punishment of innocents looks unjust, the switch to “development” appears; when soul-making looks cruel (children, animals), the switch back to “justice” or “mystery” appears.
Best-possible-world vs Fall & Eschatology: Leibniz says this world is optimal; the Fall narrative says it’s a damaged downgrade; eschatology promises a better future world. All three cannot be true without contortions. In debate, whichever horn is pressed, advocates slide to another.
Skeptical theism vs every specific reason-giving theodicy: “Skeptical theism” claims we can’t know God’s reasons. But free-will, soul-making, natural-law, punishment, and best-world do claim to know them. The move oscillates: specify a reason until it’s challenged, then retreat to “mystery,” then specify a different reason when the topic changes.
Satanic agency vs monotheistic providence & privation: Appealing to demons gives evil positive causal power and implies God’s non-intervention in the face of preventable harm. That jars with both privation talk and meticulous providence. It’s invoked for moral evils, dropped when natural evil or divine sovereignty is in view.

A hypothetical dialogue might look like this:

Moral evil? “Free will.”
Natural evil? “Stable laws; God won’t tinker.”
But miracles & answered prayers? “God sometimes intervenes.”
Why not for genocides/children’s cancers? “Soul-making / greater goods.”
That instrumentalizes victims. “It’s punishment for sin/the Fall.”
Collective punishment is unjust. “We can’t fathom God’s reasons (mystery).”
So you don’t know the reason? “Actually, demons play a role…”
Why create/allow demons? “Free will again.”
Then why freedom without sin in Heaven? “It’s transformed freedom/compatibilism.”
Then free-will defense fails here. “This is the best possible world.”
But scripture promises a better one. “That’s eschatology; different category.”

Each step blocks this objection by contradicting the premise used two steps ago. The aggregate behaves like a disjunction machine: for every datum of suffering, the set contains some incompatible story that can be slotted in to preserve the conclusion “God is good.” Some might argue that this is cumulative evidence, but this is clearly kettle logic. The choice of defense tracks the objection, not prior commitments. That’s a hallmark of defensive rhetoric, not explanation. A genuine theory constrains expectations about where and how much suffering should occur. Theodicies, taken together, are compatible with any pattern—another sign of a protective patchwork.

Theodicies answer the same questions with conflicting premises. In practice, defenders rotate among them as objections change. The rotation preserves the conclusion while sacrificing consistency. Therefore, as a set, theodicies function like kettle logic: a many-headed, mutually inconsistent defense designed to be unfalsifiable across cases rather than explanatory in any one case. Outside theology, “kettle logic” (piling up incompatible defenses) is a feature, not a bug, of modern propaganda. the aim isn’t to converge on a true story; it’s to overload attention, fracture consensus, and give every supporter something to cling to. here’s how it works:

Firehose Dynamics: High-volume, multichannel messaging pushes many claims—fast, repetitive, shameless about inconsistency. In this environment, contradictions don’t penalize the speaker; they just increase surface area for persuasion and make correction infeasible. The RAND “firehose of falsehood” model documents why this works even without commitment to truth or consistency. It Simultaneously pushes clashing accounts of an event to blur attribution and exhaust verification—classic firehose tactics.
Audience Segmentation: Different segments accept different stories; broadcasting inconsistent lines lets each subgroup pick the one that fits its priors. The overall coalition is held together by identity/loyalty, not shared facts. Research on conspiracy thinking shows people will endorse even mutually incompatible conspiracy claims when they serve a higher‐order worldview of distrust. Multiple incompatible plots circulate (e.g., a figure is both dead and secretly alive). What ties them together is mistrust of institutions, not logical coherence.
Cognitive Overload and Asymmetry: Rapid-fire, many-claims-at-once (“Gish gallop”) overwhelms the opponent’s bandwidth. Even if each point is weak, answering them all takes more time than making them, and unanswered points leave residue in memory (illusory truth effects).
Manufactured Uncertainty: When action depends on consensus (public health, climate), flooding the space with conflicting frames (“it’s not happening / it’s natural / it’s good for us / it’s too costly to fix”) can stall policy even if none of the frames are individually strong. This “merchants of doubt” playbook is well-documented across tobacco, acid rain, and climate campaigns.
Information Disorder Ecology: Contradictory narratives propagate because platforms reward engagement, not coherence. Wardle & Derakhshan’s framework (mis-, dis-, and mal-information) explains how mixed-quality, cross-purpose content pollutes the infosphere and erodes common ground.

I think media ecology can be insightful for understanding how kettle logic functions propagandistically. Media ecology is the study of media as environments—how the properties of communication technologies (print, TV, platforms, feeds, memes, etc.) shape perception, attention, values, social organization, and ultimately culture. The idea traces to McLuhan (“the medium is the message”), with the term popularized by Neil Postman; the Media Ecology Association sums it up as examining how media environments “impose on human beings certain ways of thinking, feeling, and behaving.” Kettle logic can be thought of as flooding the space with mutually inconsistent defenses so that something sticks. Specific media environments make this tactic incredibly effective.

Modern “firehose of falsehood” propaganda thrives by being rapid, repetitive, and notably unconcerned with consistency. That’s not a bug; it’s an affordance of the medium (24/7 feeds, bots, cross-platform reposts). The volume and speed outpace corrections. High-volume, multichannel flow rewards inconsistency. In fast formats (TV panels, short-form video, timelines), the “Gish gallop” works: it’s cheaper to assert 10 weak points than to carefully rebut one. The medium’s time constraints turn contradiction into a feature. This means that attention asymmetry favors quantity of quality. Algorithmic personalization lets different sub-publics see different, even incompatible lines; each group keeps the version that fits its priors, while the coalition benefits from the whole contradictory bundle. Research shows people can simultaneously endorse incompatible conspiracy explanations when these serve a higher-order worldview. By segmenting audiences, you can normalize contradictions, effectively stopping people from digging deeper into the mutual incompatibilities. Platforms reward engagement more than coherence; mis-, dis-, and mal-information co-circulate. In that ecology, contradictions don’t cancel out—they accumulate and stall consensus and action. In short, media ecology gives the causal map from medium → incentives → discourse style, showing how today’s environments select for kettle-logic propaganda—and why simply pointing out contradictions often isn’t enough to neutralize it.

Malignant Exploitation of Uncertainty

I was listening to Richard Feynman's lectures on the scientific method. His specific dialogue recounting an experience with an interlocutor believing in "flying saucers" set off a light bulb. I realized that I've actually been seeing this pattern of argumentation everywhere. Lets first look at his comments before connecting this pattern to a bad arguments & propaganda:

Some years ago I had a conversation with a layman about flying saucers — because I am scientific I know all about flying saucers! I said "I don't think there are flying saucers'. So my antagonist said, "Is it impossible that there are flying saucers? Can you prove that it's impossible?" "No", I said, "I can't prove it's impossible. It's just very unlikely". At that he said, "You are very unscientific. If you can't prove it impossible then how can you say that it's unlikely?" But that is the way that is scientific. It is scientific only to say what is more likely and what less likely, and not to be proving all the time the possible and impossible. To define what I mean, I might have said to him, "Listen, I mean that from my knowledge of the world that I see around me, I think that it is much more likely that the reports of flying saucers are the results of the known irrational characteristics of terrestrial intelligence than of the unknown rational efforts of extra-terrestrial intelligence." It is just more likely. That is all."

I think this experience of his points to a broader argumentative or rhetorical tactic exploited by propagandists. Obviously, Richard’s interlocutor has a very weak argument. Nevertheless, its weakness doesn’t stop the proliferation of this type of “proof”. What I meant say is that, in the context of obvious bad arguments, ones like this that appeal to possibility are very appealing to people, and often take conspiratorial forms. For example in climate change debates, there often isn’t even a debate, one interlocutor merely asserts that “it’s possible that there’s a global conspiracy” therefore we cannot trust scientific research. People often use "possibility" to mean “possible therefore true” which is an obvious non-sequitur, but they also implicitly take it to mean “possible therefore more likely than any other conceivable possibility”. Let's analyze this argument, describing how it’s used as a form of propaganda, rather than it merely being a bad argument isolated from its specific propagandistic function.

Feynman’s little story is basically a miniature lesson in probabilistic thinking, and the way propagandists exploit our discomfort with it. At its core the move is:

Assert mere possibility: “It’s possible that P.”
Demand disproof: “Can you prove ¬P?”
Smuggle in a conclusion: “…so we should treat P as true or at least as likely as any alternative.”

Logically, it jumps from ◇P (P is not impossible) to P (P is true), or to “P is as plausible as Q,” without providing any evidence or base rate. It also flips the burden of proof: instead of offering evidence for P, it insists others eliminate all possible worlds where P holds—a bar humans can almost never meet. Why do people find this compelling?

Probability neglect / possibility effect: We overweight small possibilities—especially when they’re vivid, scary, or identity-affirming.
Availability + repetition: Repeating a possibility (“What if…?”) makes it feel familiar, and familiarity is misread as likelihood.
Ambiguity as virtue: “I’m just open-minded / asking questions” signals intellectual humility while quietly advancing a claim.
Absolutist standards for opponents: “Unless you can prove it’s impossible…” turns science’s normal uncertainty into a rhetorical cudgel.

In propaganda, the “possibility” move isn’t an isolated fallacy; it’s part of a playbook designed to manufacture doubt, stall action, and reframe credibility.

Doubt manufacturing (paralyze the audience): “You can’t rule out a cover-up; therefore, we can’t trust any evidence.” This converts normal scientific uncertainty into permanent stalemate (“We must wait for certainty”), which conveniently delays any policy, consensus, or accountability that would otherwise follow.
Burden-flip and unfalsifiability (immunize the claim): “If there’s no evidence, that’s because the conspiracy hides it. If there is evidence, that just shows how powerful the conspiracy is.” Any outcome is taken to confirm the possibility; the claim becomes non-disconfirmable while opponents face an impossible proof-of-impossibility demand.
Possibility ⇒ plausibility ⇒ default: Start with “maybe,” then through repetition and insinuation treat “maybe” as “on the table,” then as “the neutral middle,” and finally as the default stance (“we can’t trust anything else”). This shifts the prior without ever arguing for it. The audience forgets that the alternative requires extraordinary coordination, resources, and silence across many independent actors (which has a tiny base rate).
Gish-gallop of maybes (overload the referee): Firehose of “could be,” “what if,” “some say,” each too cheap to refute in limited time. Our attention is finite. Debunkers look evasive or pedantic; the speculator looks energetic and “curious.”
High-stakes laundering (Pascal’s wager twist): “Even a small chance of P with huge consequences means we must treat P as decisive.” This smuggles significance without establishing probability or mechanism; swaps impact for evidence.

Feynman was doing Bayes in plain English: compare explanations by prior probability (base rates, complexity, coordination cost) and likelihood (how well each explanation predicts the data without ad-hoc patches). “Misperception + rumor” has a massive prior and fits the noisy reports; “coordinated extraterrestrial visitation + perfect secrecy” has a tiny prior and gains no predictive edge. Put simply: not impossible ≠ likely; and “likely” must be earned by evidence × base rate, not by surviving someone’s impossible challenge to “prove the negative.” The problem is many people do not reason like this. Mere possibility and an enthusiastic testimonial have significant effects on the acceptability of a conclusion. Propagandists exploit this tendency. You can observe this in the media; baseless assertions predicated on mere "possibility" (normally arising from an unverified tweet), capture the public imagination. These "possibilities" are normally constructed not only to exploit this tendency, but also to appeal to our prejudices, making the possibility that much more salient. We should act on possibilities when three conditions hold: (1) credible mechanism, (2) non-trivial prior (base rates or analogous cases), and (3) decision stakes justify precaution with explicit trade-offs. That’s risk management. Propaganda skips (1) and (2), inflates (3), and calls it prudence. The “appeal to possibility” seems like open-minded skepticism, but as propaganda it’s a probability eraser. It replaces evidence and base rates with a rhetorical dare (“Disprove this!”), leverages human bias to overweight small chances, and then uses repetition and burden-shifting to turn “maybe” into “default.” Feynman’s cure still works: compare explanations by how simple, common, and predictive they are, and keep the burden where it belongs. Here are some typical micro-moves to watch for:

“Just asking questions” (JAQing): Questions posed to seed a possibility but carefully insulated from answers.
Motte-and-bailey: Retreat to the modest “It’s just possible” when challenged; return to the strong insinuation when unopposed.
Goalpost drift: Every disconfirmation is met with “but what about this other possibility…”
Selective uncertainty: Hyper-skeptical toward mainstream evidence; credulous toward any scrap that sustains the preferred possibility.

To spot the propagandistic version of this possibilities argument, ask these five questions and notice if the answer is evasive:

Base rate: Compared to history, how often do events like this actually happen? (Scale, secrecy, incentives matter.)
Mechanism: What concrete mechanism would make P work? Who does what, when, and with what constraints?
Predictions: What would we see more (or less) of if P were true versus false? (Demand likelihood ratios, not vibes.)
Falsifiability: What observation would change your mind? (If none, it’s not an investigation; it’s a narrative.)
Cost of patching: How many ad-hoc add-ons are needed to rescue P from counterevidence? (Each patch should lower your confidence.)
Check symmetry: “Do you apply the same ‘prove it impossible’ standard to claims that support your side?”
Separate stakes from probability: “High stakes don’t raise the chance your claim is true; they change risk management. Let’s do expected-value with uncertainty ranges.”

Now lets tie this into something more concrete. In politics, the “appeal to possibility” isn’t just sloppy reasoning; it’s a tool for agenda-setting, identity activation, and policy moves. It takes our normal uncertainty, welds it to latent fears or prejudices, and converts “maybe” into moral urgency or paralyzing doubt; whichever helps the goal.

Policy is made before evidence is complete. That gap is fertile ground for “what if…?” stories that outrun data. Parties compete to be guardians against threats. Hypothetical dangers are cheap to invoke and emotionally potent. There are also deeply embedded media incentives. Vivid, worst-case possibilities get attention; repetition makes them feel plausible. "Maybe" or "Possibly" becomes power:

Agenda setting: Float a dramatic possibility to decide what everyone talks about (e.g., “It’s possible the system is rigged”). Now opponents must disprove a negative instead of advancing their own priorities.
Burden shifting + paralysis: “Until you can rule out X, we can’t proceed.” This stalls regulation, investigations, or reforms that otherwise have evidential momentum.
Overton window ratchet: Repeated possibilities (“maybe schools are indoctrinating,” “maybe ballots are insecure,” “maybe migrants are criminals”) normalize extreme suspicions, moving proposals from fringe to “worth considering.”
Pretext creation: Hypotheticals justify hard policies: surveillance, bans, purges, or rollbacks (“Even if there’s a small chance, we must act”). Impact is substituted for probability.
Narrative immunity: If evidence is missing, that’s framed as proof of a cover-up. The claim becomes self-sealing.

This "possibility" logic fuses with prejudice and fear. Propaganda normally integrates into existing, highly motivating schemas, creating a multiplier effect. For example:

Outgroup threat: “It’s possible [outgroup] is dangerous” maps onto outgroup homogeneity bias (“they’re all like that”). A single vivid anecdote stands in for a category.
Moral contamination/disgust: “What if they’re corrupting our children/values?” activates disgust and purity norms; tiny probabilities feel intolerable.
Status loss anxiety: “What if they replace us / steal our jobs / vote illegally?” ties a hypothetical to fears of decline, making the cost of being wrong feel catastrophic.
Authority distrust: “What if the experts are colluding?” harnesses prior cynicism, turning ordinary uncertainty in science/governance into evidence of malice.
Stereotype fit: If a hypothetical aligns with a stereotype, it feels true, so the mind treats it as more probable than base rates warrant.

Here are some common political templates, and the mechanism they exploit:

“Security exception” template: “Even a small chance of catastrophic harm justifies extraordinary measures.” Mechanism: Pascal-style wager; swaps stakes for evidence.
“Rot at the core” template: “It’s possible the institutions are captured.” Mechanism: Global claim that can’t be falsified in finite time; any counter-evidence is “part of the capture.”
“Anecdote → epidemic” template: One shocking story becomes “this could be happening everywhere.” Mechanism: Availability bias; base rates vanish.
“Just asking questions” template: Serial hypotheticals posed as open-minded inquiry. Mechanism: Motte-and-bailey; retreat to “it’s only a possibility” when pressed, resume insinuation later.
“Pre-crime” template: “We must act now because harm could happen.” Mechanism: Shifts policy from evidence of harm to speculation about intent; legitimizes broad prophylactic controls.

And here is the playbook, from possibility to policy:

Seed a vivid hypothetical (often tied to an outgroup or distrusted elite).
Amplify with anecdotes and repetition until familiarity = perceived plausibility.
Demand impossible disproof (“until you can rule this out entirely…”).
Escalate the stakes (“If we’re wrong, we lose everything”), making expected-value talk sound callous.
Propose “common-sense” measures that incidentally advance preexisting goals (restriction, deregulation, surveillance, censorship, etc.).
Immunize: any failure to find confirming evidence proves the conspiracy’s skill; any counterexample is an exception.

There are often no base rates; you'll hear "could" and "might" but never "how often it occurs relative to alternatives". There are no falsifiers; asking "what would change your mind" gets you rhetorical bullshit. There is often asymmetric skepticism; someone advancing the "possibility" argument is often hyper-skeptical towards mainstream evidence but credulous towards rumors that flatter the narrative. And there is very often anecdotal inflation; one clip or story becomes a policy premise. In political discourse, “possibility” is weaponized to manufacture salience, freeze opponents, and green-light preferred policies by yoking hypotheticals to fear and prejudice. The antidote isn’t to deny possibility; it’s to discipline it (with priors, mechanisms, testable predictions, and symmetry checks) so that “maybe” stops masquerading as “must.”

Fig Leaf Arguments

Many arguments or contentions are typically just stand-ins for more absurd beliefs. For example, many people during Covid didn’t want to take the vaccines not because of skepticism about the vaccines being produced and distributed so quickly, but because of deeper religious convictions about it being “the mark of the beast”. Likewise, people often advance “national sovereignty” arguments against any form of global collaboration or legislation, when in reality they are influenced by conservative religious propaganda that states any form of global governance is Marxism, and Marxism is literally demonic. Another example is the anti-trans argument about women competing in sports; for many this is simply a cover for deeper convictions about denying the existence of trans people. Perhaps one of the best deflections is when it comes to climate change. A significant amount of people will cite pseudo-skeptical arguments (akin to what’s described in merchants of doubt) when in reality they hold to the belief that in principle humans cannot influence the climate because God controls everything.

This is a very common move in propaganda and everyday argument: using a respectable-sounding proxy to mask a less acceptable core commitment. The proxy is what’s said aloud (“safety,” “fairness,” “sovereignty”); the core is what’s driving it (eschatology, identity denial, anti-globalist theology). Think of it as pretextual or fig-leaf reasoning: a thin cover that provides plausible deniability while advancing the real aim. Here is what's happening under the hood:

Identity-protective cognition: People defend beliefs that anchor their religious/political identity. Evidence becomes a threat to group belonging, so debate shifts to safer proxies.
Public-reason laundering: Sectarian or extreme premises are translated into neutral-sounding policy talk to pass in public spaces (courts, schools, media).
Plausible deniability & coalition-building: Proxies keep unlikely allies together (someone uneasy about vaccines for mundane reasons can stand next to someone certain it’s the “mark of the beast”).
Rhetorical insulation: If one proxy is refuted, another can be swapped in. The core commitment never has to be examined.

Here is the typical sequence. First, start with the core conviction, typically identity-based or theological. Second, translate it into a principled proxy. This can be done by framing it as "safety" or "fairness". Third, weaponize uncertainty. By insisting on impossible standards or cherry-picking anomalies, the reframed argument appears more plausible. Fourth, shift the goalposts when objections are met. Lastly, retreat to the core when cornered or switch to a new proxy. Typically when shifted back to the core, the conversation is over because these are deeply entrenched beliefs not subject to rational or evidential scrutiny.

There are a variety of ways to identify the pretext fig-leaf pattern. Is there a stopping rule? If there is no evidence that would change someone's mind, the proxy is a shield. Is the selective consistency? If the stated principle is applied to the targeted issue, but not similar issues, it's likely a fig-leaf. Is there argument drift? When an objection is answered, a sign of a fig-leaf will be the appearance of new, unrelated arguments. Are there asymmetric standards? Often, fig-leaf arguments apply hyper-skepticism for disfavored sources, and credulity for congenial ones.

Fig-leaf propaganda is a two layer message. The front stage is a seemingly respectable, policy sounding claim. The back stage is the motivating commitment which is often absurd or irrational. Stage one masks stage two. Think of the “fig-leaf” as a propaganda interface: a public-facing rationale that launders a private or unpopular motive into something socially defensible. It’s not just bad reasoning; it’s a message strategy that (a) keeps coalitions together, (b) preserves plausible deniability, and (c) shifts debates onto terrain where the propagandist can’t really lose.

Lets map these concepts to the main arguments I presented earlier:

COVID Vaccines: “Safety” as a Fig Leaf for Apocalyptic Beliefs
- Back-stage core convictions
  - Eschatology and spiritual warfare frames. The vaccine is not merely a medical product in this lens; it is coded as a step in a prophetic drama—an entry point to a surveillance regime or a spiritual test of allegiance. References to the “mark of the beast” function as a totalizing interpretation through which bureaucratic procedures, QR codes, and public-health IDs are reimagined as signs of a looming anti-divine order. In this frame, accepting vaccination risks complicity with cosmic evil, making refusal a badge of fidelity.
  - Purity/defilement ethics. The body is treated as a sacred boundary that must be protected from artificial or morally suspicious substances. “Natural” immunity is valorized not only for biological reasons but because it preserves ritual purity; conversely, biomedical intervention carries a taint—corporate, governmental, or demonic—that threatens to defile the self. The spiritual logic is primary; empirical risk becomes secondary and is mobilized mainly to rationalize a foregone conclusion.
  - Providentialism and distrust of human interposition. Outcomes are believed to rest in God’s hands, and extensive human prevention can be framed as hubris or a lack of faith. Successes of medicine are reinterpreted as temptations to abandon reliance on providence, while adverse events are read as confirmation that divine order punishes such overreach.
  - Community-bound identity signaling. Refusal serves as a public ritual of loyalty to in-group narratives and leaders. Even when individuals privately waver, they may maintain refusal to avoid social costs, turning the position into a visible symbol of membership rather than a revisable judgment about evidence.
- Front-stage proxy
  - Safety/long-term effects as socially acceptable translation. Concerns are framed in secular language—“I just want more data”—because this idiom travels well in mainstream venues. The rhetorical move converts a theological boundary into a scientific-sounding prudence, allowing the speaker to claim reasonableness while keeping the spiritual premise offstage.
  - Process objections as neutral cover. Appeals to approval speed, mandates, or passport logistics present as procedural fairness critiques. In practice, these are often unfalsifiable placeholders: when one procedural hurdle is cleared, a new one is constructed, indicating the procedure is not the true issue.
  - Freedom/choice frames. The moral weight shifts from prophecy to civil liberties. This expands coalition size—libertarians, institutional skeptics, and eschatological audiences can all agree on a freedom script without agreeing on theology.
- Playbook mapping (step-by-step)
  - Translate. Replace explicit prophecy language with safety and liberty talk to lower reputational costs and broaden appeal.
  - Weaponize uncertainty. Elevate rare adverse events as dispositive, demand decades-long certainty standard no innovation can meet, and treat statistical baselines as suspect if they point toward safety.
  - Shift goalposts. As safety and efficacy data accumulate, pivot to mandates, then to data-integrity conspiracies, then to purity rhetoric—the conclusion (refusal) remains fixed while the stated reason migrates.
  - Rotate proxies. Cycle among natural immunity, pharma corruption, microchips, or ID systems so that every audience segment hears a reason it finds compelling, maintaining a stable endpoint via unstable justifications.
- How to spot the proxy (diagnostics)
  - Absence of a stopping rule. When pressed for a concrete evidentiary threshold (“What specific data would suffice?”), the answer stretches to infinity or dissolves into skepticism toward any imaginable source.
  - Selective perfectionism. Treatments with comparable or greater risk are accepted without fanfare, but vaccination uniquely requires flawless outcomes—signaling a hidden criterion unrelated to comparative risk.
  - Moral leakage under pressure. As empirical objections are addressed, explicitly religious or apocalyptic language resurfaces, revealing the concealed premise driving the stance.
  - Asymmetric trust networks. Consensus institutions are treated as inherently corrupted while fringe testimonies are granted immediate credence, consistent with identity-protective cognition rather than neutral appraisal.
- Why this is propaganda (mechanisms)
  - Glittering generalities with dog-whistle subtext. Terms like “freedom” and “safety” provide universal cover while signaling deeper meanings to the in-group, permitting deniability toward outsiders and solidarity among insiders.
  - Fear amplification via anomaly selection. Outlier anecdotes are curated to dominate perception, crowding out base-rate reasoning and manufacturing a sense of pervasive danger.
  - Card stacking and credential laundering. Selective citations and sympathetic experts are foregrounded to simulate balance while systematically excluding contrary weight of evidence.
- Productive response moves (practical)
  - Layer the dialogue explicitly. Separate empirical assessment from theological commitments, inviting a forthright values discussion rather than an endless proxy skirmish.
  - Negotiate thresholds. Propose concrete time-bound and outcome-bound criteria for revisiting the judgment; refusal to name thresholds indicates the proxy function.
  - Comparative risk mirrors. Place vaccine risks beside accepted everyday risks (common drugs, driving, air travel) to reveal selective perfectionism.
“National Sovereignty” as Cover for Anti-Globalist Theology
- Back-stage core convictions
  - Eschatological anti-globalism. International cooperation is reimagined as a spiritual hazard: an incubator for “one-world government,” a harbinger of Antichrist authority, or a portal for demonic ideologies. The policy question is thus pre-answered by sacred narrative: global structures are suspect regardless of content.
  - Sacralization of the nation. The nation becomes a quasi-religious object of loyalty; accepting external obligations is framed as moral contamination or betrayal. Moral status attaches to boundaries per se, not to the justice of outcomes achieved through cooperation.
  - Ideological hostility to supranational constraint. Human-rights and climate regimes are rejected in principle because they place collective limits on domestic discretion, which is construed as inherently virtuous when exercised by the nation.
- Front-stage proxy
  - Procedural constitutionalism. The argument is recast as a neutral defense of democratic control against “unelected bureaucrats.” The framing suggests a modest institutional repair when the underlying aim is categorical non-cooperation.
  - Competence skepticism. Doubts about the effectiveness of international bodies are emphasized, not to improve design, but to justify perpetual abstention—turning reformable defects into reasons for dismantlement.
- Playbook mapping (step-by-step)
  - Translate. Replace spiritual warfare rhetoric with civic-liberal language so the position appears grounded in public reason rather than sectarian doctrine.
  - Weaponize standards. Demand absolute non-delegation, unilateral vetoes, or instantaneous withdrawal rights that render genuine coordination impossible while maintaining the appearance of principle.
  - Shift goalposts. When treaties include reservations, opt-outs, or review mechanisms, pivot to cultural integrity or economic fatalism, preserving the anti-cooperation endpoint.
  - Rotate proxies. Cycle issues—climate, migration, health, trade—so opposition seems issue-specific though the underlying rule is “no binding coordination.”
- How to spot the proxy (diagnostics)
  - Asymmetric application. Defense pacts and trade blocs are embraced, but climate or rights treaties elicit alarm—evidence that “sovereignty” is selective rhetoric, not a general principle.
  - Infinite safeguard demand. No combination of oversight, judicial review, sunset clauses, or exit options is ever sufficient, indicating a concealed categorical objection.
  - Moral leakage. Under scrutiny, language reverts to apocalyptic or demonizing tropes, revealing the non-procedural core.
- Why this is propaganda (mechanisms)
  - Glittering generality of “sovereignty.” The term’s positive connotations smuggle in a presumption against cooperation without arguing the merits of specific agreements.
  - Transfer and flag-waving. Patriotic symbols and narratives are invoked to confer moral legitimacy on the anti-cooperation stance and to frame critics as disloyal.
  - Scare-text curation. Isolated clauses or worst-case hypotheticals are spotlighted while reciprocal benefits and safeguards are downplayed or ignored.
- Productive response moves (practical)
  - Specification drills. Ask which powers, under which oversight, with what exits—pressure that forces movement from slogan to design and exposes categorical refusal if it exists.
  - Counterfactual treaties. Offer high-oversight, high-exit designs and observe whether support materializes; persistent rejection signals a back-stage premise.
  - Parity tests. Apply the same standards to favored alliances to reveal whether “sovereignty” is principle or pretext.
Trans Women in Sports: “Fairness” as a Proxy for Identity Denial
- Back-stage core convictions
  - Gender essentialism as metaphysical baseline. Sex assigned at birth is treated as exhaustive and normatively binding. Because this is a metaphysical claim about what categories are real, empirical adjustments (eligibility rules, tiers, biometrics) cannot alter the desired endpoint of exclusion.
  - Categorical exclusion as moral protection. The integrity of women’s sports is defined such that any trans inclusion is a violation by definition. The conclusion is smuggled into the premise, foreclosing policy experimentation.
  - Protectionist imagery and tradition. Narratives of safeguarding girlhood, privacy, and heritage elevate the issue beyond evidence into the realm of sacred values, where compromise is framed as betrayal.
- Front-stage proxy
  - Fairness and safety as neutral vocabulary. The claim is presented as a universal concern any reasonable person could share. By abstracting from identity premises, it secures broader assent even among those not committed to categorical exclusion.
  - Institutional care rhetoric. The argument is couched as stewardship of women’s sports, deflecting attention from the underlying debate about who counts as a woman.
- Playbook mapping (step-by-step)
  - Translate. Identity denial is rephrased as evenhanded rule-making, creating a presumption that only technical calibration is at issue.
  - Weaponize standards. Demand unattainable equivalence (perfect parity across every event and physiology) or burdensome testing that functions as de facto exclusion.
  - Shift goalposts. When mitigations are proposed (tiers, event-specific criteria, monitored eligibility), pivot to privacy/safety, then to categorical bans, leaving inclusion impossible by any route.
  - Rotate proxies. Move from performance advantage to locker-room privacy to safeguarding childhood to claims about social contagion, ensuring a fresh rationale as each is addressed.
- How to spot the proxy (diagnostics)
  - Fixed endpoint with migrating reasons. No configuration of eligibility rules ever suffices; the policy outcome remains exclusion irrespective of empirical concessions.
  - Selective attention to disparities. Significant, well-documented inequities (funding gaps, coaching access, height or puberty variation, intersex inclusion) receive scant attention, revealing that “fairness” is selectively applied.
  - Moral essence talk. Under scrutiny, the discussion slides into claims about “real womanhood,” signaling the metaphysical core driving the position.
- Why this is propaganda (mechanisms)
  - Wedge framing and moral panic. The issue is cast as an urgent threat to women/children, activating protective instincts that short-circuit careful policy design.
  - Plain-folks laundering. The categorical endpoint is masked behind common-sense rhetoric—“I just want fairness”—which reads as moderation while entailing exclusion.
  - Salience manipulation. Rare outlier cases are elevated as typical, establishing an availability bias that crowds out base-rate analysis.
- Productive response moves (practical)
  - Declare the goal space. Ask explicitly whether the speaker seeks calibrated inclusion or categorical exclusion; clarity about endpoints prevents endless technical haggling.
  - Cross-apply fairness tests. Evaluate consistency by applying the same standard to height, puberty timing, and funding inequities; selective application signals pretext.
  - Design-and-commit experiments. Propose concrete, sport-specific eligibility models with review periods; refusal to consider pilots indicates a metaphysical rather than empirical dispute.
Climate Change: “Uncertainty” as Mask for Providentialism & Anti-Regulation
- Back-stage core convictions
  - Providentialism/dominion theology. Climate is construed as God-governed and therefore beyond human alteration or intervention. Efforts to mitigate are morally suspect—either futile, presumptuous, or an affront to divine order—so empirical findings cannot, in principle, generate an obligation to act.
  - Fixed anti-regulatory ideology. Constraints on fossil-fuel activity are rejected as distortions of market freedom and national strength. The policy verdict precedes the evidence: any science that implies regulation is treated as suspect by definition.
  - Identity economics. High-carbon industries and lifestyles are entwined with group identity; acceptance of mitigation can be read as betrayal of one’s people, livelihood, or region, raising the social cost of belief revision.
- Front-stage proxy
  - Epistemic skepticism reframed as methodological virtue. Uncertainty in models, natural variability, and historical climate shifts are emphasized to imply that no action is warranted, converting a quantitative margin of error into a qualitative veto.
  - Cost-centric rhetoric. The case is recast as prudent stewardship of jobs and prices, positioning mitigation as reckless while avoiding the deeper premise that no level of evidence would justify constraint.
  - Geopolitical futility narrative. Claims that “others won’t act” portray domestic policy as naive, ensuring inaction even when cooperative designs exist to address free-riding.
- Playbook mapping (step-by-step)
  - Translate. Theological resistance is expressed as neutral scientific doubt and sober cost–benefit talk, gaining mainstream respectability.
  - Weaponize uncertainty. Treat normal model revision as refutation, elevate contrarian outliers as decisive, and conflate unknowns about magnitude with doubts about direction.
  - Shift goalposts. Progression runs from denial of warming to natural-variability claims to human irrelevance to unaffordable costs to “adaptation only,” preserving the anti-mitigation endpoint.
  - Rotate proxies. When scientific doubt weakens, pivot to economics; when costs are bounded, pivot to geopolitics; the reasons change, the conclusion does not.
- How to spot the proxy (diagnostics)
  - Asymmetric evidential bar. Decades of convergent assessments are dismissed as ideology while selective blog posts or hearings are taken at face value—an inversion consistent with identity defense rather than inquiry.
  - No policy-responsive threshold. Even low-cost, no-regret measures (efficiency standards, leak reduction) are rejected alongside ambitious measures, indicating that uncertainty is a fig leaf for blanket opposition.
  - Moral leakage. When asked what would count as sufficient evidence, the answer returns to providence or divine sovereignty, revealing the non-empirical core.
- Why this is propaganda (mechanisms)
  - Manufactured doubt. Strategic curation of anomalies, staged debates that imply parity where none exists, and credentialed contrarians create an illusion of unresolved fundamentals.
  - Value halo transfer. “Economic freedom,” “energy independence,” and “jobs” are invoked to sanctify the anti-mitigation stance, drowning out risk management logic.
  - Fear-forward messaging. Catastrophic cost scenarios are foregrounded without parallel attention to damages avoided or to transition opportunities, biasing public calculus toward the status quo.
- Productive response moves (practical)
  - Trigger-linked thresholds. Tie specific levels of attribution confidence and impact projections to pre-committed policy actions; refusal to acknowledge any trigger reveals the proxy function.
  - Claim disaggregation. Separate trend detection, attribution, projection, and impact from normative questions about risk tolerance and justice; mixed bundles hide where disagreement truly lies.

Pretextual arguing wastes public attention on decoys, prevents genuine value disagreements from being negotiated honestly, and foggs accountability: policy is justified on grounds that aren’t actually doing the work. The “bad arguments” are stage props. The real play is about identity, eschatology, or fixed moral commitments.

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